Women don't believe that men does any emotional labor since we don't cry when we hold back our frustration. I mean, this is a stay at home mom spending around 10 hours a week on her passion to write earning very little money (according to her blog) and she still dares to literally cry about her husband not doing most of the household chores?
How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
321–330 of 449 posts
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do. I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it. I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk abou…
It does seem kind of confusing. The first time I encountered the term "emotional labor" it referred to aspects of customer service work (like responding politely to abusive customers, being performatively cheerful, etc) and it was intuitive to me what it meant. Using the term to mean unpaid, typically female labor seems less intuitive.
Emotional labor is a real thing and a large part of what women are expected to do is rooted in catering to the feelings of other people. But, yeah, it gets used kind of sloppily. Just about anything women want to complain about gets lumped in with it and the writing frequently fails to make it crystal clear how x, y and z actually relate to or are rooted in the expectation that women cater to everyone's feelings.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#323I'm not sure I buy this. In my experience at least, it all comes down to standards — it sounds like this woman has higher standards for what constitutes a "running household", and gets frustrated when her husband doesn't share those standards. It sounds like he would be content with boxes on the floor, dirty bathrooms, etc. When she asks him to raise the house to her standard, she is asking him to adopt her perspecti…
The problem isn't messiness. The problem is the additional mental load it creates for half of a household to keep increasingly more information in active memory while staying functional. If you continue this computing analogy, you can easily see how the added search cost, not to mention memory/storage load, dramatically affects system performance (but with the benefit of things being done with full contextual awareness). Compare this to a system with extremely limited working memory, which flies in comparison but only puts the very most recent or most critical actions in context.
In a household with more than two people, especially, the resulting mental load can get unreasonable very quickly.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#324Wow. This article just comes off as pure whining. He cleaned your damn bathrooms. Problem solved. Don't be ungrateful.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#325>That’s the point,” I said, now in tears, “I don’t want to have to ask.” >Walking that fine line to keep the peace and not upset your partner is something women are taught to accept as their duty from an early age. >My husband is a good man, and a good feminist ally. >However, it’s not as easy as telling him that. My husband, despite his good nature and admirable intentions, still responds to criticism in a very patr…
Easy to preach, but much can go wrong, people can get ill, people can get in trouble, people can get addicted, people can get used by others (mothers, daughters, friends, bosses). What then, will you front and deal with it? Will you try and sail the ship through the storm? Or will you make a list of the good things that you could have had if only?
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#326This is a topic where the more I learned about it the more I opened my eyes to it and saw it happening on my own life. I'm very easy going and there isn't much I get too worked up about. My wife, on the other hand, is a meticulous planner. I could see her getting stressed out making decisions for a vacation. I realized that by not caring, I wasn't helping and offloading the burden to her. Now I truly didn't care if w…
You say she is a meticulous planner, and maybe that's the case, but maybe you are missing the point(as is most of the other commenters here). the point isn't whether it's Restaurant A or B, the point is you have to make a decision about A OR B, or even going out to a restaurant at all. Someone has to think about: lets go out for dinner tonight @ restaurant A. Women generally do that thinking, because like you said, y…
They are both adults. Neither of them needs to take responsibility for the other eating dinner. It's not like he's going to starve to death without her intervention.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Those implications are entirely inaccurate, but given that this is an overwhelmingly male forum, it is a no win situation for me." How does the fact that HN is an overwhelmingly male forum make this a no win situation for you? Are you suggesting that only a few HN members could ever see things from your point of view? For what it's worth, I thought that this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15359215 wa…
And yet you are crabbing at me instead of them. Why is that?
Because they're not the one that conflated gender with understanding, and that's what I found interesting about your exchange. The rest of the discussion was just a common form of miscommunication that happens when someone wants to talk about specifics and the other wants to talk in generics, and the two collide.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#328Describing cleaning as emotional labour is weird to me. I'm fully on board with the "many women do lots of emotional labour that goes unnoticed" logic but to me cleaning is labour and that's that. It's a job, and it should be talked about as hard labour, not some mysterious emotional nebula that men avoid because of gendered conditioning. I think the danger here is that by conflating emotional labour and cleaning, we…
I think you might be missing the point. The gift that she wanted was the house cleaning service. She had already been planning/considering hiring someone anyway. The gift was that she would not have to do the work to find, vet, make the calls, research, arrange payment, schedule, etc. for this task. The gift was supposed to be him taking over that work. > The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but t…
If this is what the author wanted, which I 100% agree with you it is, why didn't she just say that? Admittedly, I often find myself in the clueless husband role, but my wife has been making a huge effort to directly say what she wants. The result is that both of us are much happier. If the author of this article wanted her husband to do the legwork of finding a housekeeper she should have asked for exactly that.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet you are crabbing at me instead of them. Why is that?
Because they're not the one that conflated gender with understanding, and that's what I found interesting about your exchange. The rest of the discussion was just a common form of miscommunication that happens when someone wants to talk about specifics and the other wants to talk in generics, and the two collide.
I am not conflating anything and I have no idea why you would claim that I am.
Re: How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality
#330It's not emotional labor. It's that she tends to worry and obsess over routine decisions, and he can't be cared to put in effort on things that aren't important to him directly. Even if he changed, she would still nag and belittle his choices because she still worries and obsesses; even if she changed, he would half-ass and still be lazy. They both have to change, and they don't need to make it into this grand narrative of emotional labor.
She should not expect him to ask five friends on facebook to find a cleaning service. He should realize that it is important to her to have one and just get one instead of complaining to her about it. Both failed, and it had little to do with any grand feminist narrative.