I came across a TikTok from The Cut, featuring writer Angeline Chapin talking about her article on women funding their boyfriends’ lives. These women are out here making more money than their boyfriends, picking up after them, teaching them how to cook, and helping them build resumes and land jobs.
What the actual fuck.
Chapin frames this as a Gen Z problem. It’s not. This is happening across every generation still bowing to the patriarchy, still coddling men who take everything and give the bare minimum in return. A drone doesn’t build the hive. A drone just feeds off it.
How Can a Man Lead When He Can’t Run His Own Life?
Ask yourself that. A man who cannot operate his own life without a woman doing it for him is not a leader. He’s a dependent. The patriarchy set these boys up to fail at the one thing it claims to prepare them for: standing on their own.
Patriarchy doesn’t build men. It coddles boys and calls it strength.
Blame the Parents
This starts at home. Parents raise daughters to take care of the village. They raise sons to be taken care of by it. Daughters learn to cook, clean, plan, manage, and carry. Sons learn that someone else will always handle it.
That is not raising a leader. That is raising a liability and handing him off to the next woman in line.
Blame the Women Who Keep Doing It Too
And yes, I’m calling out women here too. Every woman who stays with a drone and does his laundry, fixes his resume, and manages his emotional life while getting nothing back is confirming the deal. She’s telling him, and every man watching, that this is how it works. That a woman’s love comes with a full-service upgrade to manhood, free of charge, no reciprocity required.
It is not a woman’s job to raise a man into a functioning, responsible adult. That job was already assigned. It was assigned to his parents. If they didn’t finish it, that’s not your homework to complete.
The Part That Really Doesn’t Add Up
Here’s what’s confusing. If the patriarchy is supposedly built for men, why are so many of them still struggling to make ends meet? Women are earning more than we did decades ago, sure. But men still out earn women on average.
So the system is still stacked in their favor. And they’re still coming up short. And somehow it’s still the girlfriend’s job to close the gap.
Something is not adding up, and it’s not our math.
Bottom Line
Stop raising boyfriends. Stop mothering men who should have learned this before you ever met them. A worker bee builds her own life and chooses a partner who builds alongside her, not one she has to carry.
If he can’t function without you, he’s not your man. He’s your project. And you didn’t sign up to be anyone’s mother twice.
By the way, is your man a drone? Take the quiz here.
