What is Weaponized Incompetence?

Weaponized incompetence is one of the new terms that people started to use especially on TikTok. Weaponized incompetence is named after spotting a certain behavioral pattern seen predominantly in men. It means pretending to be purposefully lacking and incompetent at something to avoid doing even simple tasks and responsibilities.

It is weaponized because men systematically and intentionally pretend to be bad at their supposed shared responsibilities such as common household chores, resulting in their partner being frustrated at the sloppy job and doing it themselves. According to some psychologists, this is a manipulation tactic. Because women are strategically convinced that their partners are bad at doing chores and take the physical and mental workload on themselves.

We can list many examples of this common behavior. Think about such a scenario: You are almost always in charge of the house chores, but are feeling tired today and asked your partner to wash the dishes for once. He reluctantly agrees, and you go to bed. The next they when you go to the kitchen, you see a mess on the counter and that the dishes are not properly washed at all. Now you have to do the job yourself. After asking simple things like this and seeing the result being always bad, you stop asking your partner to do chores and shoulder the responsibilities on yourself. This way, men in the relationship avoid doing chores.

In popular culture, we can see the reflections of this patriarchal idea that men are often incompetent at house chores. It is often played as a joke in the movies and series how the father of the house doesn't know the basic information about their children and makes a mess in the house once left alone.

It is important to spot these types of problematic behaviors that society accepts. Maybe next time you ask your partner to do something and after seeing that they do a bad job, instead of determining that they are incompetent and shouldering the responsibilities on your shoulders, allow them to do however the result is. The key point is to make them understand that they cannot avoid their responsibilities through this performative incompetence.