this doesn't seem insightful to me at all. there's thousands of years worth of culture attesting to the fact that men and women tend to (with exceptions) have different communication styles. men are much more explicit and women are much more implicit.<p>"you should have asked" is natural for a man and egregious to a woman who will naturally tend towards "you should have known". that's not to say there are no exceptions. the world is 7.5 billion exceptions, but if we're going to be speaking in generalizations (as the essay is wont to do) then let's do that.<p>this essay highlights only failures of men to communicate with women in the female style w.r.t to domestic tasks. what about the failures of women to communicate with men in the male style in other domains? these are all causes of conflict in relationships and addressing only one side of a conflict is not how to resolve a conflict. good relationships establish communication by both partners based on their natural communication tendencies. a man will learn to be more intuitive and a woman will learn to be more direct.<p>the essay begins by making some fairly trivial observations about communication and then it goes totally off the rails with ideology about "mental load". Every single person in the entire world has a mind full of minutia, anxieties, and distractions. Everyone. If you don't, you're the Buddha. "Mental Load" is not a female or male phenomenon.<p>And then even more ideology about how the media portrays men as "adventuring heroes" or somesuch. really? what media is this? I've become accustomed to seeing men portrayed as hapless fools, wage-slaves, and of course angry and dangerous brutes.<p>honestly I'm just not sure what I'm looking at here. this is the kind of rant that if the gender roles were reversed would be considered totally unacceptable as chauvinist pig shitlord propaganda. can you imagine such a thing? an essay written by a man about how annoying women are and how they just don't "get" us?<p>this is the world in 2017. there is still substantial injustice committed against women (and against men too) but the discourse is rancid and encourages intractable bickering and ideological warfare.
Am a guy. Also have this exact mental load thing in my head 80% of the day.<p>I can see how it could be more common for women, but I think it's also a misinterpretation and simplification of how men think as well.