Is it Even Worthwhile to Teach Men to Value Emotional Labor?
LatestOne of the most essentialist views about the difference between men and women is that women are naturally better at dealing with feelings. But even though studies have suggested this is false, is it worth pushing men to split this kind of work, just as we have with housework and diaper-changing?
In an interesting piece at the Guardian, Rose Hackman digs into the cost of women absorbing most of the emotional labor required to make the world go round—the workplace kind (which includes conjuring and telegraphing the appropriate feelings for your customer-service type job, being pleasant at work, and doing all the menial shit workplaces tend to off-source onto women, like office housework) but also the interpersonal kind, like presenting as nice, caring, and genial, because as a woman, you’re supposed to be those things.
Even though this stuff has been studied for decades, Hackman posits that it’s just now becoming something mainstream feminism is really looking to unpack; perhaps it is the next frontier in radically rethinking how women’s work is diminished. There are real consequences for this stuff, Hackman notes: tipped workers (mostly women, mostly women of color) are twice as likely to be harassed, and in addition to all the ways men schmooze, small-talk, and seem personable, it’s a plus when they do it—it’s an expectation for women.
Part of the problem is that people seem heavily invested in this view of women as a fount of innate love, even 30-something male feminist types. Hackman quotes one as saying, “Why is the fact that women provide emotional support work, though? What if people actually enjoy it? What if women are just better at doing that? Why do we have to make that something negative?”
Well, we aren’t making it negative. For one thing, as Hackman notes, there’s a difference between being better at something naturally and better because of a lifetime of conditioning. Studies show that this is just an elaborate gender construct—that women are often cast in the role of the pleasant helper, which we then characterized it as their most natural self. And this has happened fairly constantly to women over the course of history. We weren’t (and in some places, still aren’t) given access to education, and it was therefore concluded that we were not as intelligent. We were held hostage in the home our entire lives, and celebrated for being such wonderful decorators. And on and on and on.
And for another thing—even if women are better at feelings due to a lifetime of wallowing in them, as Jess Zimmerman lays out so poignantly in her essay about the hours and hours of agony aunt duty she’s filed in her lifetime—it’s still exhausting, time-consuming, and damaging. Zimmerman suggests possible compensation, only half joking: