| Good morning! I recently stumbled upon a new term, ‘weaponised incompetence’, which is basically the (mostly male) art of doing a simple household chore so badly that nobody will ever ask you to do it again. That and the gender news of the week. Read on... The Big Story How India’s raja betas are using weaponised incompetence to wriggle out of housework I am on the phone with the wife of one of my oldest friends, let’s call her ‘A’. It’s April 2020, I remember this because we’re marooned in our homes (and we’re the lucky ones who aren’t trudging back home on foot) just days into the nationwide lockdown that began on March 24. ‘A’ tells me she’s doing it all, the cooking, the cleaning, the washing—while working from home. I get on the phone with her husband my pal and yell at him. Surely he can make the bed and wash his clothes (and his wife’s too)?  You Should Have Asked by Emma (Source: The Guardian) And then A tells me with a resigned sigh: “He will do it so badly, that I will just have to do it all over again.” I didn’t know it then, but there’s a term for this. It’s called weaponised incompetence. Basically, it’s a partner (mostly a man) claiming that he would love to help out with housework but lacks the skill to run a washing machine, or rinse a few dishes in the sink or even cook a simple meal. In other words, weaponizing an incompetence that follows the script: “If I do a simple job so badly, nobody will ever ask me to do it again.” Whose job is it anyway? It's no secret that all over the world, women bear a disproportionate load of the housework that includes cooking, cleaning, chopping, caring for the elderly and the sick and so on. The first consequence of this imbalance is on women’s workforce participation. A 2018 International Labour Organisation report found that in 90 countries the #1 reason why women were not in paid jobs was because they were so busy with the unpaid labour of running their homes. If you want exact numbers then 606 million women (and 41 million men) around the world cited housework as the reason for not being employed. [For a more scholarly discussion on the impact of unpaid care work on economic development please read this paper by economist Mitali Nikore and others here.] The impact of weaponised incompetence can also be seen on marriages, writes feminist writer Mahima Vashisht on her Substack, Womaning in India. But for the presence of domestic helpers, women (and subsequently marriages) would simple collapse under the load. Examples of weaponised incompetence include men who can’t figure out how to operate a vacuum cleaner, or what kind of milk to pick up at the store. This can, and does, get so frustrating that very often women will just throw up their hands and say: “Forget it. I’ll just do it myself.” [If you haven’t yet signed up for Mahima Vashisht’s Womaning in India on Substack you can do it here.] You should have asked If you haven’t yet seen this 2017 comic by French illustrator and feminist Emma that so brilliantly captures the idea of mental load, please do so here. Housework is not just a physical act of labour. Beyond the cooking of a meal is the mental labour of planning it: Are the ingredients available? Have you remembered to restock? If you have guests over, have you catered to specific dietary requirements? What about the left-overs, freeze or give away? If give away then to whom? “A lot of women feel that they are bearing the emotional load when it comes to planning,” says psychologist and author Sonali Gupta. “I have 250 tabs open in my mind at all times, most of them are to-do lists for the house and family,” says Vashisht who adds that even though she’s married to a man who identifies as a feminist, “our life is not untouched by gender roles’. “After our child came into our lives, I found myself shouldering a lot more of the domestic and caregiving responsibilities,” she says. The Raja Betas Vashisht echoes what my friend Samar Halarnkar, journalist and author, The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking calls the Raja Beta syndrome. Put simply it’s how Indian boys are cosseted, fussed over and spoilt by moms, grand-moms, elder sisters, sisters-in-law all of whom believe without any irony that said Raja Beta has been born to save the world and so must be spared the humdrum business of putting his plate in the sink after eating the meal so lovingly cooked for him. “Boys are pampered and put on a pedestal, and for this their mothers are to blame,” says Halarnkar. “They believe that any housework by them is a great favour or achievement.” When men help out with simple tasks—clearing the table after a meal, for instance—they can expect to be teased about “helping out in ‘womanly’ tasks,” writes Vashisht. And women who accept this help are also shamed for “letting my man indulge in such trivial pursuits. After all, it should be clear to all of us that men were put on the planet to do bigger things than clearing the table.” While working on a year-long series on women and workforce participation I often asked the women I interviewed about whether their husbands chipped in with housework. Yes, all of them insisted. When I asked for specifics the answers varied from ‘plays with child while I cook’ to ‘fetches water from the handpump’ and ‘buys vegetables on his way home’. These were women who toiled at home, cooking twice a day, because how could Raja Beta eat ‘stale’ leftovers from lunch? But of course there’s a flip side. Sonali Gupta who counsels couples says the complaint can work both ways with men shouldering the lion’s share of banking, managing finance and administrative work. “Ultimately, relationships are complex and you have to see the context in which statements are made. I often get couples where both say they would like the other to share more responsibility.” Weigh in: What will it take for men to bear a greater share of housework and why does it matter? Write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com | 
