If you spend enough time on parenting, relationship, or conflict resolution forums, you’re sure to see your share of stories about boyfriends and husbands simply not cutting it around the house.
Whether they’re undervaluing the work that stay-at-home moms do, intentionally failing to pull their weight, or not taking their partner’s most vulnerable moments seriously, there seem to be a lot of guys out there that make pretty poor romantic partners.
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So when the folks who don’t engage in these kinds of behaviors get some attention, they can sometimes find that others have set the bar so low for them that they seem downright heroic by comparison.
And that effect is hardly lost on one mom who noticed a pretty wide gulf between the expectations people have for her and those of her husband.
Be advised that the video featured in this article contains explicit language.
On Halloween, Chloe Sexton of Memphis, Tennessee uploaded a TikTok examining what she described as “daddy privilege.”
In it, she lays the foundation for her point by explaining that while her husband has a job, she owns a bakery.
As part of her role as a business owner, she goes to to purchase about 400 pounds of flour and 100 pounds of butter from the Restaurant Depot every week.
And whether this occurred when she was in the advanced stages of pregnancy or when she actually has her baby strapped to her like in this picture, she’s been known to carry all of these 100 pound bags herself.
But one week, Sexton’s husband had the day off and decided to pick her ingredients up for her with the baby strapped to him.
And while it was nice of him to take care of that for her, the reception he got went significantly deeper than that.
As Sexton said, “When I tell you the way that this man was treated like a hero.”
By that, she meant that multiple strangers would commend him for working so hard and carrying a “whole-ass” baby while he lugs flour around.
But at the same time, nobody batted an eye when Sexton did exactly the same thing week after week leading up to that day.
And as she explained, this included people who actually knew who she was or who recognized her from TikTok.
In her words, “I’m getting a whole lot of ‘nothing to see here, just a woman doing woman things, busting her ass.'”
So as Sexton sees it, the concept of “daddy privilege” comes down to how differently male and female parents are perceived for doing the same job.
As she put it, “He’s not a hero. He’s literally just a father, just a parent doing the same [expletive] I do every week.”
