Awhile back someone sent me a very intresting read I want to share with you ladies, its long so I will be posting a chapter a day for your reading pleasure. Its from a discussion on my favorite group on the net,people posted replies and a member condensed it into a book. Here goes Part 1.
The original post first then come the relevant replies compilation.
[SIZE=6]“Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor
July 15, 2015 2:38 PM [/SIZE]
Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.
posted by sciatrix (2113 comments total) 1019 users marked this as a favorite
I . D E F I N I N G EL
A. The overhead of caring
I often talk about emotional labor as being the work of caring. And it’s not just being caring, it’s that thing where someone says “I’ll clean if you just tell me what to clean!” because they don’t want to do the mental work of figuring it out. Caring about all the moving parts required to feed the occupants at dinnertime, caring about social management. Caring about noticing that something has changed - like, it’s not there anymore, or it’s on fire, or it’s broken.
It’s a substantial amount of overhead, having to care about everything. It ought to be a shared burden, but half the planet is socialized to trick other people into doing more of the work.
posted by Lyn Never at 4:33 PM on July 15
B. The full weight of a double-standard
…[This thread] also made me think about my Dad, and how he is good at emotional labour, and when he and my Mum split up when we were small he visited us every week and took us all weekend every weekend without fail and took us on holidays every year with no other adults. I’ve always been really proud of him for that, especially as he is from an older generation and would have been brought up in a very traditional role. But I remember how people would say how good he was - and he was, he learned to cook for us for example - but I don’t remember anyone saying that about my Mum, who had us the rest of the time. Because, hey, that was her job. I’m still grateful to my Dad because he’s probably why I’ve only ever been in relationships with good guys who can really listen (he’s a great listener) and don’t have some idea about what constitutes “women’s work”, but again it brings into relief the difference between what is expected of women and why men get cookies for doing the same thing.
posted by billiebee at 7:18 AM on July 22
C. There are no gnomes!
To quote the late great Douglas Adams: “An SEP [Somebody Else’s Problem field] is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem… The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye… it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” You see that you just used the last of the toilet paper (you’re not dumb). Your brain registers that this is a problem. But it’s not an immediate problem, and it’s a problem for the hypothetical next person, not for you. So you file it away into a SEP, probably with half your brain saying “yeah, I’ll grab another roll and put it on when I finish,” and part of your brain going “and if I forget to do it, the next person will get it, what’s the big deal, it’s just grabbing a roll of toilet paper.” Now obviously, I actually do change the damn toilet paper - even if I’m only in there to use the sink and wasn’t the one who used the last of the paper - because the next person in my house on that toilet will not be a hypothetical person, it will be a real person and most likely a person I love. And I do it at work because I dunno, Kant’s Categorical Imperative plus it’s the right thing to do – even though some
weeks it seems I am the only woman at my workplace who ever does so (WTF - but it’s more proof, I think, that this really isn’t a cut-and-dried men vs. women thing).
I think the thinking really is as simple as “I am bad at X, other people are good at X, therefore I will leave X to them.” Which often is accompanied by the assumption that people who are good at X actually enjoy it. Which is possibly true for some people, and some variations of X. But when I ask my son to help empty the dishwasher or some other chore and he responds “I don’t want to,” or “I don’t feel like it,” my response is always, ALWAYS, “Nobody likes it. But it has to get done.” To me that is the insidious thinking that has to be overcome – that somewhere out there is the Helping Fairy who enjoys washing dishes and cleaning up pee and making sure there’s always milk in the fridge, and who rushes in to do so because it’s fun for her.
posted by Mchelly at 3:23 PM on July 21
I. DE F I N I N G EL
D. Getting the meal and the calm is male privilege
At some point I realized I was being a huge nag about dinner, because I cooked dinner every night, because when my boyfriend cooked dinner it took forever (see: not cooking for himself his whole life) and we were dieting and I didn’t want to eat snacks all evening waiting for dinner to be done at 9:00 o’clock. Then I realized hey-- I can just let go. I can ask him to make dinner, and I can eat a peanut butter sandwich or something, and save my leftovers for lunch the next day. It was a great revelation in terms of my personal mental health-- I got fed, I didn’t have to always be the cook, and I didn’t have to be mad at my boyfriend. But even in that situation I was just saying, “hey, if I completely let go and eat like a kindergartener, I don’t have to be mad at my boyfriend!” It’s just so sad that that’s the solution. I don’t get a warm, homecooked meal at a regular dinner time. That’s not how heterosexual reciprocity works. I get a peanut butter sandwich and “peace of mind” (i.e., freedom from domestic/emotional labor). Getting the homecooked meal and the
freedom from emotional labor is male privilege.
I love him very much, but I don’t think he bought Christmas or birthday presents for his family until he met me and realized that I (and all my sisters) did that. So he’s actually a really good guy in the sense that he wants to do that labor and be helpful and kind. But even the best kind of guy didn’t have it beaten into him since he was a kid and I feel like we’re lightyears apart in that sense.
Anyway, this thread is sooooo excellent.
posted by easter queen at 10:09 AM on July 16
E. Even many good men don’t understand: they don’t have to
…But I think the point I wanted to make (and which other women in this thread have made much more eloquently and less rantily than me) is that my partner is in almost every other area a legitimately fantastic feminist ally. He gets it. He takes action in many ways, large and small, to make the world a more humane and equitable place for women. He is wonderful, and I love him. But he does not understand the value of emotional labour, because he has never had to do it except when by choice, and he does not understand the consequences of neglecting that labour, because he is not the one who suffers them. He is not a monster. He is not a boor. He is insightful and proactive about many feminist issues.
But he is deeply and willfully blind in this area. He (like many men) is convinced that engaging in an emotional economy is voluntary, because for him it always has been.
posted by [username] at 8:16 AM on July 16
F. When will we have earned a turn?
How much of this labor has a woman got to pay out before dudes will do anything in return? Seriously, what’s the price? Because we’ve been doing this shit all our lives, yet we’ve never saved up enough goodwill to have our needs acknowledged. We’ve asked politely and waited patiently, but we’re made out to be the bad guys
for even bringing it up.
posted by gueneverey at 10:29 AM on July 20
G. My heart just falls
Count me in as someone who loves doing emotional labor if it’s acknowledged. But omg, maybe one of the saddest things ever for me in relationships is when I do something and put a lot of effort into it and am so excited to do so because I just know it will make my partner feel so happy and loved - to do all that and then have the recipient literally not even notice or not say one word about it - omg. My heart just falls. I mean, it’s like I can almost feel it falling. It makes me SO sad. This is also a big trope in movies. The wife who goes out of her way to make herself look nice or make a nice dinner and set the table or whatever, and she’s so excited at the expectation of his reaction, and the husband just sweeps in and doesn’t even see it and you see the wife’s face fall. That never, ever fails to make me tear up. I’m tearing up just thinking about it. I don’t know why this thing in particular makes me so sad, but it really, really does. It’s just so hurtful.
posted by triggerfinger at 1:51 PM on July 21