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16-year-old boy says only ‘failed men’ do chores so his divorced parents taught him a lesson

The kid believes household chores are only for women.

via Canva/Photos

An upset 16-year-old boy.

It may seem like the idea that housework is a woman’s job was abandoned back in the 1950s. However, there’s a new generation of misogynistic influencers, such as Andrew Tate, that are pushing regressive gender roles to young men. These people prey on young men’s insecurities by teaching them that they can build themselves up by keeping women down.

A divorced 34-year-old father discovered that his 16-year-old son held these sexist beliefs and did everything he could, including using the talents of his ex-wife, to help stop his son’s misogynistic thinking. The father and son are in Germany and live together during the school week and the son lives with his mother on weekends.

“A few weeks ago, I was ironing me and my son's clothes and told him that I want to teach him how to do this, as I don't want him falling into the same mistake I did and never learning this on my own,” the father wrote. “He said he doesn't want to, and I just said he'll have to learn to do this at some point. He then said, ‘only failed men do stuff like this, and I won't be one of them.’”

The father was caught entirely off guard by the comment. “He said that it is his belief that this is a woman's job to do and that only simps do simple household chores,” the father wrote. “I told him that now he will have to choose his next words very carefully, but I said that he will learn household work whether he likes it or not.”

“If you think this is a woman's job, it's time for you to live with a woman,” he continued, asking him to pack his bags because he doesn’t have any “Andrew Tate bullsh*t” in his house. “He must've called his mom in the time I was packing as she called me as well,” he wrote. “She asked me what's going on, and I told her what happened. Surprisingly, she's on my side and has just asked me to drop him off at hers, and she'll help teaching him a lesson.”

teens, chores, sexismA father teachers his son a lesson. via Canva/Photos

Life hasn't been easy for the teen at his mother's house. He has to take public transportation 2 hours each way to get to school, and he has been going through a crash course in chores when he gets home. Two weeks after being sent to his mother's house, the boy called his father, beginning to come home, but the dad intends to keep him with his mother for another few weeks to reinforce the lesson.

“He WILL be getting a fixed chore schedule [when he returns], whether he likes it or not. No more coasting the easy life,” the father wrote.

The father’s decision comes after he learned a harsh lesson in equality himself. He and his ex-wife had their son when they were teenagers, and their parents forced her to stay at home while he worked. So when they spilt up 2 years ago, he had to learn a lot of new skills to take care of himself.

Still, after some friends said he was being hard on his son, the father began to second-guess his decision to send him to live with his mother. So, he asked a group of people on Reddit if he had done the right thing. They overwhelmingly supported his choice. They believed that the dad needed to nip the sexism in the bud and that learning household chores was essential for his son’s growth as a person and potential partner.

teens, chores, sexismA teen boy learning how to cook. via Canva/Photos

“You gave him an important reality check. These guys falling for this Andrew Tate crap need to learn, that’s what it is. Wait till they marry 2 or 3 times and don’t understand why the marriage breaks down,” one commenter wrote. “Pretty sick that so many men and boys think loving a woman makes them a ‘simp.’ And they sincerely wonder why they’re lonely,” another added.

“I don’t even know how to run a dishwasher because I’m such a MANLY man,” a commenter joked. “I can’t take care of myself; I’m utterly helpless. Just a widdle baby. Hell yeah, that’s masculine af. Right? Ladies?”

Some commenters also celebrated how the divorced parents partnered to teach the lesson. "You two may not have been right for one another as spouses, but you’re both amazing parents,” a commenter wrote. "This is one of the best examples of cohesive co-parenting I’ve heard of. Kudos to OP and his ex for both standing firm,” another added.

The parents were right to team up because their son’s attitude is a massive self-inflicted wound. It will affect his future relationships and make him incompetent because he doesn’t know how to care for himself. It’s hard to believe that influencers who claim to build men up are keeping them in a suspended state of immaturity.

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Culture

A guy definitively listed the 12 things that make men happy and it's 100% accurate

Guys literally only want one thing and it's a cool stick.

Nolan Reid / TikTok

There's an old joke slash meme that goes something like this:

"Guys literally only want one thing and it's disgusting."

Its used to imply, obviously, that men are shallow and crude creatures.

TikTok creator and simple-life advocate Nolan Reid, however, has a different idea of what men really want.


Nolan recently made a video about "Little things in life that make men happy."

The hilarious list includes:

  • A fridge full of beer.
  • Drinking said beer in the garage. With your dog. And a good buddy.
  • Finding a cool stick.
  • Kicking a rock.
  • Staring at water.
  • Dropping rocks into said water.

As a fellow man, I would say: Yeah. That pretty much covers it.

