“Next Tuesday, McDonald’s workers at restaurants in 10 cities will walk off the job at lunch, waging the first-ever nationwide strike to combat sexual harassment.”
Glad to see my lifelong disinterest in golf is paying off
let me tell you about golf
i grew up in a little desert valley called Tucson, Arizona, where it only rains 2 inches a year on average. the majority of the city’s water is pumped from an underground aquifer, which took millions of years to fill. one of the biggest conservation efforts in our city was for water, naturally, and i spent a lot of time learning about low flow toilets and 5 minute showers. i learned that filling your sink basin and washing your dishes in that water is less costly than running the tap. i learned that it only takes 2 days without water on the desert for someone to die
the city was sinking as the aquifer drained. neighborhoods fell into flood zones that didnt exist 10 years ago
there’s a road called Golf Links in the city and it is lined with golf courses. miles of green grass where grass doesn’t grow, in a valley where it doesn’t rain. why? because the rich white retirees who moved there to stop the aching in their joints decided they should also get to play golf. meanwhile our public schools taught small children like me that taking long showers would kill the world
let the golf industry burn
There are 15,500+ golf courses in the United States alone.
Dr Malcolm perfectly captured the problem with too much moralizing sci-fi when he whined “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”Because of course they should! “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs*?” The answer is obviously yes, utterly yes, that’s the positive control case to test absolute YESness. You don’t ask people that question to find the answer, you already know the answer, you ask people that question to find out if they’re worth talking to.
*a scaled pseudospecies distinct from feathered “actual dinosaurs”.
The real problem is the wrong people asking the wrong questions, then blaming science for delivering overwhelming experimental evidence of their mistakes. Jurassic Park’s key question wasn’t “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs?”, it was “Should we unleash those awesome dinosaurs on a safari with worse security and fewer staff than the average Apple store?” No, you shouldn’t have done that. The science spectacularly succeeded in delivering a dinosaur miracle, and then specifically didn’t knock them out of the Park because that tourism screw-up’s entirely on capitalism. No scientist was collecting data for “Quantifying how much money we can make from tourism” or “Material testing the flimsiest fences imaginable with a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex”.
That’s the Malcolm Fallacy: blaming science for everyone else’s mistakes. You’ll see it in almost every techno-horror.
Should we invent AI? Yes! Should we connect it to military mainframes with nuclear launch authority? No!
Should we research viruses? Yes! Should we override the security computer and physically crack open sealed airtight doors when viral labs go into lockdown? No!
Should we research teleportation? Yes! Should we experiment on ourselves, alone, without even the most elementary laboratory (or even pizza parlor) standards of cleanliness? No!
Almost every sci-fi horror plot is driven by money-grubbing corporations but it’s the researchers who can’t even afford a change of clothes from their “I’m a scientist!” lab coats who take the blame. And now we have hordes of idiots destroying cropfields and resurrecting defeated diseases while CEOs gold-plate profit reports on basic medicine.
Our society has a number of loveable buffoons who fool around and are excused from acting like prats because they’re funny. They might be rubbish at most things but as long as their banter is flowing, we put up with it.
These types are almost exclusively men. You don’t get hilarious, idiotic women being lorded as icons of our culture. Diane Abbott is dismissed as a cretin while Boris Johnson is a joker.
Which begs the question: is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny?
If you labour the point that you can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else to take over.
Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, they’ll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when you’ve got an incompetent clown on your hands.
I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.
It’s about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that she’s spent the past eight years being a slave to her kids and nice-but-emotionally-dim husband.
Part of this awakening is the realisation that she does all the housework because her husband is crap at it. Left alone, he makes inedible food. He lets the kids stay up well beyond their bedtime. He leaves the house a tip.
He doesn’t even try to do a good job because he fears that if he’s too good at these jobs, his wife will make him do more of them.
Put these garbage men in the garbage where they belong.
I went and checked the original source and it’s worse. While most of the comments get the problem (the lying, not the eggs) some of them just cannot see that this shit is actually a big honking warning sign for bigger shit. A loving person is not capable of doing this.
He literally puts his mere convenience over her actual well being. This guy thought up and executed a plan where she has to do *all* the work (because of course it wasn’t just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. …now imagine this with kids. You think this guy cares if she gets off during sex? Would he take care of her if she were to get sick? Would he ever lift a finger if he could get away not doing it?
She can’t trust a word he says and he doesn’t give a shit about her needs. It’s not about the *eggs*.
Sorry to reblog from you, stranger, but this commentary is all very good. I especially appreciate the emphasized statement that “a loving person is not capable of doing this.” That line is going to rattle around my brain for ages — the words feel good in my mouth. How you’ve said it is just so right.
I want to add some of OP’s further comments on the thread she made:
“To be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, that’s okay! But now I’m starting to seriously wonder if he sabotaged cleaning, too, just to get me to do it. Dishes, for instance. He will wash half and leave a nasty sink full of the rest, claiming he’ll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, I’ll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, I’m seeing it as malicious.”
→ The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesn’t even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.
“Yes, he sucks at dishes and laundry to the point he is banned from doing them. He will leave clothes in the washer overnight and doesnt separate anything to the point I’ve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.”
→ The husband is inconsiderate of his wife’s property, even that which is well-loved. Could his repeated failure to learn how to do this task have been a ruse? Did he anticipate his banishment from laundry duty? OP now has to genuinely wonder about this.
“I’m starting to think he does things wrong on purpose now just to get me to do it. Another example! My car. For a while my driver side door wouldn’t open from the outside, so I had to crawl through the passenger side. He ordered a handle and kept putting it off for WEEKS. Finally, he says his hands are too big to do it, so I had to do it.”
→ The husband makes excuses for himself that cast him as an unwitting victim to fate, with the implication that he would totally do [action], if only he could. He distances himself from any possibility of blame.
Obviously, anonymous forum posts are taken with a grain of salt — we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. That’s not a concern for me, though. Like I don’t care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the poster’s husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. He’s manipulative and lazy to the point of cruelty, expecting his wife to work while he fails to lift a single functioning finger. The statement that “he likes her eggs better” isn’t cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; it’s just another excuse that walls him off from criticism, a bullshit reason he pulled out of his ass to make her feel guilty and unreasonable for being upset.
The absurdity of the situation when taken at face value — lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someone’s favorite food — extends an air of the absurd to the wife’s concerns, and to others’ warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, “These people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. That’s just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.”
It’s fucked up, is what it is.
…deviled egg lady, if you’re truly out there somewhere, I hope you told your husband to make his own goddamn eggs from now on. It’s literally the least he can do.
When I was angry about this people reblogged from me to say it was no big deal and saying that it’s not as bad as I was making it sound and that he was actually just complimenting her and everyone takes things too seriously…this is what you need to read.
Actions show you the mind of the person who decided to act on them. His actions told her that he was capable of lying to and manipulating her for his own benefit. That is never healthy. It’s a sense of entitlement that can only be achieved when he doesn’t view her as having equal value as him, that her labour can be exploited to compensate for his lack of contribution.
It will never be the only time he is manipulative, that’s a place you can only get to when manipulation is very common and easy for you, you don’t even consciously realise that anymore.
It’s more than an abuse red flag, it’s abusive on its own.
Death By Catchphrase 