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While this is a reminder, I also consider this a vetting and safety tip as it’s something to look out for in a man. Putting up with this early on will result in it being a constant in your relationship.
The reasons why men use weaponised incompetence is because:
1. they don’t like, care, regard or respect us which makes them angry at us for asking them to help and also angry that they can’t be honest with us about why they don’t want to help us, for fear of them losing us, their appliances
2. they are extremely lazy and for some odd reason, don't like to make any efforts to be better, resulting in them living in a messy and filthy state
3. they feel that helping out is them showing care and empathy which are “feminine” and would make them “weak”. For so many men who have this unending need to feel powerful, they do everything they can to push away niceness, sympathy and care for fear of being vulnerable which could make a woman walk all over him, not respect him or hurt him.
4. they feel that "women’s work is women’s work" and it is, therefore, repulsive and beneath them to help us
For these reasons, they pretend to not know how to do things to punish us which in turn, gives us more work to do. Any man who does this is selfish and doesn’t love his partner because a big part of love is helping your partner to make life easier for them, not watching them run themselves ragged. To be clear, a man is not "helping" a woman that he has made his partner because the whole essence of being partners and being called partners is helping one another, which is why it annoys me when I hear both men and women saying that a man is “helping” his wife with their kids or "helping" to do chores. If a man is living with a woman in any capacity, especially a romantic one, he should be doing things around the house too, as a productive part of the partnership.
When men refuse to help us, we end up reminding them over and over and then to scare us into shutting up, they call us nags. This is a gaslighting technique that makes women fearful of being seen as annoying, screeching nags, which stops us from saying anything to them, leaving them to not do anything at all (which is their desired outcome), which leaves us to do everything. Women go to work, some of us work multiple jobs, run a business or are working on a degree yet we are still able to cook, dust, mop, read to our children, do garden work, fix our cars and many other things. Why? Because we have been conditioned to do these things and because we choose to do so. If we can do these things then men have no excuse.
Refuse this dynamic for yourself ladies. Any man who refuses to lighten your load does not love or respect you. If you told a man he was nagging you for sex, you always got defensive when he complained about a lack of sex and you made several attempts to get out of being intimate with him, he’d either cheat on you or dump you. Men don’t tolerate their needs not being met. Very few of them will stay miserable, in a relationship, where their needs aren’t being met while still being faithful to their partner. Men always go for what they want and we should do the same. Always.
When I became divorced, my workload at home became way less, and suddenly I got a lot of free time. I love it.
When you live with another grown person, workload at home should be less. For it to become easier to be a single mom, than married, the man have to be pretty fucking useless.
Don’t fall into the same trap as me ladies. Men can do things, they just don’t want to.
I was thinking about this yesterday after reading some of SayNad's excellent posts on jealousy/mate-guarding and I also realised that in essence, weaponised incompetence is actually a form of mate-guarding for LVM who have no other way to get a woman to stay with them. After all, if you're constantly burdened by all this extra work he creates for you (and I honestly now think this is done entirely intentionally, if not consciously) then there's less chance of you having the wherewithal to see clearly how shit it all is and leave him for a better man who is actually offering something besides endless fucking drudgery. And meanwhile, he gets to enjoy extra leisure time at your expense. So it's a win-win for him.
Beware of men who seem to go out of their way to make work for you, ladies. It's done by design.
I just want to point out that men aren’t Machiavellian super villains who intentionally plot their incompetence. It’s a survival tactic they practice since childhood. I have sons and it’s simply their nature to try to get others to do things for them —especially their parents. It starts when they are babies who depend on you for everything and as they age it goes from a survival need to a bid for your attention. Doing things for a child means they are loved and safe and in the child role. Kids ask or trick you into doing things for them to feel loved and safe.
When a grown man does it he is putting you in a role as his mother (the doer of things) and himself in the child role (the passive receiver of things). He is self-soothing at your expense and at the expense of the relationship. Doesn’t matter if you tell a man up front that you’re not his mother and that you won’t act like like his mother —he will unconsciously keep trying to put you in that position. Men’s first experience with women is motherhood. That’s their main frame of reference for understanding us even though we’re obviously not all mothers (obvious to us, not to men).
This type of man has never had a healthy relationship with a woman who is not his mother and the fault is largely on him for intentionally choosing pickmes, people pleasers, or young naive women to exploit —none of which have the awareness or experience to correct him and reject his behaviour and expectations. If men were corrected right after leaving home by every woman he interacted with and tried to date —he would quickly learn that “other” women do not equal “mother”. But instead society has taught both men and women for millennia that women are supposed to be men’s replacement mothers who cook and clean for them —because men are so helpless they’d starve in filth if we didn’t. Women know it‘s not true and we were played, but men haven’t yet realized the deal’s off.
Correct on all points. To add: men also do this as a tactic to reinforce their position of dominance in the relationship hierarchy. As in - he's not lazy, he's perfect, she's the bad one because she's the nag. That absolving him of his bad behavior and demonizing her for her reasonable reaction to his bad behavior is intentional. Anyway, "nag" is a misogynist slur just like "bitch" and "slut". It's used exclusively to unfairly denegrate and dehumanize women to then justify abusing us. Any man who calls you those words gets DUMPED.
Men do not listen to women's words or requests. I'll give you an example. When I was married, my husband dipped Copenhagen and left open cans of dip spit around the house for me to clean up. For 2 years, I asked nicely for him to please throw the Copenhagen spit into the trash when he went to bed so that the dog wouldn't walk by and hit the dip spit and have it spill out onto the carpet. I'd broken my neck and jaw, so housework was very hard for me to do, and getting out the wet vacuum nearly put me in the hospital again it was so heavy. But he never did what I asked no matter how nicely I put it or if I appealed to him about my injuries. Right before I left him, he actually balanced an open can of dip spit onto the couch cushion where I always sat and left it there for me to find in the morning. He always sat on the other couch and put the cans on the end table, but this time, he balanced it on my couch on my seat. When I awakened and found this, I went off! I took the can of dip spit upstairs, pulled up the stopper in his bathroom sink, put all of his toiletries into the sink, and poured the dip spit all over them. When he got home, he was surprised, and I told him that if he wanted a war, we'd have one. Men do not understand anything except ACTION. If you're unhappy and he doesn't listen to words, LEAVE.