It really doesn't take much! Watch Nolan's full video to see the rest, and just appreciate how much joy and satisfaction he gets from these simple thing.

People loved Nolan's list – so much so that they began adding their own ideas of "simple things men love."

The video racked up hundreds of thousands of views across TikTok and Instagram.

One commenter wrote, "He just described my whole personality." Another added, "This guy gets it."

Others chimed in with their own additions to the list, like staring at a fire for hours. Or just peace and quiet.

But most of the nearly 200 comments were just people chiming in to say one thing:

"Hell yeah."

Finally, someone who understands us.

Nolan's ultra-relaxed vision of "masculinity" is honestly so refreshing.

Men on social media are usually bombarded with the Andrew Tates and Jordan Petersons of the world, influencers who constantly berate us to make more money, lose weight and add muscle, sleep with more women, take charge, relentlessly self-improve.

I like Nolan's much chiller idea of masculinity. It reminds me of being a kid, taking pleasure in the simple things, not racing to be anywhere, not trying to impress anyone or prove anything.

Nolan's entire account is a breath of fresh air, an antidote to hustle culture. His videos find joy in:

  • Breaking down cardboard boxes
  • Driving at sunset
  • Going fishing
  • Throwing a frisbee
  • Wearing t-shirts
A daily visit to his page is almost like a meditation. I highly recommend giving him a follow to add a little counterprogramming to your social media feed.

Nolan says in another recent video that he started making TikToks and Instagram reels just for fun, but discovered along the way that he was really passionate about the message.

"I never thought that my simple living and love for little things would resonate with so many of you."

He said he hopes to inspire people to "take a step back and enjoy the good simple things in life."

I suddenly have the urge to go chuck a rock into a river, so I would say: Mission Accomplished!

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Woman's viral posts about her dad's 'discussion agendas' are hilarious and inspiring

Packers football, family updates, and of course, General Discussion.

Photo by Giovanna Gomes on Unsplash

Kenzi Enright's dad, Riley, has been getting together with the same group of guys every Friday night for years.

Neither of them ever expected that the meetups, officially known as "Board Meetings," would eventually make them both Internet-famous.

One night in late 2022, Kenzi's dad invited her out with the boys and caught her off guard when he handed her a printed agenda full of discussion topics for the evening.

On deck for the night?

  • Jordan Love
  • World Cup
  • China and Russia
  • After Christmas party with the boys
  • and General Discussion

Kenzi found it so hilarious that she shared the agenda on Twitter, where it instantly went viral.

Some people found the structured approach to hanging out impressive, while others just thought the over-the-top dad vibes were adorable.

Kenzi began sharing the agendas almost every Friday — and has kept the gag going for nearly two years.

The formal discussion topics started as a joke.

Riley and his friends found a coaster at their bar table one night with some hard-to-read writing on it, and one of them joked that it must have been a previous group's agenda.

From there, the group began discussing their own agendas for the evening before meeting up, and soon, Riley was printing them out before each Board Meeting.

Sometimes the guys include little notes like "Please be on time, we have a lot to get through," or "Please take good notes." Sometimes there are guest speakers on the docket, including Kenzi.

After the initial laughs and virality wore off, Kenzi's dad and his friends found they actually liked having an agenda for their meetups. So they decided to keep it rolling.

By now, Kenzi has posted over 60 updates — with an audience of thousands eagerly awaiting each one!

The agendas may have started as a joke, but they serve an important purpose — and hold a valuable lesson.

"We found ourselves going down some rabbit holes. Political things and whatnot would get in the way, and life would get in the way of things," Riley told People.

"We found ourselves getting away from the fun and into kind of depressing things. So we made a vow to each other — no politics, no depressing things. We're just going to get together and have fun."

According to the agendas, The Board discusses a wide range of topics, from sports (the Green Bay Packers make a lot of appearances on the lists), to pop culture, to home repair, family, life updates, and more.

The gang has a lot of fun hamming up the discussion guides, but the fact that the joke has lasted this long is pretty amazing.

It's no secret that there's an epidemic of male loneliness in America. A 2021 survey found that a shocking 15 percent of men reported having no close friends.

The isolation is even more pronounced in younger generations, with a survey from 2023 discovering that a staggering 65% of men ages 18-23 agreed with the statement "No one really knows me well."

The same study found that 40% of all men surveyed showed depressive symptoms.

Guys everywhere can take a lesson from Riley and his friends, and from the commitment they show in getting together every single week and talking openly about real issues — something so many men struggle to do.

Your own Guy's Night Out may never go viral, but it might be a surprisingly important piece of your long-term mental health.

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They said no one would read a novel about dads — I wrote one anyway.

