Wash It Yourself
Turns out housework is heroic. Magical. But not IRL - funny how that works.
Here is the climax of one of the great fairy tale epics. A woman travels to the ends of the earth, bargains with the four winds, gives away every treasure she owns, and breaks a witch’s curse.
How does she break it?
She does the fucking laundry.
That’s it. That’s the ending. A prince is trapped, a whole castle of trolls stands between him and freedom, and the thing that saves him is a woman who can get three grease stains out of a shirt.
Nobody can do it. Not the troll princess. Not the troll queen. Not the entire troll court scrubbing away. The shirt just gets blacker.
Then the poor girl dips it once, and it goes white as snow.
She wins because she knows how to wash. And nobody else does.
⚠️ Trigger Warning
This essay discusses domestic labour, invisible work, and the way women’s competence gets dismissed and exploited. If you are carrying an unfair load at home and feeling unseen, read with care.
The story is called East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It’s Norwegian, old, and it’s basically Beauty and the Beast’s tougher older sister. (Yeah I didn’t know that one could exist. Especially after writing Beauty and the Beast before.)
Let me walk you through Beauty and the Beast’s tougher older sister.. because the whole point is in the parts we don’t remember.
A poor family. A white bear shows up and offers to make them rich if they hand over the youngest, prettiest daughter. She doesn’t want to go. They send her anyway. (Sold for the household income - of course. We have met this girl before.)
She lives in the bears castle. Every night, in the dark, a man comes and lies beside her. She never sees his face. She is not allowed to.
She gets homesick, visits her family, and her mother fills her head with doubt. Light a candle. See what is really in your bed. So she does. She finds a beautiful man, leans in, and drips three drops of tallow on his shirt.
He wakes up. And he’s furious. Not because she looked. Because she looked too soon.
Turns out he’s a cursed prince. One more year and he’d have been free. But now? Now he has to go marry a troll princess in a castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon. The impossible place. The place that isn’t on any map.
And then he is gone.
So what does she do?
She goes after him.
Not metaphorically. She walks out the door and crosses the entire world.
She climbs mountains. She finds three old women who each give her a golden treasure. She goes to the East Wind, who can’t help, who sends her to the West Wind, who sends her to the South Wind, who sends her to the North Wind. The North Wind blows so hard carrying her to the impossible place that he nearly dies doing it and has to rest for days afterward.
She did that. Alone. On foot and on the backs of the winds. To save a man.
Let that sit for a second, because this is the part the story treats like a footnote and it’s the most epic quest in the whole canon.
She crossed the world. Then she gets there.
And here is where it gets good, and by good I mean infuriating.
She uses her three golden treasures to buy three nights with the prince. The troll princess agrees, takes the gold, and then drugs the prince with a sleeping potion so he won’t wake up.
So for two nights, she sits beside the man she crossed the world for, weeping, begging him to wake, and he sleeps through it. Drugged, sure. But he sleeps through it.
She does everything. He naps.
On the third night, some prisoners in the castle tell him what’s been happening. So he finally, FINALLY, does one thing: he doesn’t drink the potion. He stays awake. (cough cough.. Big moment. Round of fucking applause.)
And his master plan, his one contribution to his own rescue?
He announces a damn laundry contest.
Yeah.. you heard that right.. and yeah.. I need you to really hear this.
The prince’s brilliant scheme to free himself is to say he will only marry the woman who can wash the three tallow stains out of his shirt. He knows the trolls can’t do it. He knows SHE can.
So the trolls line up. The long-nosed princess scrubs. The shirt gets blacker. Her mother grabs it. Blacker still. The whole troll court has a go. By the end the shirt looks like it’s been up a chimney.
Then the girl steps in. One dip. White as driven snow.
Curse broken. Trolls explode with rage. Prince freed. They take all the treasure and fly away.
The end.
She bent the four winds. He picked the right woman for the wash cycle.
And we call it his curse, his story, his happy ending.
And what nobody says about this story?
Every single decisive thing is done by her. She is sold. She is blamed for the curse breaking. She crosses the world. She finds the help. She pays for the access. She does the weeping, the searching, the surviving. And then she does the thing that actually breaks the spell.
He is asleep for most of his own rescue?!?!?
This is not a love story about a cursed prince.
It is an epic about a woman who walked off the edge of the map and won!!!
We just filed it under romance and forgot the quest.
Sound familiar? The woman does the work. The man gets the ending. And history calls it his.
I sat there reading this whole story and went from “huh, interesting” this might be a great story to decipher to “oh holy fucking shit, I’m going to be thinking about this all week!”
Look at WHAT wins the day.
Not a sword. Not magic she happens to have. Laundry. Fucking damn laundry.
The trolls can’t wash a shirt because they have never had to. They are nobility. They have never scrubbed a stain in their lives.
The poor girl wins precisely because she is poor.
Because she has spent her whole life doing the work that keeps a household running.
The invisible, unpaid, unglamorous work that everyone needs done and nobody calls a skill.
Her “magic” is competence. Hard-won, daily, ground-into-her-hands competence. The kind we have spent centuries refusing to count as competence at all, specifically because women do it.
