We all know thoughts lead into each other, it's like one tangent leads to another, so it's pretty much impossible to say where anything begins or ends, and perhaps all things echo throughout the universe endlessly... in light cones (aka Einstein), but we know vibrations do end and so we're left with the impression that things do separate into distinct units, but at least on a quantum level they don't and perhaps because our experience is pretty much limited to friction world, a planet spinning seemingly endlessly in a frictionless environment. oh the irony.

I digress (of course).

So I was thinking about the cruelty of small children, and/or adult men.

But men are the ones who get to re/write history because women don't get much downtime and it takes a specific kind of person to do the writing. Then my mind slipped off to Austen's Mansfield Park were she likens poor dependent (female) relatives to slaves. After all she wrote about women, their status and how females gain employment, aka get married (and then possibly die, a lot of Austen's mothers die). But this is pretty much irrelevant to men because they are looking at the younger women anyway. (Is this why women go through menopause so they wont die in child birth? Although menopause comes too late for many women.) Anyway men live on to write the books because they are alive and have time and enough status that what they write matters. But I digress again.

I was thinking women have always been treated as slaves, and it's not just poor dependent female relatives. Women get to do so much of the scut work, cleaning house, toilets, kitchens, then meal prepping... and it's mostly very low paid/unpaid. Then they give birth to the next generation, raising that generation into the inheritors of the mess some adult men leave behind. I generalize of course. Some men do clean house and are paid well to do so, and there are women who refuse to do the scut work of cleaning and having children.

I like books and as such I spend some part of my day getting free books from Amazon and I have noticed that when men write a love story it's deemed literature (thus lofty and noble), but if a woman writes one it's chick lit (at best) or a romance. All signs of: run away, run away! (The equivalent of other culture - you know like mainstream culture is for a white male audience, and how white people don't watch other cultures' TV...)

Austen is often declared to be a romance writer. This infuriates me. She wrote about the female economic situation, not always but often. Men who write about economics are exalted (because they turn what is truly luck into a magic 8 ball with ridiculous formulas), but women, it's romance (which is so easy to dismiss). Austen wrote about more than getting married, and her books weren't morality tales either.

I realized that 'systems' is a kinda huge buzz word amongst scientist-wannabes, along with 'AI', 'quantum', even 'computer'... and apparently a Nobel prize was recently awarded for these dour faced men (as these men are always dour faced - seemingly so beyond us they don't have emotions, if a woman won a Nobel prize she'd be smiling) for systems.

My eyes roll.

If you want systems, go ask a woman who works in the home about systems.

It has occurred to me that men just can't think in systems. My husband has been carrying the housework load for a little while for us and he just can't get his head around the idea of multitasking - a concept so fundamental to women who manage a household. My husband is a super smart guy, he has a PhD in astrophysics, but he just doesn't manage multitasking when it comes to solving housework problems. Although he is getting better.

My guess is he has learned the importance of optimizing time with the multitude of tasks that need to be performed.

I know I have read these accounts of emotional labor and men's helplessness when it comes to doing housework. Perhaps some of it is men feeling annoyed they have to contribute during what they thought would be their downtime, housework is beneath them - besides there is a really interesting game on TV and here he is in the laundry, so they put the clothes in the washer and never turn the machine on... then he can say he put the clothes in the washing machine (literally. Of course that'd be extremely passive aggressive if it's intentional. But my husband is nothing like this)... I think it's more likely men just do not understand the problem.

Men seem to have a really hard time managing systems. Whereas women think men can do systems as well as they can because hey - all she is doing is housework... anyone can do this - right?

Well I think we've bought the lie that women have to live up to men's ability and standards. We think men can do all the things, and women have to prove they can.

The idea that computer software must have a bug in it is based on men writing the code for a system and the problem is men just can't do systems. I have written heaps of bug-less code. And I am talking about telephone systems and neural networks, symbol translators, code that writes other code... all completely bug-less, easy to maintain and upgrade.

This realization came to me when I saw on brain-games a segment about men having better spatial reasoning, that they can pack a car trunk for an outing more quickly and efficiently than women can in general. And perhaps that's true - if you don't mind the diaper pail next to lunch. Perhaps the women on the segment were solving the real problem - if you are going to access food during the journey, perhaps you don't want to have to pull out everything to get to a squashed lunch, to get to the diaper pail, or to find where the clean diapers were stored in the first place.

In my opinion, men are basically peacocks who love showing off, and tell how wonderful they are at showing off. In general, women prefer to just get the job done and hopefully get some recognition for it. Perhaps our assumption is wrong, that men cannot do everything as well as women can.