GeniesLoki

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)

I’ve had similar thoughts, but struggled to come up with a lot of examples. Basically I came up with things that are defined as “courtesy” (asking about someone’s day, listening to someone without criticism or unwanted “fixing”) that may feel more like labor to men...

I think being a source of stability and calm is the most central example of emotional labour typically done by men. A lot of men describe it as being the only one not allowed to fall apart in a crisis. Many men don't do this and many women do, of course, but it's skews male.

Interestingly, my husband does this for me, but my mother and mother-in-law did it for their husbands.

Yeah, that's true, this one isn't so unambiguously gendered so much as a thing that often happens in couples. I think it's disproportionately gendered male in my social groups but that's probably idiosyncratic in society at large.

I think this might be a thing that is actually normally not that gender coded but feminism tells us it's bad when women do it so it skews male in more progressive circles? I'm not sure.