a man is mysteriously unable to cook, clean, or manage any domestic task until he has to, at which point he can
I read
@mahimavashisht’s piece on weaponised incompetence in Indian marriages and I haven’t stopped thinking about it
the term describes something so specific it’s almost funny:
the strategy of claiming you don’t know how to do something so that someone else does it for you. and it works because eventually it’s easier to just do the thing than to fight about why you have to explain it again.
one woman in the piece spent 20 minutes explaining to her husband how to use a Dyson vacuum cleaner. it has one button. he never used it. she cleaned the house till the end of lockdown.
covid was the biggest accidental experiment in this. domestic help disappeared overnight and suddenly the question of who actually knows how to run a house had nowhere to hide. the answer, in most Indian homes, was extremely clear. women who were already working full time added cooking, cleaning, childcare, elderly care, and online school management to their plates. men made chai and got LinkedIn posts written about them.
this is also, quietly, the reason Indian divorce rates are low. either the woman accepts she has to do everything, or domestic help cushions the gap enough that the marriage survives. the bai isn’t just doing the dishes. she’s structurally holding together marriages that would not survive a month without her.
one man told a woman he was considering marrying: “jise aata hai wo kare, mujhe nahi aata aur naa hi main seekhunga.” he couldn’t understand why she said no.
one woman divorced hers. the rest are still counting down the days till the bai gets back.
the bar is on the floor and somehow it’s still being described as a system.