In my current and past relationships, the issue of how tidy the living space needs to be has come up a few times - I generally keep it less tidy than my partners tend to. I realise this isn't necessarily a gendered issue: my sisters are messier than me (as they sew and knit and don't tidy up after themselves), and I've known men who were very tidy.

In these relationships I usually try to come to a compromise with my partner, to varying degrees of success; I've had a partner who was very insistent that her level of tidiness (vacuuming once a week, keeping the kitchen countertop completely shining clean unless it's actively being worked on, not having clothes on the ground for any period of time at all) was some objective standard that I should work hard to help her maintain, but in other relationships it was more 'let's meet in the middle'.

I have ADHD, and I find a lot of this stuff difficult-to-impossible to change my habits on. There's no way I'm going to be able to train myself to walk into a room and immediately pay attention to the floor and correctly assess whether it needs to be vacuumed according to the standards of another person. There's no way I'm going to be able to remember to put the things in 'the right place' in the cupboards, when I'm not the one who has assigned those places in the first place. Even if I set an alarm every day to walk around the whole house and look for tasks that need doing, and I concentrated really hard, about half of the tasks (at least) would not end up getting done. I find it completely impossible to manage this stuff to the standards of some of my previous partners.

When I hear about 'weaponised incompetence' as an explanation for men not doing household tasks, it really hurts. To me, it's so obviously a bad or reductive explanation. It seems to totally ignore any charitable interpretation of men's behaviour, and to me it also seems to show an incredulity with the idea that men (or less-tidy-people) might genuinely just perceive the issue differently for totally innocuous reasons - that men (or less-tidy-people) must fundamentally see all of the issues that women see (because how could a human not perceive them as issues and notice them automatically?), but must be maliciously avoiding doing them in order to force the other partner into doing them ('because obviously one of us needs to do them, or it'll be a disaster').

This is one of the things that makes leaning into feminism so difficult for me. I recognise that I have a male perspective on the world - I go through all kinds of things that women don't see, so I totally believe that women do as well. I totally believe that being sexually harassed is an extremely common experience for women whether I notice it or not, and that these issues around harassment and sexual assault are appreciably worse for women than they are for men etc. So I want to lean into the largest movement that counters that kind of thing. But when I see these stand-out examples where fairly mainstream feminist talking points are just wrong (and I know they are, because they're making false postulations about my intentions and my internal experience), it causes me to lose faith in a lot of the stuff they say, and in their perspective on men in general. It makes it clear to me that it's possible for some of the common but more abstract principles in feminist theory (that the patriarchy is upheld by men and men are responsible for it) can easily lead to false, harmful and more concrete perspectives (that common disagreements between men and women are caused by intentional malicious behaviour by the individual men involved).