What compliment is not actually a compliment?

What compliment is not actually a compliment?

This one

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Every Mother’s Day or Women’s Day, I see this post flooding my social media pages.

While women and mothers deserve praise and recognition for what they go through to keep the houses beautiful and functioning, the fact this image is used to stereotype women (to an extent where any mother not acting like the one in the picture is shamelessly categorised as a ‘bad’ mother) is way too obtuse.

Let me give you an analogy.

Two friends finish shopping at a supermarket.

They prefer to walk to their house, one kilometer away.

One friend is carrying two bags of fruits, vegetables, oil bottles, coffee jar with her right hand and two bags of rice, salt, snacks and soft drink bottle with her left.

The other walks beside her, munching apple and keeps praising her all along the way— Oh my god, how are you able to carry all these! You must be really strong. Cha! I feel sad looking at you struggle. You are great. You deserve a treat.

So should she thank her friend for

Noticing her strength and praising her with such a nice compliment

or

Tell him that he is so insensitive that he doesn’t even know to share the load.

The situation shown in the picture above also follows the same logic.

When you praise a woman for coming back from work, going straight to kitchen, cleaning all the vegetables, chopping them and cooking dinner for the whole family, and then cleaning all their plates and the kitchen before going to bed and then share these kind of memes once a year to thank her super-strength and not bother to ask the man who comes back from work and watches TV relaxedly till dinner time and then goes to bed later on, it means that you are living in denial about the harsh reality and blindly taking forward what was conviniently considered as the norm.

It is not the case of woman being an all-rounder. It is a case of man who let the woman overwork and be over-burdened, over-stressed under the name of ‘feminine’ duties.

Women are trained to be okay with it and men think they are okay with it.

So, don’t just see it as a compliment.

All that glitters is not gold, Milord