This Week's Distraction

[ayun]

This very lengthy MetaFilter thread about emotional labor, and how strongly it's gender-coded, is fascinating me to the point of distraction. I've emailed it to a few colleagues, can't shut up about it to Andy, and every time I refresh the thread, there's a whole batch of new comments that I've been reading all week, ten minutes or so at a time.

Comments

[kirkjerk]

So, I'm really worried I might be on the verge of saying stupid things, because I know I'm a little or a lot dense about some of this. I try to be a good feminist, for reals, but I can have a tin ear about some things, and the way I might be expecting free emotional labor.

Reading the original article... to me it feels like it's conflating two things. One is the "placating men and navigating patriarchal expectations". I'm probably with the group that doesn't have an intuition for the cost and long term drain of that for women.

The other I thought I could recognize more, and that's "being 'wise' counsel to friends", and why other "friendly" favors might be free at least the potential for renumeration is recognized, unlike with those.

I can think of 3 reasons for that, or way payment is tacitly made:
1. the old "fandom" concept of egoboo
2. relatedly, the idea that the person doing the advising is reinforcing her or his authority, and that might temper future relations
3. the idea that everyone is "rich" enough in the resource being spent (time and emotional energy and thoughfulness in this case) that we can assume long term balance and that will "all come out in the wash", or if it's blatantly asymmetrical, it can be addressed. Though that doesn't explain why putting cash to it seems weird tho.

I dunno.

I like the article as explaining where middle management often seems to have a lot of female representation even as I'm bummed it doesnt stretch to the upper echelons of corporate stuff very often

The other thing I was wondering if it resonated for you (like if it as an" only child" thing, maybe?) I tend to be what my friend described as a "crux-ian", I want to pour resources and attention into what seems important to me, and absolutely economize on the rest. And unless I check myself, that's how I expect partners to be too. Don't want to house clean? Great, me either, so as long as we're ok with the level of mess, we're good, right? (Later my partner got into us hiring weekly or semiweekly cleaners , a luxury I've kept up to this day). Or worse: "want to buy a house? great! I don't care where we live, really, but understand I'll get some benefit from it so while I'll support you with money and some time it's mostly you and your mom's project"

er, yeah, so that kind of "do what you want! I support you" stuff wasn't really good for my long term relationships. I guess stuff like this article provides a bit more of a framework for understanding why not, and being more aware of the costs I was less willing to pay, or needed pointed out to me that I had to pay them.

(the other thing is I grew up with hyper-symmetrical gender role models, so my expectations for who 'should' do what aren't as pointed as some dudes)

[ayun]

The article I didn't like so much as the thread, because I just haven't had a lot of the experiences the author writes about. But I think in a lot of places, in the article and the thread, the problem isn't the doing of emotional labor, it's doing unrecognized emotional labor that is not reciprocated in some way.

Example: My coworker was bitching to me about some stuff her husband doesn't pull his weight on which was especially difficult for her lately. He's kinda shitty on that front, and there was a lot of work for the family in that area lately. But he does all of her clothes shopping for her, and does a very good job, and that's something she really hates doing. It's asymmetrical, but reciprocal, and one of the things that thread did for me was help me recognize that I undervalue some of the emotional labor other people do, and I'm happy to have gotten the wake-up call.

I TOTALLY do the 'crux-ian' thing, and...I dunno, I think it's not inherently a bad way to be, but does require a partner who is similarly wired, and a level of honesty with yourself about whether you really don't care about stuff, or are just checked out. The thing I figured out a while back is that you get a great return on emotional labor investment by being explicit about your needs, and not expecting people to anticipate them. I mean, it's great if they do, but there's a nice two-way bit of labor happening when one person says "Would you do the dishes tonight?" and the other person does it without being an ass because the dishes do need to be done, and there's a reason he or she was asked explicitly to do them.