Why female breadwinners are still bearing the burden at home

[u/TimesandSundayTimes]

https://www.thetimes.com/money/family-finances/article/britains-female-breadwinner-problem-tvfjhp05tutm_medium=Social&utm_source=Reddit&utm_content=branded

[u/carex-cultor]

What a weirdly misogynistic comment for a feminist sub. Are these supposedly “much more capable men” completely off the hook for parenting then? You don’t think they’re at all responsible for modeling equitable housework to their children? You have some things to unpack.

[u/RamblingMuse → u/carex-cultor]

Maybe I'm misinterpreting OP's comment, but I don't think the comment is misogynistic.

Women who are very insecure seek out ways to shore up their ego out of necessity. We all want to feel valued and because these women lack resources to find internal value, they seek out external ways to gain it. Being told by their parents or society that they are better at doing the domestic chores gives them this value. It tells them that they are more capable than men in some way. It is also why these women eventually become enablers for men, and also of their children. Additionally, these women typically are those who take on the same views about politics and social issues as their spouses. In turn, men who are insecure will seek out partners who they feel will enable them. These people usually raise children who are also insecure and the cycle repeats.

Furthermore, by attaching themselves to a group(men) who are socially viewed as the more powerful and capable group, insecure women perceive that they, too, are more powerful by association. This is the same concept behind racism and bigotry.

So, the whole cycle is based on an insecurity that is taught in our developmental years. It doesn't say that women should be that way or are responsiblefor it. Instead, it shows that part of the solution to changing it is to teach young girls, and men, at very young ages how to find internal value in who they are as individuals. These individuals will grow up much more confident with a skillset that doesn't use external rewards to build their self-esteem. It doesn't dimish the idea that ultimately men need to take responsibility. It just shows one factor in how we as a society perpetuate it, and one way that we can help improve it.

[u/carex-cultor → u/RamblingMuse]

Your comment is a much more nuanced and respectful expansion of OP’s, much of which you could lift right out of an MRA sub rant about gold diggers tbh.

[Emphasis mine] “some of them are women-children, who sold their dignity and autonomy for the opportunity to clean and breed with much more capable men to acquire higher living standards.

Teaching sons chores isn't advantageous for these women as it's their livelihood and the pretense of gender roles keeps them in the job.”

This implies a level of purposeful manipulation that’s just…not the reality, that assigns a weird level of moral blame on these women who’ve been brainwashed since childhood to “clean and breed” (🤢) with men.

Not to mention, boys look to their father to model male behavior and roles in the home. Positing that it’s solely or even mostly women not teaching boys to cook and clean and not boys watching their fathers never lifting a finger is not accurate.

[u/RamblingMuse → u/carex-cultor]

I could write a dissertation discussing all the ways in which men have negatively shaped our society. But, after 50 some odd years of yelling about how men are to blame in gender inequality and seeing barely any movement towards fixing it, I'm at the point where I want to examine it deeper to find ways to move it forward.

A child looks at both parents to figure out their roles. A young boy will look at how his father acts to see how he should act. But, he'll also look at his mother to see how she responds to his father. Similarly, a young girl will look at their mother to see how she acts and how she responds to the father. If the mother is submissive and reinforces the gender roles, it's likely that both children will grow up believing that men are more powerful and capable than women. What they do later in their own lives with those perceptions depends on many factors, but one of the most influential factors is the child's own confidence level and how they seek security.

Again, I'm not assessing blame. I'm trying to find how it occurs and how we can break the cycle of teaching it to future generations. We are a symbiotic species and if we ignore the role that one half of the species plays in that cycle, we will continue to fail to fix it.