Men’s work/women’s work; It’s All the Same

Throughout our lives we’ve all heard the expressions “women’s work” and “men’s work.”
A man makes dinner or does the laundry and people say that’s women’s work he’s doing. A woman does body work on her car or patches a sidewalk with cement and that’s men’s work.
I often wonder whoever decided how to categorize them and how they decided which would be which. When you think about it, a lot of men’s work is pretty similar to women’s work and a lot of it doesn’t have a bit to do with men being any stronger.
Take for instance, sewing vs. rewiring a light fixture. Sewing requires patience, steady hands and agile fingers for intricate detail work. You take a string, smooth the end as much as possible and carefully insert it in the end of a needle. Then you tie some knots and begin connecting the fabric.
If you rewire a light fixture, you strip some of the coating of the ends of your wires and carefully thread them into a wire nut, or just twist them together and seal them with electrical tape.
The only difference is, with the latter you really need to turn off the breaker first, and if you connect the wrong colored wires, you will hear a loud pop and blow a fuse.
Now look at the cooking thing vs. patching a sidewalk or repairing a fender. A woman may make a cake by taking various ingredients and mixing them together, with certain knowledge of how they will combine chemically and texturally to create the finished product.
She knows that baking powder will make it rise and eggs will make it stick together, and flour will give it some substance. Combined with that is the knowledge of the baking temperature and length of time needed for baking.
Similarly, a man may mix cement by using a mix that he combines with water. He must add just the right amount of water to give it the appropriate consistency. Combined with that is the knowledge of how moist it needs to be kept as it cures and how long it takes to cure.
Granted, a bag of cement mix is a little heavier than a bag of flour, but there are always ways of getting around that, if you don’t like pushing yourself to the limit and pulling your back muscles to pieces as I have done. Have someone at the store load it into your car, then scoop small amounts out of the bag.
And when it comes to frosting a cake, or patching a sidewalk, it is all a matter of pouring and spreading.
Now, we examine the process of doing body work on a car. As in making a cake, when a man does body work on his car, he knows that he needs to mix the body putty for substance, the cream hardeners for, uh … hardening, then smooth it on to fit the contours of the car and later sand it to fit those contours even better.
Well, any woman who has ever baked a cake, eaten most of it by herself, gained 10 pounds and tried to squash and smooth the contours of her body into a tight pair of jeans, knows full well how to do that too!