Men have red sock treachery down to a science, so much so that it is not even clear how the technique is communicated. Perhaps this is proof of the Gaea theory: we all just know the trick. Women often have men sized up fairly well in their wanderings from the truth but red sock treachery works against women’s strong suit of superiority in household matters.
It is really simple, though women seem blind to it.
You are a man, in a domestic relationship with a woman, and early on, within the first year, say, she asks you to take care of the laundry. You may in fact do a credible job at first, but that is just a smoke screen. Comes the inevitable day when you will put that red sock in the white load. If you are brave and smart, there will be a favorite garment, of hers of course, in the load. This garment is both financially and emotionally valuable. By the time the load is done, it is ruined, she is inconsolable and furious. You feel terrible, you may even help get another to the point of going shopping with her.
But your treachery is successful: you will never be trusted to do the laundry again.
Sure, this is not universally true, but if women only knew how widespread it is they would realize that men used jujitsu on them and they fell for it. Naturally, woman surmise, men can’t figure this sort of thing out. It’s beyond us. Of course we are idiots and women have to protect their clothes by doing the laundry themselves. The fact that men are perfectly capable of sorting out complex combinations of goods, when mixing them up would lead to disaster, is entirely ignored. Does it not occur to women that men sort all kinds of things into all sorts of complex arrangements and never get them mixed up?
We just don’t want to do the laundry and you do. We don’t care, and you do. We don’t really mind if our T shirts and underwear are purple or red. You think we are stupid. Fine with me. If we are so stupid how come we never ask you to change the oil in the car? Because we like doing it. If we get tired of doing it we’ll take it somewhere and pay some other guy to do it and talk about oil with him for a while. It’s interesting. Delicate cycle is not interesting.