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

[couplingchaos]

Thanks for sharing this. Great food for thought.

[silentq]

Ditto. :-)

[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

[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

[ayun]

I was honestly shocked by how many women ended up in those situations and really resentful over it. I think if I had somehow managed to hook up with somebody with that set of expectations, the jig would have been up the SECOND they saw my filthy-ass apartment and I'd have been dumped in a heartbeat.

I think it's SO STRANGE when people get married without living together first, and that thread is a good set of reasons why it's a bad idea. Though a lot of the stories are from people who moved in together and found that formerly Grown Ass Adults suddenly turned into babies once they had a woman living with them, so even that's not a guarantee of anything.

I found a lot more to personally identify with later in the thread when the focus turned more toward the work of maintaining friendships and emotional labor in the workplace, but the whole thing was just riveting.

[ayun]

Yeah, Christmas cards were never a thing my parents did, so I think of them as optional. I like getting them, because I like my friends, and I like seeing the cute family portraits or whatever they do. I'd rather write postcards on a solo vacation because I enjoy doing that AND people enjoy getting the postcards. It's probably more work than Christmas cards would be, because I write them all by hand and pick out different cards for every person/household, but it doesn't feel like an obligation (and I don't do it for every trip).

[ayun]

RIGHT?! I had a lot of moments like that reading the MeFi comments. Quite a few "Oh! THERE I AM!" in the stories of other people. The diversity of experience is pretty great, once you get past the early "ME TOO!" part of the thread.