Some guidelines to help this space be a positive experience for everyone:
As always with the Avocado, don’t feel compelled to share beyond your comfort level.
Anyone who identifies as female, or who was socialized female/AFAB/otherwise has firsthand experience with the issues being discussed, is welcome to post. If you identify as cis-male, we ask that you please set your participation to “lurk” mode, unless otherwise explicitly invited to participate further (i.e. if we did an AMA kind of thread). I’m sure there’s plenty to be gleaned just by reading! (New Guideline, please take note) This includes upvotes, we ask cis-men to keep their upvotes to commenters who voluntarily add “+up” to their comments and only those comments.
Please do your best to be mindful of others’ experiences when commenting or posing questions for the group. The female identity is Legion and contains multitudes, and not everyone who has experience with being treated as female by society identifies as female. Furthermore, racial and ethnic identities, sexual orientation, and many other factors can color how one experiences their gender identity on a day-to-day basis.
Today’s suggested topic: Weaponized incompetence
An article has been floating around of late (Here without paywall: https://news.yahoo.com/experts-men-weaponize-incompetence-avoid-152642099.html) about a strategy many here are probably familiar with predominantly used by cis men in heterosexual relationships of weaponized incompetence. Also called strategic or performative incompetence it refers to the strategy of doing something so poorly that other people (women) are forced to do it instead. This can be something like deliberately ruining laundry because you don’t want to do it so that the person expecting you to do it doesn’t ask you again.
Have you faced this phenomenon and how do you deal with it? Let’s talk about the insidious ways patriarchy makes social roles for women all the work men don’t want to do.