Weaponized incompetence as male control tactic?
On many women and parenting-related subreddit threads, you will often find women complaining about their partners’ “weaponized incompetence.”
Psychology Today defines weaponized incompetence as “when someone knowingly or unknowingly demonstrates an inability to perform or master certain tasks, thereby leading others to take on more work.” I find this definition in line with how people on Reddit tend to use it, and I also find it incoherent.
How does one unknowingly weaponize anything? “Weaponization” implies intent. Can you unknowingly weaponize a knife? In normal speech, unknowingly weaponizing something is often just called an accident.
On Reddit, there are two main types of examples that people will invoke when talking about weaponized incompetence.
Example 1: Suzy and Steve live together and co-parent an infant child. Steve hates changing diapers, so he pretends like he does not know how. Suzy ends up doing all of the diaper-changing because of his weaponized incompetence.
Example 2: Suzy and Steve live together and co-parent an infant child. Steve is a well-meaning but inept diaper-changer. When he changes diapers, he always does it wrong. Suzy takes over this chore because Steve is so bad at it. Steve has unknowingly weaponized his incompetence.
You’ll notice that the difference here is intent. If you read enough of these threads, you’ll notice that people will tell a story like Example 2 and pass it off as if it is the same as Example 1.
Consider the following Reddit post:
And the 2nd most popular reply (96 upvotes):
Consider the stated facts of the original post:
Woman shatters pasta sauce jar while bringing in groceries
Woman alerts spouse to the mess that this has caused
Woman’s child is upset that he cannot be with his mother while she cleans up the mess
Husband does not help clean up the mess
Husband does not help console their child
Woman laments that husband is incompetent
And then consider the framing of the events in the reply:
Husband is intentionally shirking his responsibilities as a spouse and co-parent
Husband is doing this because he feels entitled to his wife’s labour
… which is a lot to read into the original scenario. It’s turning an Example 2 scenario into Example 1, ascribing nefarious intent where there isn’t any evidence for it.
Weaponized incompetence as male skill issue
Recently I moved in with my long-term, long-distance boyfriend and I have found the experience to be very pleasant from an enjoying-being-around-my-boyfriend perspective but also very frustrating from a not-enjoying-the-way-he-does-chores perspective.
My boyfriend was raised in a good liberal household where he was taught that women typically do most of the work around the house, and that this is often the fault of men, and that he, as a man, should be consciously working to correct this inequality. If you asked him about it, he would say that he is very concerned with having an equal division of labour. He actively tries to do more around the house and is consistently asking me if there is more that he can do to help.
And yet he often does things incorrectly, or at least not in the way that I would do them (correctly). Handwashed dishes end up greasy or with flecks of food on them. Crumbs don’t get swept off of the counter. The “cleaned toilet” still has shit stains under the seat.
When he asks me if there’s more he can do to help, there often is, but I anticipate needing to inspect his work afterwards, which I don’t want to bother doing, so I end up doing it. I suspect that this is the trap that most women fall into when they talk about weaponized incompetence, but it takes two to tango. Is it male incompetence or female enablement?
In an ideal world I would let my boyfriend take over the chores he sucks at, and maybe the work wouldn’t be perfect, but he would get better with time. This does not happen all the time because it’s faster and more reliable to do things myself in the short term. Sometimes I find his lack of cleaning skills frustrating, but I think that it would be unfair to describe his behaviour as weaponized incompetence. The intent to be an equally contributing partner is there. I’m sure that over time we’ll hit a cleaning equilibrium that works for us.
Weaponized incompetence as female neuroticism
There’s also the sex difference explanation for this behaviour. Women have a stronger disgust response than men. Women are more likely to be neurotic. Women are more social than men, and they’re more likely to be concerned with how other people are going to judge their homes. All of this plays into the general tendency of women to have higher cleanliness standards in the home.
I saw a tweet (which I now can’t find) that framed male/female disagreements in household cleanliness as a female neuroticism issue, not a male skill issue. The argument goes: men are perfectly fine living in messy bachelor pads. It is only when they move in with women that they are told that their way of doing things is wrong. Seeing the gap between male and female cleaning habits as a solely male fault is missing half of the picture. It is actually men who have to learn to live with women imposing rules on them, and that the expectation of equal labour is unrealistic given the differences in neuroticism.
I find this idea somewhat convincing, although I think that trying to equate female neuroticism and male incompetence as equal sins is somewhat wrong. Keeping a clean and organized household is beneficial to all parties. If men would otherwise live in squalor without women, then it’s probably a good thing that they have us keeping their living spaces in check.
That being said, I do think that the Reddit framing of things is a recipe for creating resentment in a relationship. Putting all the blame on men for not meeting women’s household standards is unfair when a) it’s women who impose these higher standards in the first place, and b) women often enable the “incompetence” we see from men. In any relationship, seeing your own role in creating bad patterns is important to fixing them.
So what did we learn from this exercise? I am highly doubtful that weaponized incompetence from men occurs as described in its worst form on Reddit. Most men are not intentionally acting incompetent so that they can get more household labour from women.
In my view, “weaponized incompetence” is an unfair way of characterizing conflicts that occur from both socialized differences between men and women and inherent sex differences. Women have a role in reinforcing unequal household labour divisions that should not be ignored. Intent matters when evaluating your partner’s actions. And most importantly, do not go on Reddit looking for relationship advice.