"At Least I'm Not as Bad as That Dad!"

How men's social comparisons perpetuate the domestic status quo.

Have you ever noticed that men love to hear — and tell — stories about deadbeat dads? The husband who cheats on his wife; the father who doesn’t know how to use a washing machine; the guy who gets mad at his wife if the house isn’t spotless. Their reaction is rarely horror or disgust or “God, what a dick!” — but rather, something along the lines of:

“See, I’m not so bad, right?”

“Look! I’m an angel in comparison.”

“Aren’t you glad you married me?”

I know, I know; #notallmen. But if I had a dime for every time I heard a friend laugh/vent about their husband comparing himself to a bad apple to make himself look good, well, I wouldn’t need any paid subscribers.

Recently, my friends and I were talking about this phenomenon, and I couldn’t help but notice that women rarely make these comparisons. Yes, moms are often judgy about other moms, but we don’t usually judge ourselves against the worst of the worst and say “Hey, at least I’m not that bad!” (If anything, as I’ll discuss in a minute, we do the opposite: We see the Momfluencers on Instagram looking perfect while seemingly doing it all, and we feel like shit in comparison.)

I was fascinated by this discrepancy and wondered if there was any research on the issue. So I reached out to Harvard sociologist Allison Daminger, who studies gender inequality within families and writes the excellent Substack The Daminger Dispatch. “You're definitely identifying something real here,” she told me. “You can come to very different conclusions about your contributions to a household depending on who you are comparing yourself to.” Today I’m going to talk about the research on this phenomenon, which, frankly, blew my mind.