"Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else"
About this Quote
Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes a double standard embedded in everyday life: men are granted indulgence for domestic incompetence because a broader culture presumes their competence in public, paid, and prestigious realms. The same presumption flips for women: domestic mastery is expected and taken for granted, while competence elsewhere is treated as an exception that must be proven repeatedly. The result is a social alibi that frees men from accountability at home and an invisible tax on women who must excel both domestically and professionally to be considered merely adequate.
The line diagnoses how status hierarchies shape skill expectations. Housework, historically feminized and devalued, is treated as beneath the arena where male excellence supposedly matters; thus, failure at it seems trivial, even charming. This leniency fosters a culture of low standards and “weaponized incompetence,” where bungling a task ensures one is never asked to do it again. Meanwhile, women shoulder the mental load, planning, anticipating, and coordinating, labor that is cognitively demanding yet rarely recognized. Humor about hapless husbands isn’t harmless; it normalizes the idea that domestic competence is optional for men and mandatory for women.
There’s also a psychological halo at work: presumed global competence for men makes a local failure seem inconsequential; presumed limited competence for women makes any failure appear as confirmation. This asymmetry drains time, limits career advancement, and produces resentment and burnout. Correcting it requires naming housework as skilled labor, establishing clear standards and accountability, and distributing both tasks and the mental load equitably. Boys should be taught domestic skills as nonnegotiable competencies; cultural scripts that applaud men for “helping” must be replaced with expectations of ownership. At a societal level, valuing care work through policy and pay helps recenter domestic competence as a shared civic responsibility rather than a gendered afterthought.