3 More Ways People Gaslight Their Partners About Domestic Labor Inequality

Last year, I wrote 6 Ways Men Gaslight Their Partners About Domestic Labor Inequity. I was tired of reading websites and life coaches and therapy guides that all put the blame on women for men’s laziness. I was tired of self-declared experts adding training men to women’s already exhausting to-do lists. And they’re still at it. Here are even more ways men—and society as a whole—gaslight women about the glaring inequity in front of us.

The “You Should Have Asked”/Nagging Paradox

The Internet is full of websites admonishing people, and mostly women, who struggle without household chore inequity to simply ask their partners differently or better. In this understanding of things, it’s the woman’s fault that things are unequal. That’s because one of her womanly duties is educating her partner about how to stay alive as an adult.

Men are not children. They are not incompetent. Many of them successfully manage to feed and clothe themselves for years before entering a heterosexual partnership with a domestic servant I mean wife. No amount of list-making or project management will get someone to do their fair share if they’re determined not to.

It sounds like this: Women just need to train their partners to do household labor! They need to teach men and ask for what they need! And then when they do, they’re obnoxious nags who have failed to make their partners feel good about their successes. How very dare they!

The propagators of this ridiculous paradox would have us believe that men are forever inferior to women. They cannot master basic human knowledge on their own. Someone needs to tell them they children and pets need food and that bills must be paid. And then, that same someone must praise them for still fucking it up. If they don’t, the man is entitled to fuck it up even more because God forbid you fail to praise a man for even the slightest effort.

The Too Specific/Not Specific Enough Challenge

This one, too, builds on the notion that women just need to tell men what they need. Those who advocate for better communication about chores are drawing upon sound principles, specifically the idea that no one can know another person’s needs without open communication. The problem is that the need for children to get food and roaches to not take over the house and groceries to live in the home and such are not unique, personal needs. These are needs everyone has. Telling someone they need to communicate these basic needs is like telling someone they need to communicate the need not to be hit. It’s pure foolishness.

So if you’re playing the game of articulating what needs to be done around the house, you’re already losing. Some men up the ante by adding an additional challenge to the game:

They ask what specifically you need them to do. And then they become maliciously compliant. They do only those exact things. If you ask them to wash the dishes after dinner every evening, they will only wash the dishes. And only after dinner. And only in the evening.

At a certain point, you’ll want to talk to them about the bigger picture. So you’ll start telling them things like, “I need you to take more responsibility for household chores.” Or you’ll get even broader and say, “I need you to support me more.”

And they’ll either tell you they need you to be more specific, thereby re-initiating the cycle of malicious compliance. Or they’ll start talking past you. “But I do support you! I am taking more responsibility for household chores! After all, I started washing the dishes!”

Lies About Neurodivergence

Just as many women as men have neurodivergence. Isn’t it interesting, then, that a whole generation of women is trying to figure out how to work around their partners’ autism/ADHD/depression to get them to help out, even as women with autism/ADHD/depression continue to do household chores without being asked every single day?

Neurodivergence can make some aspects of household labor/parenting more difficult. But it is absolutely not an excuse for dipping out of equality. If a person can’t remember to timely pay the bills, then they need to pick up the slack elsewhere. If they refuse, then the problem isn’t neurodivergence. It’s being a sexist asshole. And that’s still not a mental health diagnosis.

Listen, you don’t have to educate men about domestic labor inequity. They’re not innately stupid or incompetent. Men who buy their leisure time with their partners’ exhaustion know exactly what they are doing because it is right in front of them. Don’t let them distract you with a bunch of excuses or endless demands that you explain the obvious.