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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Speaking in general real-world terms, I'd think complaining about unfairness in the division of labor would only matter for sexual desire in women if the man wasn't at a level the woman respects.

If a broke husband with a massive beer belly while sitting planted in front of the TV and covered in pretzel crumbs told his wife to clean all of the dishes and vacuum the house and then do laundry, anybody would probably mentally check out of that relationship eventually, and deservedly so.

But if a wealthy, hard-working, and fit husband asked his wife to do 100% of the housework, that's probably not going to dampen sexual desire in the slightest.

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Why would said wealthy, hard-working, and fit husband not just hire a maid?

Besides, it's often not just about the fact that someone has to do household labor. A lot of women are realizing that said ideal husband somehow expects their partner to clean up after them, essentially taking over the role of his mother. This is despite both parties often having a full-time job.

A lot of men demonstrate a form learned helplessness, and pretend they are unable to do even the most minimal form of household labor - often including things as trivial as putting the dishes they used in the dishwasher, or putting dirty laundry in the hamper. This needlessly complicates what should've been a trivial chore, and breeds resentment.

A commonly-heard sentiment is that women feel like they have to care for their husband as if he is another child. Their husband expects them to act as his mother and a maid in one. I am not really surprised that this is a turn-off.

> Why would said wealthy, hard-working, and fit husband not just hire a maid?

You might be overthinking a generalized extreme example designed to illustrate my point.

women demonstrate learned helplessness far far more frequently. pretending they could not learn how to change a car's oil, fix a flat tire, or kill a bug, etc. but we have normalized it as a society. Same with men often having to treat their wives like children by handling all the finances, etc. But again, it's normalized and nobody says a thing

I think your impression of what constitutes 'normal' in this regard is a few generations out of date.

And only for a very narrow bit at the top of the socioeconomic heap - once a week, my great-grandmother would wring and then chop the neck of the Sunday chicken, so I doubt she had a second thought about smacking any insects that threatened her pantry.

I don’t know a lady who couldn’t kill a bug but I know plenty of guys who can’t change a tire.

cope

> essentially taking over the role of his mother.

I hear this complaint a lot, but the inverse is also true. Many women expect their male partner to take over the role of her father. Any relationship that has severely asymmetric exchange of value is ultimately doomed.

But it seems reasonable to me that in a healthy relationship, each partner at least partially replaces the role of the other's parent, so long as the exchange is balanced.

Relationships of all kinds are ultimately built on value exchange. Parasitic relationships are those in which the value exchange is severely unbalanced. And these kinds of parasitic relations inevitably end, either because the node getting sucked dry realizes it and cuts the bond, or because the parasite eventually sucks its host dry of all potential value and then cuts the bond to look for a new host.

Each partner sharing in household work is common sense, however details are up to them. Doing dishes in bulk every 2 days is an equally valid alternative to scrubbing one plate immediately after eating a snack. Also household chores including providing for the household, doing taxes, balancing checkbook, changing light bulbs, doing small repairs, changing oil in cars... Someone who doesn't equally share in every one of these chores may want to cut their partner some slack on others rather than leaning into 4th wave feminism.

Many wives would still want to have a (professional and social) life even if their partner is wealthy and hard-working. If you take all care of kids and of the house, it's quite hard to have time to be something. It's also exhausting in a bad way.

Having said that, wives often discount the bits that their husbands do for their household. It goes like: Thing A is something only my husband knows how to do, so he would be doing it; whereas we are both capable of doing B so let's share it fairly.

Things A tending to be large, more-spaced-out endeavors such as fixing things.

My wife and I had our second baby in October. I'm on paternity leave to help out. My wife is currently very sleep deprived due to breastfeeding at night, and she is also prone to anxiety from messy spaces. Our first child can tear up the house pretty quickly. A couple days ago, my wife was saying that she _felt_ like I wasn't helping out, even though the rational portion of her mind knows that I am.

We just got our house exterior painted. Yesterday she insisted on helping out with some of the "handyman" work, and learned how to wire up some light fixtures.

> But if a wealthy, hard-working, and fit husband asked his wife to do 100% of the housework, that's probably not going to dampen sexual desire in the slightest.

The wealthy, hard-working and fit wife may be not that happy to do 100% of the housework while the wealthy, hard-working and fit husband sits in front of the TV.

If you add up all the things that somebody could be resentful about I am sure that all of them would correlate to low sexual desire, and the more of them that are present the less the desire.

The flip side is that 20% or so of women were sexually abused as children and that creates a situation where no matter how many current time causes of resentment you remove and no matter how many positive things you try to add it is like trying to get a fish to fly. There is a reason why they don’t let victims of sexual abuse serve on the juries of people like Danny Masterson because one person’s indulgence can permanently deprive the victim and their partners of what is an important part of life for most people.

The shit people sign their name to on the internet...

I’ve found going from ‘this is something that is true generically’ to ‘this is something I’ve lived’ turn -7 downvotes to +200 upvotes but I’d rather not air dirty laundry.

I can say it makes people like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Book

go Batman on people’s asses and lead to situations like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offe...

Not having victims of a specific crime serve as juries of a trial for that crime isn’t specific to sexual assault.

In the case of masterson it is a sexually specific crime. A sexual abuse victim would not be disqualified from serving on a jury for, say, bank robbery or embezzling.

The main issue is that if happens to you it makes a wound that doesn’t ever heal and you are very inclined to want to pass your trauma forward to somebody…. If you knew that person crossing the road in front of you was a molestor you might think about not applying the brake…

You’re assuming sexual assault victims not being the jury of sexual assault trials is somehow special to sexual assault victims because of how sexual assault is. In reality any victim of a crime is not eligible for jury to trial the exact same crime- victims of embezzlement are likely to be thrown out of embezzlement trials, gun violence victims from gun violent trials, etc. sexual assault isn’t somehow special in that case and has no correlation with the other claims you’re making.

Except victims of this kind of trauma usually become hyper sexual...

Some do. Some do the opposite. Some people are hyper sexual in some social contexts and asexual in others. Either way it has a persistent harmful affect on the victim and people around them.

Others just figure that a year in prison is not enough to pay for damage that lasts a lifetime, particularly when it affects the people around you in a cryptic way, and look for opportunities to hurt other people.

> The flip side is that 20% or so of women were sexually abused as children

What country/city/area is this? I find this exceptionally hard to believe.

My number can be found here but you can find other numbers on it too..

https://victimsofcrime.org/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/

There are some therapists who see couples who say that when sex is not working for a couple and the simple things don’t work that the cause is almost always past abuse. It is an N=1 experiment but I can say talking about that with my partner led to some revelations 2 days later that were dimly remembered but later confirmed by others who were involved.

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