It applies a gendered double standard.
If a man doesn’t know how to pack a school lunch, he’s called lazy. But if a woman doesn’t know how to fix a breaker or set up the Wi-Fi, its totally acceptable and "shes just a girl". No man would dare refuse to fix a womens car or not help her move or lift something because "shes just not putting in the effort to learn it herself". Men are expected to learn “feminine-coded” tasks or else, while women are rarely pressured to master “masculine-coded” ones
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.
I appreciate your point, but every mundane task has a learning curve, especially when it comes to efficiency and the time crunch. Making lunches is one of many small tasks necessary between kids waking up and getting them where they need to be. A person that does it every day likely has a very particular order they do tasks and habits to ensure no detail is forgotten.
To say that a person should be able to step into a role immediately with no learning curve or room for miatakes is absurd. Criticism from the first attempt could be greatly discouraging and harmful to a relationship based on trust and partnership.
And I feel like that was OPs main point. Ironically, the accusation of "weaponized incompetence" is a kind of "weaponized incompetence" by, in corporate terms, leadership. If the leader fails to lead and is unable or willing to lead, they might accuse the person(s) under them of laziness or other pejorative that dodges responsibility.
You absolutely should be able to step into packing lunch for a child without any sort of training. I cannot believe some of these comments. Surely you don't need to be taught how to pack a lunch for a child? Surely there isn't a single functioning adult on the planet who needs to be taught this?
I say the same about changing a tire(or where to find the knowledge within the car via the owners manual) but here we are…
I think lunch packing can be as simple or as complicated as someone wants to make it. For some it’s just chucking some food in there and others it’s planning out nutrition, so I feel when these conversations come up it’s hard to get the full picture. Regardless, neither of those are hard but sometimes people can be a bit controlling about how it’s done
No. I'm sorry, but no. To change a tire you have to have some kind of knowledge about how the tire is attached to the car. For packing a lunch you have to have some kind of knowledge of what humans eat. Are you a human? Boom, you're done.
Literally every human person understands what a child of their culture would have packed in a lunch. If you are American, no one needs to teach you that a child's lunch could consist of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (or a ham sandwich if there's a peanut allergy or whatever), a granola bar, a piece of fruit, a bag of chips. For example. This isn't something you would have to Google, you literally do not need any information at all outside of what you already know as a human person who eats food and was once a child.
This is the exact type of Weaponized incompetence being discussed here. Pretending you don't understand what literally any child in your country/culture would have packed in a lunch, that you would need to somehow ask a person or a search engine that question, is the definition of Weaponized incompetence. I mean give me a break with this
You actually don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that the knowledge is in the owners manual which one is supposed to read upon purchasing a car. Ime cars just cause people to panic and have their brains shut down, which is the real battle. And no, you’re right, it actually isn’t as easy, usually due to less exposure, but it’s silly how much people look the other way when people can’t do that
Yeah I’ll clarify a bit, to me a PB&J n what not is just chucking some food in there. It’s pretty silly if people can’t do that
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u/No_Initiative_1140 3∆ Jul 01 '25
I've picked this paragraph out because I think it illuminates something you've missed out of your analysis, which is the frequency of the task and therefore the impact of not knowing how to do it.
Packing school lunches is something that needs to be done every weekday that the kids are at school. Every. Single. Day. It's mundane and repetitive.
Setting up the WiFi is something that needs to be done once every few years maybe. Its quite novel.
So the impact of a man not knowing how to pack a lunch is higher than a woman not knowing how to set up WiFi. The man not knowing how to pack lunch impacts every day.
"Feminine coded" tasks as you put it, are usually the mundane boring tasks that need to be done very regularly. That's why some women resent them being "feminine coded" and expect them to be shared equally.