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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Emotional work in the original sense is work done specifically to manage your own emotions, to ensure that they're "right" for the particular context. I think there's a major element of that in the "free therapist" problem but that's not all that's going on there.
The typical examples of emotional labour in the original sense are things like how airline staff are expected to constantly be helpful and friendly - it's part of their job to project the right emotions.
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As a side note, I'm somewhat sceptical of the idea that it's only women who do the "free therapist" thing and think this is a thing where most couples help each other process emotions and it's more acceptable for women to complain when it's disproportionate (which it often is).
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I don't know what the skew is - could easily believe it skews heavily towards women doing it, default assumption would be that it skews that way at least a bit - but I'd be at least a bit surprised if it were overwhelmingly women doing it.
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