The woman in this comic is abusive and I hate her. I know she’s supposed to be some sort of a victim but I detest passive aggressive people of this sort.
My blood pressure shot up like an angry squirrel when I saw the strip. Hate, hate, hate people who flip out on you because you didn’t read their fucking mind when and how they expected to. It’s especially tough on a child who lives in permanent terror of mommy yelling at daddy for no reason that can be anticipated.
Any child would much much rather live in a messy house and eat out of a can than have to be saddled with life-long anxiety because of mommy’s fucking mental loads!
I’m especially insulted that this vile piece of trash used the word “feminism.”
Fuck these fuckers.
Wow, this really hit home.
Clarissa's Blog 
I hate passive-aggressive people, too. But I don’t think she’s wrong that this dynamics, where the wife is a chief organizer of the family life and the husband does only what he’s specifically told to do, is uncommon; quite the contrary. And she’s right that these are learned behaviors and that they are not easy to get rid of even if one wants to. What I presume pisses you off is that the comic presents it as some sort of impossible-to-escape victimization, and many women are actually complicit in this setup as they enjoy being able to bitch and moan and feel like martyrs without actually doing anything to change what supposedly bothers them.
I have some of it in my family, and for me, the solution has been to first give up whatever kicks I was getting from feeling like a hero/martyr (my mother and grandmother definitely embraced the whole woman martyr/useless husband paradigm, so it wasn’t easy to get over it), and then figure out a reasonable and sustainable division of labor. My husband took over certain chores completely (he does all the laundry, all the vacuuming, most of the cleaning, and the outdoors chores like mowing and snow blowing) and I made peace with the fact that he finds communication with other people truly difficult, so that scheduling sports, doctors appointments, playdates, and anything involving other humans will have to be done by me. I also do 100% of all the cooking and grocery shopping. We divide shopping for kids clothes and pickup/drop off fairly equally. I think we’re reasonably well balanced, taking into account what each of us likes/hates to do and is good/bad at.
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I almost sent you the link yesterday! Her strips on racism and police violence are much better, I think. I don’t know if they have been translated.
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I get that reaction – reading the thing gives me this twisting pain in my stomach. But less than having problems with the woman, I kind of just want to punch the guy. Who the hell walks into problem situation and starts with “What did you do?”
Either help with the problem at hand, or keep doing what you were doing and entertain the guest. Anything aside from transparently trying to have your partner shoulder the awkwardness on their own.
Hm. Seems like any such cracks are always made worse by the presence of a guest. Most in-home social occasions deteriorated into passive-aggressive sniping or downright shouting matches so quickly an reliably that I still don’t really treat my home as a place I invite friends over to.
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The man and the woman have freely chosen this S&M dynamic and are deeply enjoying it. The kids are the ones who will spend a lifetime paying for the way their parents entertained themselves.
I grew up like this and I made a promise to myself that I’ll never wash a plate that I don’t want to wash or cook a dish I don’t want to cook and I’ll never ever feel resentful about housework.
It’s very very easy to manipulate and control people with housework.
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This exact dynamic is why I never wanted to have people come over as a kid. Getting ready for guests was just like Dweird describes especially if they had a party.
It was always such a production.
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Even as an adult, I couldn’t tolerate anybody to visit me at home. I had to look for the reason with the analyst’s help, and this was the reason. So yes, we could form a club here.
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We still entertain way less than I would like. We have three kids and the house is always mildly chaotic (e.g., getting your foot impaled on a Lego is a clear and present danger) and getting it to be in tip-top shape takes a lot of work; it turns out, neither DH nor I are too willing to spend a whole weekend cleaning and me cooking for hours so we’d have guests over for 2 hours and have mostly empty small talk (DH hates it). I wouldn’t mind having people over in our humble abode and I believe that people who’d be really close to us wouldn’t mind the less-than-spotless look, but the truth is we don’t have close people here; most colleagues from my department are uber-neat Midwestern protestants and they would probably think we’re pigs, and I really don’t need work colleagues to think that on top of my other flaws, such as having a big mouth. The people who actually do come to our house regularly are our kids’ friends and their parents; those who are super neat (also invariably somewhat xenophobic, not able to get over the accent) don’t end up staying in out lives for long, while those who’ve been around for years are relaxed like we are. But I like people and miss having people over… Not sure what the solution is for us. Maybe we just need better people in our lives.
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“used the word “feminism.””
While reading it, I kept having the feeling that there was going to be a party meeting where I would have to stand up and parrot it all (and/or do self-criticism about how I’ve been letting the agreed-on-from-above standards slide….)
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I had a very similar visceral reaction to this comic. The obsession with expecting mind-reading and manipulation is exactly how I was treated growing up – my mother believed that if she had to ask me to do a particular thing, whether it be a chore or something else she desired in that moment, it was too late and I’d already failed. (There were many things I was expected to do, including cleaning, cooking, dishes, trash, etc. that I didn’t mind as much, it was the expectation that I should know exactly what she wanted done at that exact moment and should have already anticipated and done it 5 minutes ago…)
I could go on for ages about this and its effects on what I turned into as an adult, as I’ve analyzed it considerably, but that isn’t the point… the point I wanted to make was that it’s not just adult relationships that do this, but abusive parents as well, and there it is even worse in some ways for the kid, who, instead of living in constant fear that mom will yell at dad, is living in constant fear that mom will yell at them… And they had no choice in the relationship…
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This is a classic form of emotional abuse. I know exactly what you are describing, and it’s very very harsh. I’m sorry you had to experience this.
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Regarding feminism today:
A black feminist festival in Paris that excludes white people could be being banned, the city’s mayor has warned.
During the ‘blackfeminist’ Nyansapo Festival in July, 80 percent of the venue, owned by the city of Paris municipality, will be reserved for black women, reports Le Figaro.
Black people from both genders will be permitted to enter another section, while a third area will be open to all.
In a tweet today, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted that she reserved the right “to prosecute the organisers for discrimination”.
http://www.9news.com.au/world/2017/05/29/13/45/whites-banned-from-black-feminist-paris-festival
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“Regarding feminism today:”
Why not write “Regarding purple unicorns today:”
When so-called feminists expend so much energy in segregation (racial and sexual) and supporting burkas and concentrating on microaggressions and triggering then the movement (as necessary as it was at one time) is dead and needs to be put out of everyone else’s misery.
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It does happen that some people insist on TOTAL CONTROL of a certain aspect of married life. Their partners then think “I can yield on this, since it’s not like he/she wants total control of everything everywhere.” The partners then are conditioned / badgered / (sometimes terrorized) into legalistic compliance with every instruction given, because over- or under-doing anything results in yelling. “Well, I’ll just do exactly what she said, because I don’t know what she’s thinking.”
Then, as we see in the cartoon – legalistic compliance also can result in a crisis, as with the “take the bottle out of the dishwasher situation.” I’ve been in those situations and then been reprimanded for doing more than was specified – in this case, it might have been “I wanted to have you wipe out the cabinets, now the dishes are already back there, I ONLY asked you to take the bottle out, would that have been so hard?!”
Ridiculous.
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