What if the reason why women do most of the emotional labour is that we don't count it as emotional labour when men do it? (I was surprisingly reluctant to tweet this even on alt)
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(This is even before we get to the "Well actually if you read The Managed Heart, you'll find that emotional labour *really* means..." criticism which I also think is valid)
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The basic problem is that doing emotional labour more or less requires performing gender roles, and performing feminine gender roles involve expressing emotion and performing masculine gender roles involves suppressing it. The former is much more visible than the latter.
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Oh another common example of male emotional labour (in some spaces) is pretending that "men are terrible" discourse doesn't upset them.
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I guess another way to look at this is that women are expected to perform emotional labour to come off as friendly and helpful, while men are expected to perform emotional labour to come off as strong yet safe (except when doing power games, in which case just strong).
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It's maybe worth noting that emotional labour is not intrinsically bad, and many of these examples of men doing emotional labour are in fact things we probably want men to keep doing, I just think it needs acknowledging that this is indeed expecting emotional labour of them.
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So obvious I didn't even think of it: heterosexual dating norms are full of examples of male emotional labour - e.g. expecting men to approach women (Also full of examples of female emotional labour, just different things)https://twitter.com/GeniesLoki/status/1300523796470861832?s=19 …
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End of conversation
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Yeah, the book is generally quite even handed in its treatment of gender I think! Mostly that bit was just a snarky aside about the level of drift in the concept from the original usage.
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