The problem is that a single fairy tale is kinda irrelevant. Any single epsilon is insignificant. But if you add up a thousand epsilons, you end up with something that is grotesquely distorted from nominal. (See also, "tolerance analysis" for how this works in engineering disciplines. The phrase that is often used in sociology is "death by a thousand paper cuts" or the "leaking balloon".)
The problem with both "Never lifting a finger to help" and "being bossed out of the kitchen" is that both of these explanations look at symptoms. The symptom is that at Thanksgiving, all the men are in the living room watching the football game and all the women are in the kitchen cooking. What any individual actor does in this scenario is irrelevant. What is relevant are the systemic social factors that make this scenario damn near inevitable in the overwhelming majority of American homes. Those factors are often completely opaque to the individual woman who compains about her jackass husband guzzling beer with the boys instead of helping or to the individual man who feels put upon and self righteous that the gossipy harpies chased him out of the kitchen.
So it's not just the fairy tale, although Sleeping Beauty is a rather dramatic example of the average girl experience. It's the fact that adults by and large expect girls to be quiet, passive, play imaginary games, play dressup, etc etc. and expect boys to play sports, roughhouse with one another, be competitive in school. Kids pick up on their parents subtle cues as to how Mommy and Daddy want them to behave. There is a ton of research done in this field, and frankly, I tend to think that intelligent educated males have enough resources to go look up the research themselves instead of expecting it to spoon fed to them. If, that is, they actually mean it when they say they want to learn about sexism and male privilege in our society and what they can do to eliminate it.
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The problem with both "Never lifting a finger to help" and "being bossed out of the kitchen" is that both of these explanations look at symptoms. The symptom is that at Thanksgiving, all the men are in the living room watching the football game and all the women are in the kitchen cooking. What any individual actor does in this scenario is irrelevant. What is relevant are the systemic social factors that make this scenario damn near inevitable in the overwhelming majority of American homes. Those factors are often completely opaque to the individual woman who compains about her jackass husband guzzling beer with the boys instead of helping or to the individual man who feels put upon and self righteous that the gossipy harpies chased him out of the kitchen.
So it's not just the fairy tale, although Sleeping Beauty is a rather dramatic example of the average girl experience. It's the fact that adults by and large expect girls to be quiet, passive, play imaginary games, play dressup, etc etc. and expect boys to play sports, roughhouse with one another, be competitive in school. Kids pick up on their parents subtle cues as to how Mommy and Daddy want them to behave. There is a ton of research done in this field, and frankly, I tend to think that intelligent educated males have enough resources to go look up the research themselves instead of expecting it to spoon fed to them. If, that is, they actually mean it when they say they want to learn about sexism and male privilege in our society and what they can do to eliminate it.