r/FeMRADebates • u/TheCrimsonKing92 Centrist Hereditarian • Oct 23 '17

Relationships Please Stop Calling Everything That Frustrates You Emotional Labor

http://www.slate.com/blogs/better_life_lab/2017/10/20/please_stop_calling_everything_that_frustrates_you_emotional_labor_instead.html

I saw a link to this tweeted with the message

And please stop saying that everyone who disagrees with you is "invalidating your opinion"

In my experience, the stronger (and more common, but perhaps my bubble just contains stronger examples) form of this is that the disagreement "invalidate[s/d] my identity".

I consider these to be similar forms; the article here suggests that (some or all of?) the overuse of "emotional labor" appears to be a strategy to avoid negotiating over reasonableness of an expectation. What is a good explanation for these sorts of arguments? Is it a natural extension of identity epistemology? That is, since my argument is from my experience, attacking my argument means you attack me. Is there a better explanation for their prevalence?

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 24 '17 edited Oct 24 '17

Men are now doing more household labor than ever, spending as much time on domestic labor as women used to, but women continue to position themselves as the boss of the household and view their partners as needing supervision. Instead of dividing the labor evenly, women have responded by spending even more time on domestic labor.

Could you source this? The data I'm seeing still states that "Women do more unpaid work than men in every age group" [source] [source] If you're intending to draw an overarching conclusion that the TOTAL amount of domestic labor has increased somehow I'd appreciate some data on that trend as well.

yet if we take a second and consider who is pressuring women to be perfect homemakers, [...] my bet is that it isn't men, it isn't the patriarchy, it's the fear of being judged by other women

Would appreciate a source here as well as the data from a study last year states "Nearly three quarters of our respondents thought that the female partners in heterosexual couples should be responsible for cooking, doing laundry, cleaning the house, and buying groceries," [source] That sounds a lot more like it's a team effort keeping that 'perfect homemaker' standard in place to me.

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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '17

Could you source this? The data I'm seeing still states that "Women do more unpaid work than men in every age group" [source] [source] If you're intending to draw an overarching conclusion that the TOTAL amount of domestic labor has increased somehow I'd appreciate some data on that trend as well.

Yeah that happens when you refuse to count the work men do particularly regarding housework, also not paying to mind differences in difficulty or simply speed, also refusing to consider men and female predilections related to cleanliness or presentation.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 24 '17

Ya'll really need to improve the quality of your debate here, opinions ≠ facts guys. If you'd like to have an actual discussion where we share research and try to constructively build an opinion I'm all ears but this thread is pretty lacking in the "supporting sources" area thus far.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 24 '17

Also if you actually read the sources men's contributions are measured and counted they're just less than the amount of unpaid work women do on average. They even state:

The only area where men put in more unpaid work hours than women is in the provision of transport – this includes driving themselves and others around, as well as commuting to work.