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Just following up on my earlier post, Domestic Experience and Being Taken for Granted: It’s Not a Gender Thing, It’s Situational, the other, obvious thing is that it’s all my side of the story.*

Because if I would say the floor is not a closet my partner would say the dining room table (where I work) is not a recycling bin. And if I groused out loud to my children about them not liking the lunches I make them to take to school, my children would suggest they’d make lunches for themselves if I didn’t crab so much about the mess. And so on. And my children and partner would all probably say that when I’m not cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing their homework and/or computer time, or snuggling them at bedtime I’m nose-deep in a book, or laptop, or a musical instrument.

The point here is that we all have visions of how our lives are supposed to be, and part of that vision includes the roles we take on, the tasks we see as needed, and our understanding of how people around us to perceive what we do.**

In other words we don’t just stereotype other people we stereotype ourselves.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with stereotyping, by the way — our brains would slow to a crawl if we had to look at every instance of every thing as completely unique and previously unencountered. What is wrong, though, or at least unproductive, is to mistake our stereotypes for reality and either forget to examine and update them when reality conflicts with them… or, worse, to ask reality to adjust to our stereotypes. Including, our stereotypes of ourselves.

* By the way, no, I wasn’t prompted to mention this. :-)
** The Two Rules of Desire and the whole no-sex class thing work this way. Our expectations of how the world works condition us to miss cues that are given, and see cues that are not. Hilarity rarely ensues.