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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I'm not sure it's this simple. I think the types of emotionality which are acceptable vary by gender. For example, women who get angry or show determination may and are labelled b**ches. The kind of acceptable compliant niceness expected must take great emotional self control.
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Men are allowed to be aggressive or get angry without anywhere near as much much criticism. Other emotions like lust are also still perceived as more typically male. But men are generally judged for what one might call pro-social emotions which women are encouraged to express.
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Hadn’t thought about it in these terms but, as a male, this feels directionally correct.
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