Reply to Here's the thing I don't understand about husbands who don't help out

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Because my husband wouldn’t go back to the store, clean the bathroom again, or watch the kids. He’d do what he wanted and get pissed at me. [/quote]

This. Not only that, but the next time one of those things needed to be done, he'd say "Well I can never do it to your demanding specifications, so why bother?" It would give him an easy out, which is what he's already looking for.

Any halfway decent parent knows that positive reinforcement is a much more effective way of getting your children to behave a certain way, and that criticism tends to make them more recalcitrant and combative.

Yep, I'm comparing my husband to a child. That's because when he was an actual child, his own parents failed to do any of this. They bought into toxic ideas about masculinity that "boys are just messy" or "girls are just naturally more helpful than boys." So my grown ass husband has had to relearn how the world works as an adult because [b]his parents bought into dumb ideas about traditional gender roles.[/b] That sucks for both of us, frankly. I don't love having to praise my husband every time he does something normal and expected, like cleaning the shower. And he doesn't like that he is instinctively selfish and childish at times because his parents taught him the wrong stuff.

And before you say "Well, why didn't you marry a better man?" a few things. First, the vast majority of men are like this to some degree or another. My husband had actually figured some of this out on his own before I even met him, putting him light years ahead of other men I know. But two, [b]toxic masculinity sneaks into all the crevices of a person's personality. You think you've sorted it out and then, boom, you have kids and discover a whole new batch of idiotic assumptions about gender. Sorry, but we all have to keep working on misogyny forever in the hopes that our kids will have a slightly easier time. At let we are working on it instead of eating it up and teaching it to our kids on purpose.[/b][/quote]

That's it 100%. There are deeply entrenched cultural ideas that men don't need to do certain things if women are present. There are studies that have even found this is true in the workplace - men will volunteer for certain duties if no women are around, but once women are there, it's expected they will handle those things.

I don't blame men and I don't think they consciously realize what they're doing. Hell, most of the women I know (including myself) have internalized misogyny....and that's often why we marry men who don't pull their weight. We're too young and naive at that age to recognize it.

But it's a HUGE disservice to again put the onus on women to explain these things to them and "train" them to behave like a functional spouse. I'm happy to explain my point of view to my H, but I'm not going to praise him every time he completes a basic task. At some point, it's on him to examine his own beliefs about gender roles and make changes.

Unfortunately I don't think most men will change. The idea of losing their power - and being equal to everyone else - feels like oppression. My own H dismisses it with "well all the women at my work get paid the same as us!" Like dude, it goes SO far beyond that.

I feel like the best I can do at this point is raise my daughters to not tolerate that behavior from males, and raise my sons to view women as equals.

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