Why “female skills” can bite my arse

Once again I have been angered by a news article found on news.com.au (I really don’t know why I read that damn website, it send me into a furious rage almost every time I do). Today it’s about the loss of “female” skills within Gen Y. I started typing this massive rant but when it started getting a bit tl;dr I decided to cut it down as much as possible. So without further ado, here is why I think the idea of Gen Y losing these so called “female skills” is a bit of bollocks.

Yes, a lot of Gen Y females do not know how to properly hem a skirt, whip up a roast or a batch of lamingtons and aren’t probably as good at ironing and scrubbing floors as their grandmothers were. In case you missed the memo, times have changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. Women aren’t expected to stay at home and watch the kids and do all the tedious house work while hubby brings home the bacon. In fact a lot of women, even those who have kids, have to go out and work to support their families. Suddenly the typical woman doesn’t have all this “free” time on her hands because she’s out working every day, just like her partner, in order to provide a comfortable life for herself and her family.

If you want to be good at anything, you need practice, and the life of the average female these days doesn’t allow for what this article seems to think are basic female skills. Sure, it’d be nice to not have to spend $30 on getting a hem done up by a tailor and it’d be great to be able to whip up a fancy dinner every night, but most women don’t have the time for that sort of thing any more. Not every woman has the need to grow plants from cuttings and because of how cars are these days, having a manual license is not that important any more. Even if we’re shown how to do this stuff (from parents or in high school Home Economics), our lack of need to utilise these skills means we soon forget how to do them. I mean, if you live in a unit in the City, why would you need to know how to operate a whipper snipper?

Look, I think everyone, not just female, should know a lot of these basic skills. Sewing and cooking will always be invaluable, knowing how to check the car if it’s low on oil or being able to start a mower are also equally good to know. But clearly the parents of these apparently “hopeless” Gen Y’s decided these skills weren’t important enough to hand down to many of the people of my generation and so a lot of this knowledge has disappeared. As a result there are plenty of ways we can overcome the fact we lack these skills and our lives really aren’t that badly affected by it.

As it turns out, the article itself wasn’t what angered me the most, but the comments by the douchebag chauvinists commenting on it. All I’m going to say is, if you expect your girlfriend/wife to come home after a long day at work and iron your goddamn shirts then you are a pig and deserve to have that iron shoved somewhere nasty. Women shouldn’t be confined to these old-fashioned chores if they don’t want to. If a women is happy to work all day then come home to cook dinner, do the laundry and clean the house then that’s her choice. But if you expect her to do it just because it’s a “female skill” then you need to check the date and realise it’s 2011, not 1955. Likewise, if you don’t like how your wife is a stay-at-home mum and doesn’t have the house spic and span when you come home from work, perhaps you should stay home and change shitty nappies and entertain your screaming, messy whirlwinds of destruction for once and see how you feel like doing the dishes or ironing!

Personally I was brought up to learn all of these skills, and my mum still teaches me new things constantly. I have a new sewing machine which she’s giving me lessons on, I mow her lawn all the time and have fixed her mower a couple of times and thanks to her teachings I am an OK cook, even though I don’t like cooking much at all. But that’s me, and given the fact I live where I live and have an extremely busy life, I don’t need to know these things. I just choose to and that’s my right, as it is to anyone who chooses not to learn these sometimes old-fashioned and unnecessary skills.

And to conclude this rant, here is Beyonce being the damn finest housewife ever (but not being very happy about it, which is damn well fair enough):

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