Nearly 80 percent of all books are bought by women

Evan Porter

The first time I sat down to write a fictional story (about 13 years ago), I wrote a screenplay jam-packed with stuff a 20-something year old guy thought was cool.

There was a bank heist gone wrong. Guns. Bad guys. Car chases. Explosions!

Since then I've become a father to two amazing girls, and for a long time my writing career was put on the backburner.

(Turns out, you suddenly have a lot less free time as a parent.)

But in early 2021, after many long months of COVID lockdown, I wanted to try writing something straight from the heart, something that better reflected who I am now — nostalgic, sentimental, both excited for and terrified of watching my girls grow up — and I wanted to try it as a novel.

So I came up with the idea of a bunch of dads trying (and hilariously struggling) to connect with their daughters at a weeklong summer camp retreat.

There was just one problem. 'Heartfelt novels by and about dudes' wasn't exactly a thriving literary genre.

There are plenty of books written by and mostly for men, of course.

But those are usually confined to genres like military or historical fiction, or SciFi. Basically, anything with weapons and/or spaceships and possibly murder.

Men also read somewhat prominently in biography and memoir.

But books about family and relationships and (gasp) love from a male perspective? That seemed to be fairly uncharted territory.

So where did that leave me and my idea to write a book that was funny and heartwarming and all about fatherhood?

I wasn't sure. But I knew the story I wanted to tell and I knew that I wanted to take great TV dads like Bandit from Bluey, Phil Dunphy from Modern Family, Carl Winslow from Family Matters, Alan Matthews from Boy Meets World and so many others — and see them represented on the page.

So I wrote the book anyway.


Holding an early draft of the manuscript in 2022Evan Porter

As I went along, I kept searching for more books like what I hoped to write. Generally, they were few and far between, but I was eventually heartened to find that they did exist.

Authors like Jonathan Tropper, Nick Hornby, Matthew Norman, and Richard Roper were doing amazing things in male-centered fiction that didn't involve guns and aliens, but rather focused on emotion and relationships and even romance.

Still, even with those guys blazing the trail, that didn't make things any easier when I started pitching my finished novel, Dad Camp, to literary agents.

A lot of them told me they just weren't sure what the market was for a book like mine. Who's going to read this? It seemed unfathomable that actual dads would read it, so surely it had to have crossover appeal to the childrens market, or it needed a strong romance element to draw in female readers.

Many even liked the story a lot but just didn't know how to pitch it to publishers.

It's easy to see why my book, Dad Camp, was a hard sell. Men just don't read in large enough numbers.

You can hardly go anywhere on the Internet without running into the "why don't men read" discourse.

That's because the facts are inescapable:

Around 80% of book sales come from women. Every study and survey and data set you can find shows that boys read less than girls starting in childhood and the gap only gets worse and worse as they get older.

Why don't men read more? Well, there are a lot of theories.

A lot of men report finding reading fiction to be a waste of time, that they have to be productive with their 'downtime' instead — which would explain why men are actually big readers of non-fiction, which is deemed more useful.

(Weirdly, that mindset doesn't seem to stop men from watching movies or television or spending tons of time gaming.)

Other theories say that men's brains just aren't wired as well for inhabiting the mind of different characters and empathizing with them.

And then there is the self-fulfilling prophecy of it all. Since men don't read, boys don't have as many good reading role models, and the cycle continues on and on.

The proven benefits of reading for men

Us dudes with our "linear thinking brains" like hard data, right? Well it's difficult to argue with the science behind reading fiction. It's extremely clear cut.

When you read fiction, you exercise your brain's Theory of Mind, or its ability to understand that other people are thinking and feelings and experiencing different things than you are.

People who read fiction frequently display more creativity, more empathy for others, and more skill in social relationships.

I'd like to see a non-fiction or self-help book that can achieve that.

And get this, some data even shows that readers live longer than non-readers!

So instead of spending a fortune on reducing your biological age and doing things like having young people's blood injected into your veins, just try picking up a $17.99 paperback novel.

In the end, I was lucky enough to find an agent and publisher that believed in Dad Camp as much as I did.

Novels on a bookshelfSeeing Dad Camp on shelves at the bookstore for the first time was a pretty special feelingEvan Porter

And I'm really excited that it's out there in the world finding its audience of, not just dads, but moms and daughters and anyone who knows or loves a dad.

One last point from my research that really stood out was that men are apparently extremely reluctant to pick up books from female authors — a perspective, you could argue, we desperately need!

I'd like to hope that, one day, my book could be something of a bridge, and show more men that it's actually good and fun to read about relationships and family and romance.

Once you cross that bridge, there's a whole world of amazing books and storytellers waiting for you — and the positive impact those stories have on your brain and well-being will be well worth the effort.

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