#maybe thats just my motor skill issues though

[incorrect-dying-light-quotes]

🐱

[vergess]

im gonna slam these thoughts and feelings here because you usually have Good Sociological Takes about this kind of stuff and i think the world at large would be better for it if this was public, here it goes. I have Issues with the way weaponized incompetence as a concept is like used?

like i have no doubt that it is a thing that exists but i think it gets applied to a lot of ND people (esp men actually!!!) unfairly because i know for a fact that MY behavior would DEFINITELY be construed as weaponized incompetence wrt to household tasks...except being disabled, i literally Do Not Have the skills to DO domestic chores correctly.

I don't have the physical strength to scrub things as hard as they need to be scrubbed, it's hard for me to remember when to clean things, only the very smallest of vacuum cleaners are light enough for me to use which in practice makes the act of vacuuming rooms too long for my executive functioning to handle etc. (and my family gives me shit for this constantly but thats besides the point) and like...

am i manipulative a little bit about avoiding doing domestic chores? kind of! because i HAVE to be because people flat out DO NOT BELIEVE me when i say "hey i am actually bad at cleaning things" and even when i DEMONSTRATE it visibly does look like i am "phoning it in" on purpose, even though i am not so i have to be a sneaky little asshole to dodge doing chores because i have to in order to not waste what energy and time i have doing a chore that i will never be able to do properly anyway.

(and this isn't ALWAYS about NT people having higher standards for cleanliness, sometimes i genuinely cannot wash a thing to the level of safe human hygiene standards because i do not have the physical strength/motor skills to clean it. housework is physical labor i cannot do.)

I know the problem here is probably "you spend too much time on reddit" but i constantly see people whining about how all their spouse does is come home from work and then play video games and as much as i wanna empathize with the other half in this scenario (and i get it, they do deserve a break from housework too)

the "person goes straight from work to play video games all day" type of person is ME. because i CAN'T do housework. And i wonder, how many people who are all "dump them, they are using Weaponized Incompetence to get out of being an adult" realize that not everything that looks like weaponized incompetence IS weaponized incompetence?

How many men (bc its usually men getting accused of this) doing this are actually disabled and don't know it? And now, to bring gender into it, it gets even more annoying, because i am a woman, so i am expected to know how to do housework and am constantly told "well you don't know how to do chores because you refuse to learn how" when it's not ABOUT learning how, i physically cannot do them. I am cis esp physically but socially i have actually always id'd as "failed/broken girl" SPECIFICALLY in relation to my inability to Do Female Coded Chores. This, more than anything else, makes me Not Like The Other Girls.

In summation, intellectually i guess weaponized incompetence is a thing but in practice i don't think its real, it really sounds like a thing some people made up to be ableist towards disabled people yet again :/ but maybe i am wrong?

I never actually see it applied to women but i feel like its only a matter of time, society will always see afab who can't housework as defective girl anyway, and i am dreading my immediate family ever learning about the concept because i fit the description to a T even though it's literally not true in my case but there is no way to PROVE that because it all relies on just believing me and taking me at my word about my ability level because watching me fail a task is literally indistinguishable from someone "obviously phoning it in and perfectly capable."

(I feel that way about a lot of things, actually, that "spotting a fake" anything is actually impossible because so many failed tasks in any discipline look EXACTLY like someone pretending to be bad at the task.) 

--End of submission, line breaks added for clarity--

Oh boy it's time for everyone's favourite cop-out-that-isn't-really-a-cop-out:

~dialectics~

Which is basically the fancy way of saying "two things can be true."

Having experienced both weaponized incompetence and disability in myself and in partners, weaponized incompetence is definitely a real thing and it definitely needs to be discussed.

But just like everything else that can be used to shit on the disabled, it is used to shit on the disabled, especially those with chronic illnesses and invisible disabilities.

Both of those things are true.

Abled people, especially abled men, will skive off of doing their reasonable and legitimate share of home maintenance by pretending to be worse at things than they are, so that others living with them will pick up their slack. Absolutely a thing that happens.

And as soon as people became broadly aware of this, they began blaming disabled people who cannot do those tasks by claiming the disabled people are victimizing them through weaponized incompetence.

This also intersects pretty nastily with capitalism and labour (what doesn't). Since working outside the home is generally a matter of immediate survival, and working inside the home is generally a matter of long term survival, work done outside the home reads as More Important to our monkey brains. It's that much harder to cut off outside work while you any remaining brain space and energy. So, by the time you're "done" with outside work, you're genuinely too exhausted to do inside work.

So it gets put off for as long as you can bear to ignore it.

And if for no reason other than sheer socialization, women tend to be more aware of the dangers and exhausting effect of an unclean living space than men, and thus can 'bear to ignore it' less, which means that it tends not to reach the point of being consciously upsetting to men. This isn't universal, obviously, but it's a broad pattern that tends to arise any time one party is socialized as 'bring home the paycheck' and another is socialized as 'manage the living space,' even if all parties are required to work for pay to survive.

IMO, the onus is on people accusing/discussing weaponized incompetence to make, maintain and enforce the distinction between "refusing to do things they absolutely can and should be doing because they expect to be served by others" and "refusing to do things they literally cannot because they are sick."

Unfortunately, because the experience of being a victim of injustice tends to narrow one's focus in the extreme, the act of remembering the other thing is also true tends to slip by the wayside.

Ironically, this mimics the very weaponized incompetence they are complaining about. They both can and should maintain a conscious awareness of the distinction between "can and won't" and "can't and mustn't," because they are so focused on their own legitimate status as a victim on one force, that they forget they can and are perpetrating another force.