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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

We've trained decades of mass media consumers than men are simple buffoons incapable of routine household tasks.

> men are simple buffoons incapable of routine household tasks.

Well we kind of are.

When I was in college, the RAs had classes to teach students some basic things like do laundry. They were all pretty much attended by male students.

If you believe the anecdotes about dating males in tech, this problem has only been exacerbated--self important tech guys with disposable income who outsource as much of their life as possible: grocery shopping, meal cooking, lawn care, routine car maintenance, routine house maintenance, cleaning, driving, and other normal household tasks to "Uber of X" like services.

Add to that the propensity for certain cultures to have a Mother-in-law dominated household, and you can see that the "media" isn't too far off in it's portrayals.

Right, but this is another sexist positive feedback loop with a negative result.

My mother just expected me to help with laundry when I was a kid. I also helped with cooking and other chores. Now people are amazed when I hem my own pants or cook lunch.

Okay, I can hem someone else's pants, but how do you hem your own? Do you just guess, pin, put the pants on, and repeat until you get the right length to sew?

Learning how to do basic sewing repairs is one thing I really need to teach myself, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I can sew on buttons though--easy enough really.

Fold to the right length, pin, remove, sew?

Google found: http://www.themodestman.com/how-to-hem-dress-pants/ which says pretty much this but makes it sound complicated somehow.

Might be a problem if you can't reach your feet, I guess.

When I bend-over the hem-height changes, but now that I think about it, the roll doesn't move, so it should be easy.

I put my pants on, roll up the edge until it's the right length, then pin. Then mark the edge so that I can turn the pants inside out when I sew.

> My mother just expected me to help with laundry when I was a kid.

My mom was a traditional indian mom, living in an 2-income required american world. So she did most of the normal household chores, and worked ~full time (seriously props to my mom, because most people today complain bitterly if they have to cook after working all day).

She didn't want me to have that the expectation that I was to be taken care of by my wife, after being taken care of by my mom, so at a young age she taught me how to be self-sufficient. Doing laundry, as well as other basic things--balancing checkbook, making a grocery list, planning a weekly dinner menu, etc.

My sister and I also had chores too.

However there were plenty of kids (especially when I got to college and older), that had no concept of self sufficiency. I even had to teach my wife (who has a PhD in engineering) how to do the laundry, cook--no, Babe, turning the stove temp higher does not cook the food faster, load the dishwasher--sorry no, you can't use regular dish soap, wash dishes by hand, tend to the yard, make a grocery list, etc.

> Right, but this is another sexist positive

Also, I don't get why pointing out and celebrating the differences in genders (i.e. being sexist) is inherently bad.

My wife is pregnant, and it's super apparent that if Men were the ones that had babies, there would be no humans left, because as soon as the first guy popped out a kid, they would tell the others how terrible it was, and we'd figure out some way to make babies without having carry them inside us.

I get that pregnancy, partum and post-partum creates some sort of dream haze, so that women seem to forget the trauma of pregnancy & child birth. It seems pretty common that despite the "discomfort" regarding pregnancy and newborn care, women fantasize and choose to have multiple children, even those who had "rough" pregnancies.

Wow.

I knew a couple. He was over 6 feet tall and she was a little thing. Their first baby was enormous and he missed the birth by minutes. He showed up all excited about the birth of their first baby and she sat up and yelled at him "You are never touching me again!" They went on to have two more kids.

My first pregnancy was really hard -- I threw up for 8 months and the birth was hard -- and it took me more than a year to be willing to try again. When I intentionally got pregnant again, I began throwing up and remembered how hard the first pregnancy had been. I think I also had the flu. I told someone "I hope I am pregnant, because this is making me remember my first pregnancy. If I am not already pregnant, I may not have another baby. Ugh. I don't want to go through this again."

Hormonal birth control has potentially deadly side effects. Women by the millions take it anyway because the risks and side effects involved are less worse than having babies.

Please realize I was a very devoted mother, desperately wanted kids, and still have a strong relationship to my now adult sons. I was baby-crazy in my twenties. I have talked to lots of women over the years and many women a) do not want kids and never did and b) after having the first, took a long time to be willing to try again because it was such a dreadful experience.

Women don't do this because being born female makes us more virtuous (or some crap) than men. We do it because we have the equipment, thus it is ours to do. That's it.

Also, female or not, memory is state dependent. This is not specific to pregnancy. When I had a serious health crisis and was in constant excruciating pain for more than 3 years, I could CLEARLY remember the birth of my first child. Most of the time, I cannot. I am usually not miserable enough to have good access to those memory pathways.

Again, state dependent memory is not some gender based or pregnancy based weirdness. The inability to fully access traumatic memories likely has a protective function for the human race and it is extremely well known, not some "pregnant woman" anomaly.

Thank you for sharing your personal experience. If my comment was taken with any form of malice, that was not it's intent. It was mostly a joke at men & natures expense.

In all sincerity, women would have it easier if men did not use us as a means to take "humorous" digs at other men. It only makes our lives harder. There is enough friction between the sexes witbout that kind of thing.

Congrats on the pregnancy. Best wishes to you and yours.

> Women would have it easier if men did not use us as a means to take "humorous" digs at other men. It only makes our lives harder.

How so?

Lots of men are already pretty hostile towards women. This kind of behavior only fuels that hostility and it is particularly frustrating to see it because it is a situation where a woman does not have to do anything wrong to catch hell over it. A man who presumably thinks he is championing the cause of women can do this and thereby make our lives harder.

Your logic does not follow.

Lots of men are hostile to women. Making jokes regarding women's issues fuels hostility. Therefore men should not make jokes regarding women's issues.

Some people are mentally unstable. Guns in the hands of mentally unstable people can cause catastrophic results. Therefore people should not own guns.

You realize that the parallel "logic that does not follow" about guns is perfectly legitimate in many/most countries, right? Doesn't exactly help your argument outside of (about half) the US.

Logic and rationality aren't necessarily the basis for laws.

Don't people tend to marry later in the US, too? I'd expect most men to have already survived on their own for several years before landing in the haven of marriage. So most would have mastered the washing machine and at least the microwave oven.

>Well we kind of are.

Not as a rule, no. Normal men can do laundry. But you may be right about single guys on the right end of the salary curve.

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