>"a good portion of domestic work is thankless and uninteresting"
>"we obviously don't mind being made fun of for our incompetence at things we don't want to do in the first place."
This reminds me of the "protective incompetence" that paul graham talks about in "How to Start a Startup" (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html):
People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.
To be fair, Paul is far from the first to make such an observation. It has long been called strategic incompetence and is a very common behavior to avoid doing something you don't want to do.
>"we obviously don't mind being made fun of for our incompetence at things we don't want to do in the first place."
This reminds me of the "protective incompetence" that paul graham talks about in "How to Start a Startup" (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html):
People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.