YESTERDAY, COMEDIAN KEVIN Hart uploaded a video of himself changing his one-month-old baby’s nappy.
“Daddy did that!” Hart proudly exclaimed as he pointed to a soiled nappy and disposed of it in some fancy contraption known as a “diaper genie”.
Since welcoming his son in November, Kevin Hart has spoken quite a lot about changing nappies. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, he claimed that he had never changed a nappy despite having three children.
I have not changed a diaper. I’m around when the diaper is being changed, which makes me a part of the process within the moment. All you have to do is find other stuff to do while it’s going down to keep you busy. That’s all.
A few weeks later, Hart revised his story and told Mario Lopez that he had changed his two older children’s nappies, but had yet to do so on his newborn son.
Oh, no. Not on my new baby. Not on Kenzo — on my older babies I did and I had tough times doing it. With a newborn it’s very tough, they’re fragile, they need a mother’s touch; that’s not a father’s time, so I said, ‘Don’t tag me in ’til me and the baby are on terms of ‘Stop!’ and he can listen to that; I don’t want to deal with that new, new.
Hart later brushed off the latter comments as a joke. Nonetheless the comedian is just the latest in a long line of famous men who have boasted about not changing their children’s nappies.
In June, Pharrell Williams announced that he was not changing his triplets’ nappies and instead leaving that to his wife. But hey, he likened her to “SEAL Team Six”!
Simon Cowell once stated that wouldn’t change a nappy for less than ten grand.
Eddie Murphy previously said that he doesn’t change nappies because he feared he would be no good at it. It’s not laziness – it’s just a confidence thing!
Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg stated this year that he had never once changed a nappy despite having six children. Like Murphy, he cited incompetency as the reason for not performing this most basic of parental tasks.
The list of men who have publicly stated they don’t change nappies goes on and on – Prince Charles, Donald Trump, Matthew McConaughey, Will Ferrell, Gavin Rossdale.
Imagine for one second what would happen if, say, Anne Hathaway came out and said she doesn’t change nappies because (a) she’s not good at it and (b) it actually disgusts her. She would be pilloried and rightly so.
Yet people barely bat an eyelid when a famous man comes out and says he doesn’t change nappies. He can make an excuse like, “Oh, I’d just make even more of a mess,” and get off scot-free. He can offer condescending praise to women in order to shirk his responsibilities. “Women are incredible,” he’ll say. “I could never in a million years do that.”
Remember when you were a kid and didn’t want to wash up so you’d try to convince your younger, more gullible sibling that washing dishes was brilliant fun? It’s a little like that.
Changing nappies is part and parcel of being a parent. It’s tedious, it’s not glamorous, but literally everybody has to do it. Hell, there are literal children who can do it!
When someone admits that they don’t do it, it’s not only highly embarrassing but it also indicates that they probably hold some pretty archaic views about what a father’s role ought to be.
It suggests that they think changing nappies is a woman’s work, and plays into the stereotype that Dads are bumbling idiots incapable of figuring out how to use detergent or cooking a pizza without setting the house on fire.
This, of course, isn’t true. Tons of Dads play a hands-on role when it comes to raising their children – as they should.
But we still live in a world where it’s headline news that George Clooney is a “very good diaper guy”.
Again, picture a world where, like, Julia Roberts reveals that she’s “a very good diaper gal”.
Mothers never get credit for fulfilling their most basic parental duties because it’s taken for granted that they’ll do it with a smile on their face. But when a man says that he gets up in the middle of the night or changes nappies, he’s treated as some kind of progressive model parent. It’s this mindset that permits men to say they’re on “babysitting duty” when they’re looking after their own child.
“Isn’t he very good?” Sure, but he’s also just doing what mothers do all the damn time.
So good on Kevin Hart for changing his child’s nappy, but let’s hope there’ll come a day where that won’t be headline news or merit a pat on the back.
