Taking out the trash

I grew up in Southeastern Virginia.  When it was time for me to fly the coop as a young man, I went north to live. At age twenty-five, I settled in New York City. Like most sons and daughters, from time to time I would go home to visit.  I'd never had the best of relationships with my father.  We were not close.  Nevertheless, I came to visit.  He and my mother had divorced long ago, and he'd remarried and started a second family. It's too complicated and lengthy to go into our strained relationship, but there is one aspect of it that bears on this story. 
My father was one of those fathers who wanted to dominate. He was the man in the house. I was not the man in the house.  Instead of edging me toward manhood and my own way of encountering the world, he tried to maintain strict dominance.
But when I left, what was he going to to? I was earning my own money, paying my own bills, making my own decisions.
When I came home, though, he would wrest that independence from me, or try to. One of the ways he did this was by making me take out the trash. Now, what's wrong with that? Nothing--ostensibly.  But in reality, combined with a lack of interest in what I did and with no conversation with me on an adult, man-to-man level, it became a way for him to reassert domination. Throw in a pinch of humiliation for good measure.
"Take out the trash," he would say.  "Put it in the green container, not the gray one."
Now, here's the funny thing.  I came to realize that this behavior is common to men who want to assert their authority.  It is not unique to my father. It happened all over again when I was married.  When my wife and and I used to visit her parents for the weekend.  My in-laws were pleasant enough, and when my wife and I had a child, they were magnificent toward my daughter. The simple fact is, though, that my father-in-law had no interest in me whatsoever.  He usually ignored me.
Except when it was time to take out the trash.  That was my job.  That was the most direct communication we had.
Again, what's wrong with that?  Not the end of the world.  Why not pitch in and not even think twice about it?  Why make such a big deal about it?
Because it wasn't about pitching in.  It was about hierarchy, about pecking order, about who's the man here, about, "I can make you take out the trash if I want to.  And I want to." 
The fact is that I never thought about it unless I was there, having to do it.  I usually had a small flush of humiliation at being ordered to do this janitorial task.  I did it, though.  It took just a minute, then it was done.  But it was the fact that these men could make me do this--at age twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty--whenever they wanted, that made me bristle.  And that, ultimately, even though the trash indeed did need taking out, they weren't ordering me to take it out for that reason.  They were telling me to do it because they could.  I got weary of that silverback stuff.
To the sons out there, has this happened to you?  And to the daughters, is there the equivalent for you?