This is in counterpoint to a Jessica Valenti piece that I am no longer able to find, but it was about how men are terrible because we don’t do “enough” housework. Though I’ve never had and will never have children, I’ve been in battles over household chores. And often for men, women do not count these things as household chores (even though they in most relationships rarely or never do them), though they are very time- and labor-intensive:

• Any yardwork tasks such as mowing, trimming, leaf raking and the like (these can be very labor-intensive and time-consuming in spring and summer)
• Any appliance maintenance
• Any car maintenance
• Any house maintenance
• Roof and gutter cleaning
• Anything at all outdoors, no matter how difficult or even dangerous

I was told by my girlfriends in two relationships that all these “didn’t count” and weren’t “real chores” because “men enjoyed these things.” It must be some kind of woman script, because yes, they used almost exactly the same words.

My friends, most men do fucking not in fact enjoy doing these tasks and they require a whole lot of time and work to complete.

Also, many women have much higher (unnecessarily high) cleanliness standards. For instance, an ex of mine was upset if the carpet wasn’t vacuumed at least three times a week. And that’s just too much. Yet if I refused to do that in the Valenti accounting, I’d be “not doing my part.”

Fuck all that noise.

AITBF for not liking when women change their persona when they find out I’m gay?

This is interesting because something I think most women don’t realize is that straight men experience most women as extremely cold and hostile. It really colors one’s view of women. If I didn’t have a good number of close women friends, in general I’d think women are quite terrible — because that’s the treatment most straight men get most of the time. To us, 99.9% of women are experienced as glacial, distant, and mildly bellicose. (And then women go on and wonder why men do not have women friends. Well, that is why!)

Yes, yes, shut the fuck up, I know why all that it is, but it’s a terrible feeling to be iced out because you happen to be male. And I don’t even think it makes sense most of the time because most women (and most people in general) are incredibly terrible at judging actual risk.

But that’s a whole other topic.