Don’t put Phil Dumphy in this category. Man does this share of the housework and is generally a good man.
The concept of “mental load” blew the cabin doors of my brain wide open. This isn’t the comic that did it for me, but it’s as decent one about how men are often socialized to be basically useless outside of a few specialized roles: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/26/gender-wars-household-chores-comic
I mean, you could argue that the “useless husband” trope is just the “nagging wife” trope re-workwd to demonize men instead of women. Both are just as bad.
Sitcoms are bad in general. Turn off the laugh tracks and you’ll find they aren’t funny at all. The characters have to be designed to be shitty and unreasonable people, because it’s incredibly difficult to write a story with characters that make reasonable and empathetic decisions without it being boring. Dumbing people down into tropes makes it cheap and easy to crank out episode after episode after episode.
If you pay attention you’ll also notice that these shows tend to only have maybe 100 unique plots, and after that they just repeat. And these shows steal from each other. It’s similar to how so many anime’s have a “beach episode” or “bathhouse episode”.
I get the message but 2 shows shown there don’t fit that bill. Peggy was probably more useless than Al in Married with children. And Phil was actually a decent husband in Modern family. It’s right about Everybody loves raymond though. Not sure what she saw in him.
I think Fresh Off The Boat probably doesn’t fit either; I only saw a few episodes, but none of them tried to present a nagging wife trope.
The adult responsibilities need to be shared fairly. If someone is a stay at home partner, they should get more house chores to compensate for the working person. Otherwise the working person gets saddled with work, childcare and house chores and no time for themselves.
This arrangement generally does not acknowledge that caring for children is work.
Oh you’re “staying home with the kids” all day? You should be the full time maid and cook to make up for that. And obviously be my unpaid therapist as well because well, emotional labor doesn’t count either!
Also, I seem to remember the only thing Peggy nagged Al for was sex.
But she also constantly emotionally abused him, made fun of his manhood, of his earning potential, of his sexual prowess, of his ability to be a father, witnessed him constantly suffering, somehow made that his fault, and yet expected sex from the man, expected him to please her.
Like, he’s not any kind of a role model. His character was intentionally written to be despicable. But at the same time, like, holy fucking shit, he would have been so much happier if he had just divorced her. She would have been so much happier if she had just divorced him. It was entirely toxic. there are no redeeming qualities from any of the characters in this show.
I thought he divorced her, started a cabinet company and then remarried a lady from Columbia…
Love me some Peggy, but I wouldn’t exactly agree that she and Al belong in this image.
