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How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

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Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#171

Post by OmeCommentLeft »

Oh goodie, another opportunity to:

- prove my virtue by coming to the rescue of the modern vestal virgin

- prove my evilness by not demonizing men

- put my job at risk for speaking because someone who knows a Silicon Valley community manager who will forward them my information because of my failure to comply to their ideological norms

This author is a joke, HN is a joke, feminism means nothing more than "bow down to female supremacy or we will use digital intimidation to enforce your compliance"

Has it ever dawned on you that perhaps the resistance to feminism has nothing to do with females and everything to do with its marriage to Silicon Valley panipticons who regularly abuse their information advantages and are immune to regulation?

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#172

Post by cmiles74 »

eradicatethots wrote: post #66
cmiles74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is an accurate characterization of the article. It is technically accurate that the male in this article did strike me as lazy in his reluctance to call around when hiring a cleaning service. But I think it's an unfair leap to (1) categorize him as "weak, child-like" and (2) dismiss the article as a whole based on this categorization. The main theme of the article, that managing the household requi…

Why should you be ashamed of this?

I think automatically jumping to a defensive posture, even when one isn't being attacked (or there's nothing to defend) isn't a great response. It seems reasonable that I should be able to listen to someone else's gripes without jumping to the conclusion that I am somehow to blame.

In this article, it seemed to me that the author's goal was to try and get recognition for work performed, not to make their partner feel like they were not doing enough.

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#173

Post by ChuckMcM »

It is interesting to read the comments here and compare them to my own experience. I've been married for more than a couple of decades and recognized both the author's complaint and the responses of the people in the article. I have also participated with my wife in very similar discussions.

Three things that I now believe, having lived through this, are that my wife and I see value and obligation differently (and pretty much always have), the "emotional" part is important because there are other emotions at play below the surface, and that the roles and issues your own parents had in this space will color the perceptions of you and your spouse.

I can thoroughly recommend that you clip or save this article into your archive of things and re-read it every few years for the next couple of decades and reflect back on the disagreements you and your spouse have had :-)

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#174

Post by saint_fiasco »

rootlocus wrote: post #156
saint_fiasco wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I have enough self-awareness that I don't bother asking for specific gifts. It all adds up to compromise, knowing your quirks and limitations and not trying too hard to make reality conform to your quirks. However, I think it is not fair to criticize the author for trying to do the right thing. She was wrong at the time to expect her husband to understand without communicating, but then she had a serious talk…

> It's like when a boy cleans his room, praising him is the right thing to do, even if you feel a little sexist doing it (because you did not praise his sister for the same thing). Sexism is tricky because it's sometimes unrelated to the problem. I recently saw a small boy in a shop yelling at his sister not to touch him because she played with a dog and her hands were dirty. I'm pretty sure his room is cleaner than…

I agree with you. What I meant is that the boy should be criticized or praised as an individual, not as a stereotype of his gender or as a comparison to a sibling.

This individual author has trouble communicating. As an individual, she wrote an article talking about her feelings. Even though the article is kind of unnecessarily mean, it is progress compared to what she was doing before, which is nothing. That deserves praise.

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#175

Post by cjbillington »

acc1558 wrote: post #113
mmjaa wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>almost always a male problem That is sexist.

You have wholly failed to grasp the concept of sexism. "Women are bad at tech" is a sexist statement, while "men are bad at emotional labor" is not. This is no more a double standard than saying 0/1 is 0, while 1/0 is undefined. The asymmetry exists a priori, and so the balance of those statements is descriptive of sexism, not causal.

Nope. You're going to have to elaborate on why there's an asymmetry, not just restate that there is with big words and an unrelated analogy hoping we'll believe it.

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#176

Post by ThrustVectoring »

trgn wrote: post #141
mmjaa wrote: post #48

This is a highly charged, and - frankly sexist - article about how people have expectations that are unfulfilled because they simply don't communicate with each other . There isn't a single example of this "emotional labor" in the article, where a consideration is given to "the man" about how much labor it takes, emotionally, to keep up with someone who has high expectations for their environment, but does not commun…

Airing her grievances online is immature and isn't going to help their situation, there's a good chance her husband is going to get more defensive about it. That tactical mistake notwithstanding, she's on the whole quite correct though. She says: > When my husband brushes out tangles before bedtime, he needs his efforts noticed and congratulated That's such a common attitude. He needs to just do the damn work already…

>there's a good chance her husband is going to get more defensive about it.

She complains in the article that her husband gets defensive in these conversations - odds are she's simply can't see how her speech gets perceived as an attack. Especially because she very quickly blames Patriarchy for his defensiveness rather than taking an honest look at communication patterns.

Example:

>My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patriarchal way. Forcing him to see emotional labor for the work it is feels like a personal attack on his character.

Criticizing someone to force them to see things your way is completely unacceptable to me. I might have high standards for personality in a life partner, but yeah, no, I'd rather be single than put up with that.

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#177

Post by dleslie »

seattle_spring wrote: post #85

I love working 10+ hours a day to pay for 100% of me and my fiancé's expenses, coming home, cooking dinner, and cleaning up everything while she studies for med school; going to bed early so I can do some shopping before work; and then being told I'm a useless man by some nobody with a shitty marriage on a website that's supposed to be about technology.

> on a website that's supposed to be about technology

This is what irks me most. I come to Hacker News for the tech, and yet... This is here?

What is this article doing on HN?

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#179

Post by didgeoridoo »

gyardley wrote: post #150
didgeoridoo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're arbitrarily privileging "giving a fuck" over "not giving a fuck". Try this: Alice wants Task X to be done. Bob does not care whether Task X is done. Let us stipulate that, if Task X is not done, nobody will be materially, objectively harmed. Alice says: because I want Task X, you will do Task X. Alice does not ask Bob's opinion on Task X, but rather assumes that Task X is inherently necessary, and ther…

It’s usually because not doing the task has very real negative consequences and due to the sexist nature of modern society the consequences fall most heavily on Alice, not on Bob. Don’t buy the nephews birthday cards? The relatives think badly of Alice, not Bob. Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob. When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Ali…

> When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Alice does, Bob needs to step back and think about why she does, because there’s generally a good reason

Again, privileging Alice's perspective. Why shouldn't Alice step back and wonder why Bob DOESN'T think something is necessary?

I agree that there are sometimes social consequences that will fall specifically on Alice for failing to keep her house in order. Similar social consequences will fall on Bob if he, for example, fails to keep a steady job. Society is a bitch, but that isn't Bob's fault.

Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

#180

Post by [deleted] »

gyardley wrote: post #150
didgeoridoo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're arbitrarily privileging "giving a fuck" over "not giving a fuck". Try this: Alice wants Task X to be done. Bob does not care whether Task X is done. Let us stipulate that, if Task X is not done, nobody will be materially, objectively harmed. Alice says: because I want Task X, you will do Task X. Alice does not ask Bob's opinion on Task X, but rather assumes that Task X is inherently necessary, and ther…

It’s usually because not doing the task has very real negative consequences and due to the sexist nature of modern society the consequences fall most heavily on Alice, not on Bob. Don’t buy the nephews birthday cards? The relatives think badly of Alice, not Bob. Take your son out in mismatched or slightly too small clothes? People pass judgement on Alice, not Bob. When Bob doesn’t think something is necessary and Ali…

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