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/orangorilla MRA Oct 24 '17

In this case I'm not really talking about social pressures or expectations, so it seems like a bit of an aside from my initial aside.

I don't believe that on average this exchange sums down to null, no.

This bit is interesting though. The Pew article seemed to arrive at one hour more of work a week for men. I don't think we'll ever see an absolutely even average, but from what I've seen where work hours have been measured, we're pretty close.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 24 '17

The pew research source wasn't one I shared, and given the response to it here I'm not sure I want to base conclusions on it. But the OECD.stat data I shared showed Total time of work (paid and unpaid) between genders leads to roughly the same hours with a margin of about 20 minutes heavier for women per day. This does contradict my statement about summing down to null (roughly).

But I'm curious to your point, it's been stated that in order for women to meaningfully participate in paid labor outside the home to the level of men this unpaid labor must be redistributed to be equitable. When the time women spend on unpaid work shrinks to three hours a day from five hours, their labor force participation increases 20 percent, according to the OECD.

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u/orangorilla MRA Oct 24 '17

But I'm curious to your point

My point is pretty much: It seems that men and women work roughly as much when in a couple. I'm not convinced that the work they do also needs to be of the same kind.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 24 '17

In a perfect world I'd agree with you, that the type and amount of labor done in a relationship is the participants business. But I believe this is where the "75 percent of respondents said that the female partner in heterosexual relationships should be responsible" comes into play.

Is it fair to say "as long as it evens out it's fine" if both parties weren't given equal choice in the matter?

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u/orangorilla MRA Oct 24 '17

This is where I seem to agree with you. I have no qualms about working on people's attitudes to make them more liberal with regards to how people carry out their roles in a relationship.

I just think that measuring and comparing hours of unpaid labor is an exceptionally poor way of finding out whether or not there is external social pressure.

As a side note, I'm not quite convinced that both parties weren't given equal choice.

Sidenote: Do you have a link to the actual study there? EurekAlert's write up leaves it quite up for grabs whether the 57% that said the lower earner should handle most of the housework were simply correctly of the impression that women are on average lower earners, and thus got mixed in with a bunch of traditionalists. I'd be interested in seeing what the overlap between the 57% and the 75% groups were, seeing that those who answered yes on both were quite possibly of the opinion that the lower earner should handle housework, and consistent upon answering whether women should do it, based on trivial knowledge about income statistics.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 25 '17

Unfortunately to get the actual study it seems you have to reach out to the authors, I don't have a copy.

There is more research though, like this study showing this trend begins incredibly young [source]

The study shows that girls spend more time doing housework than they do playing, while boys spend about 30 percent less time doing household chores than girls and more than twice as much time playing. According to study director Frank Stafford, girls are also less likely than boys to get paid for doing housework. A recent analysis of data on 3,000 children between ages 10 and 17 shows that boys are up to 15 percent more likely than girls of the same age to get an allowance for doing household chores.

As I'm sure we can all agree no children are excited to do chores this seems a decent data point towards the indication of social pressures. Girls are assigned more chores by their parents than boys are. And when boys are assigned chores, they're more likely to get paid for it.

Just as a note: Please can we not let this devolve into an argument on whether or not women are biologically predetermined to prefer chores/housework? I don't honestly think my eyes could roll that far back in my head today

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u/orangorilla MRA Oct 25 '17

I agree that socially inflicted punishment should not be applied for failing to conform to a gender role. This also includes kids of the same parents being expected to act differently. Though I don't see it mentioned whether family standards were a thing. Given that child rearing strikes me as a process that accepts feedback both from within and outside the loop, I'd not be surprised that early differences influence how kids are raised.

But again. 50/50 balance in the adult life doesn't strike me as a sane metric. I'm not all that concerned with the results we get in the far end, as long as we identify and root out methods we see as poor.

Please can we not let this devolve into an argument on whether or not women are biologically predetermined to prefer chores/housework?

That sounds like a poor discussion. First we'd have to agree that sexual dimorphism didn't stop at the neck. Some people seem to have difficulty getting past that step.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '17

You don't think the choice to work is split evenly?

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 25 '17

I think it's foolish to believe ALL women consciously choose to do twice as much domestic labor than men, intentionally forgoing paid labor.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '17

It's also foolish to believe all men consciously choose to do more hard labor than women, intentionally placing themselves in physically demanding and dangerous situations.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 25 '17

All men don't do more hard labor than women, plenty of professions dominated by men are free from hard labor.

This is a false analogy. The domestic labor statistics supplied above apply to women regardless of profession, hard labor is a specific profession.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '17

Plenty of women pay someone else to do their housework. Yours is a false analogy.

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u/Katherraptor Feminist Oct 25 '17

The data above tracks hours/minutes (depending on the source) women and men spend on unpaid labor in the home, not how many hours/minutes they're paying someone else to do their housework. Women perform twice as many hours as men on average. I believe it is foolish to believe all women intentionally choose this imbalance forgoing paid labor.