The thing that is invisible because women do it is the exact thing that saves the prince.
And the story knows. It just doesn’t say it out loud. So I will. (while looking at my own pile of laundry I need to do. Asked my husband to do it out of protest.)
Let’s talk about the trolls who couldn’t wash the shirt.
In the fairy tale, their failure is real. They never learned. Fine.
But play it forward to right now, to this exact cultural moment, and the trolls scrubbing a shirt stained and more stained turns into something every woman watching has finally got a name for.
Weaponised incompetence.
If you haven’t heard the term, here it is:
Weaponised incompetence is when someone pretends to be bad at a task, or does it so badly on purpose, that you stop asking them to do it and just do it yourself. It is not real inability.
It’s a performance of inability. A strategy. Fail loudly enough and the work boomerangs right back to the person who was always going to do it anyway.
The term went viral. Tens of millions of posts. And women everywhere had the same reaction: oh my god, there is a NAME for it.
There is the famous one. A busy wife asks her husband to wash the potatoes. He washes them with dish soap. Then turns to her with total confidence and asks, “Palmolive’s good for potatoes, right?” She sighs, takes over, does it herself. He looks at the camera. Satisfied. (yeah that one made me want to through my phone at the wall.)
The shirt gets more stained. She takes it back. He is satisfied.
That is the move? He is not a troll who never learned. He is a man who learned that failing on purpose is cheaper than helping.
So you might think.. “Jen.. what does this fairy tale have to do with a husband washing a potato with dish soap?” Well…
In both, women’s work is the thing that has to get done. In both, the people who don’t do it (the trolls - weaponised strategically by the prince, the husband washing potatoes in Palmolive) make a great show of being unable. And in both, the woman steps in, does it flawlessly, and proves exactly what we already knew. She is the one who is good at it. She was always the one who was good at it. Because she had to.
But watch what the story does with that.
In the fairy tale, her competence makes her the hero. She wins the prince, breaks the curse, gets the castle.
In real life, that same competence becomes the trap. Because if you are the one who is good at the laundry, the dishes, the calendar, the birthdays, the doctor’s appointments, the emotional temperature of the entire household, then guess who keeps doing all of it. Forever. You are so good at it, after all. It would be silly for him to even try. (Oh so silly.. right.)
The same skill that crowns her in the story is the leash in real life.
She washes the shirt once and becomes a princess. You wash it once and become the person who washes it for the next forty years.
This is why naming it matters so much. This is why a clunky little phrase like “weaponised incompetence” lit up millions of screens.
Because for generations, women were handed this exact setup and told it was just how things are. He is just no good at that stuff. She is just naturally better at it. Bless him, he tries.
No. NO. Just fucking NO!
He is not bad at it. He is choosing to look bad at it so it stays your job.
And the second you have a name for the thing, you can see it. And the second you can see it, you can refuse it!
That is the whole reason I do this. Naming the lie is how you stop living inside it.
So let me rewrite the moral, because the fairy tale won’t. And I at least want to try!
Your competence is not a life sentence! You hear me?
Your competence is not a life sentence!
Being good at something is not the same as being obligated to do it forever. You are allowed to be brilliant at the wash and still hand him the basket. You are allowed to know exactly how the dishwasher loads and let him figure it out, badly, for as long as it takes. You are allowed to let the shirt stay dirty.
The girl in the story crossed the world, summoned the winds, and broke a curse that trapped a prince.
And the story handed her a man who slept through it as her reward.
You don’t have to take that deal. (You shouldn’t)
When he tells you he just can’t do it, that you are so much better at it, that he would only mess it up, hear it for what it is.
It’s not a compliment. It’s a job offer you never have to accept.
Put the shirt down.
Wash it yourself? No.
Let him.
Until next week,
Name the incompetence. Drop the basket. Let his shirt stay dirty.
– Jen
Credit: all illustrations used are liga-marta on deviantART for East of the Sun, West of the Moon (or, as you may know it in the US - The Polar Bear King)
!! If You Need Support !!
If this piece stirred something, if you are carrying a load at home that no one sees, drowning in invisible work, or feeling like the more capable you are the more you get handed, please know you’re not alone.
Crisis & Emotional Support
Crisis Text Line (US/UK/CA): Text HOME to 741741
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RAINN (US): 1-800-656-HOPE (4673)
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Women’s Aid (UK): https://www.womensaid.org.uk
Therapy Resources
Therapy for Black Girls: https://therapyforblackgirls.com
Inclusive Therapists: https://www.inclusivetherapists.com
Your work is real work. Your competence is not a contract. The fact that you are good at it does not mean it has to be yours.
This brings back the term, a man will only do what you allow. When their is an unfamiliar issue with his car, he takes the time to figure it out. If not, he takes the car to the mechanic to get a further diagnostic. Men are problem solvers, to weaponize domestic labor or anything he does not want to do is manipulation. Women need to stop acting like his mom and start making these be an equal participate in the partnership. Great essay Jen. 👌
Thank you for this story, and for all of your insight.