Dumb Male Journalist Tells Moms, ‘Be Like Dads And Don’t Give A S**t,’ Moms Say ‘F**k You’

Are you ready for your daily dose of mansplaining? Better buckle up, because it’s a doozy. New York Post columnist Kyle Smith has a message for exhausted, overworked moms:

I would suggest that dads may not seem as stressed because even when both Mom and Dad work full-time jobs, Mom still takes care of the brunt of the housework and child care. But sure! Yes, moms are just exhausted because we care too much about perfection. For example, right now I find myself caring a lot about what a perfect asshole Smith is.

Smith dismisses the concerns of mothers as simply caring too much about what other people think, which he dubs the ‘feminine psychosis’. In related news, I’m going to build on ‘mansplaining’ by starting to use the term ‘masculine psychosis’ to describe a dude’s overwhelming belief in his own ability to understand the lived experiences of women better than women themselves do. Geez, Kyle, why do us silly womenfolk insist on giving a shit despite Smith’s wise advice to the contrary?

A few months back, every feminist-y, upper-middle class mom cooed and thrilled to an essay riffing about how Amy Poehler once told Jimmy Fallon, ”I don’t f”‰-”‰-”‰king care if you like it.” Then they went back to fretting about the half-centimeter hole in their tights and whether people had noticed their nails had gotten a little ragged lately.

Yeah, women are so silly for worrying about their appearances! It’s not as if their opinions are rejected out of hand if they fail to meet some arbitrary standards for self-presentation, or as if mothers in the workplace are treated worse if co-workers perceive them as being tired out by their family lives. Or as if they’re ever dismissed out of hand as “just a mom” for failing to live up to the personal care, cooking, and cleaning standards they had before children.

Smith brags about dressing his daughter in mismatched clothes, feeding her pizza and Hawaiian Punch instead of organic whole foods, and being content to park her in front of cartoons for a while. And while these are all things I’d probably do with my kids (except give them Hawaiian Punch, because that crap tastes like licking the bottom of a barrel of red food dye), here’s the difference: nobody is going to look down on Smith for doing so, because as a society, we don’t consider it Dad’s ‘job’ to make sure the children look presentable, to make healthy meals and bring treats to school, to find intellectually-fulfilling activities for them to do. All that is assigned to poor Mom’s, and for Smith to so easily dismiss it all as a frilly feminine waste of time shows what a waste of space he is.

Whatever goofy clothes Smith dresses his daughter up in, whatever junk food she gets sent to school with, it’s probably not him who’s going to be side-eyed for it. If his daughter goes to school with a stain on her shirt or a knot in her hair, it’s not him who’s going to be treated like a wicked step-parent by her classmates’ parents. It’s easy to say “just don’t worry what other people think of you!” when you don’t have to worry about getting along with those other people at every class party, at PTA meetings, at play dates and birthday parties.

Maybe Smith can slide by on the hapless-sitcom-dad stereotype and be considered above board. Sure, it’s stressful to spend time and energy on fancy classroom treats or on carefully coordinating Junior’s outfit for school picture day – but you know what else is stressful? Getting picked apart, ostracized, or ignored for being the mom who ‘just didn’t give a shit’. The moms who spend that extra few seconds picking out a shirt with socks that match aren’t psychotically consumed with what people will think; they just don’t want to be that weird mom that the other room moms at school avoid because they think she doesn’t care about her daughter enough. Or worse yet, to be the one who has CPS called on her because she neglectfully let her kids play outdoors by themselves in the yard, instead of planning an afternoon’s worth of arts-and-crafts activities for them.

Sure, women are under more pressure from Pinterest than ever, and I’m sure all of us have a few things we could stand to let go of. But maybe we could work on alleviating the stresses of motherhood by kicking to the curb the societal expectations on mothers to conform and perform – instead of by telling women to keep everything running smoothly but to look effortlessly unworried while doing so.

For someone who insists that women care too much about what others think of them, Smith seems to care an awful lot about what women think of themselves. I suggest he try this cool new idea I’ve heard about, called ‘not giving a shit’. As someone who aggressively does not give a shit what Smith thinks about how much time I’m wasting or how dull (or ‘psychotic’) I mean for the family photos I stage or the butternut squash bake I’m making for dinner, I can attest that it’s a pretty great strategy.

(Image: Tom Wang/Shutterstock)