Thread by @polotek

I really don’t wanna have an opinion on “bean dad”. Bu I don’t think I can avoid it, so here we go. A few thoughts.

1) I didn’t believe the story as written. The guy is a writer and clearly wanted it to seem dramatic and entertaining. There are probably many embellishments.

2) A lot of people are honing in on the fact that the kid didn’t eat for 6 plus hours. I think there is a big difference between kids that are food insecure going hungry and someone’s who’s well taken care of not eating for a while.

And again, I believe the story was embellished

3) What strikes me is not that there’s a problem with using a can opener as a “teachable moment” (I will never forgive Obama for saddling us with this). My problem is with the way this man, and many men, decide what “learning” has to look like.

It wasn’t about the can opener. It was about resilience and critical-thinking. I get that. But as many people dunking on this guy have pointed out, this is not a good way to teach those things. And yet so many men have been taught that it is.

There are tons of men piling into his mentions to support his “parenting”. And we can see clearly how this kind of patriarchal dysfunction is perpetuated.

They “teach” someone by withholding information and watching over them paternalistically as they struggle to develop from first principles something that should be easy and free. This is one of the ways men, and white men in particular, continually create the world we live in.

These men get things easily and for free *all the fucking time*. They rarely have to struggle or develop things from first principles. But they have developed this fiction in their heads that it’s how things *should* work. And they project it onto everyone else. All the time.

Men like to make everyone around them work harder than they did to get the same outcomes. They tell us they’re doing us a favor. They expect us to be grateful. And the whole experience is one entirely fabricated by them rather than being representative of how the world works.

Let me try to be more clear. I’m trying to get at something really important. These “dads” think getting information for free is “lazy”. They think it’s “valuable” to toil and struggle to figure things out that have already been figured out. Even though that is not *their* life.

It is this ideology and it’s pervasiveness that has a profound impact on our society. The reason we have to be so resilient and to be prepared to figure it out on your own is precisely because these “dads” work to *ensure* that this is how the world works. They make it so.

There’s a reason I couldn’t resist commenting on this even though I really tried. It was such a clear illustration of how things don’t have to be this way. The world doesn’t have to be harsh and unforgiving. It’s the choices that people make every day that turn it into that.

Teach your daughter to use a fucking can opener. Teach her that this is something we can take for granted because of the boundless ingenuity of human potential. Then teach her that she should find her own ways to contribute to human progress to make other people’s lives better.