Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
So would you please not comment like this? It takes effort not to, but it's effort we all need to make if this community is to not suck. I'm tempted to call it emotional labor but I suppose that would be trolling.
It's not about "talking to the proletarians". It's about the emotional work involved with talking to a bunch of people, organizing those discussions, comparing the results, etc.
As a generally introverted person, just thinking about discussing the details with 3 or more people makes me feel exhausted. And that doesn't even count the planning, review, time off of work, etc.
Basically, the term emotional labor gets used a lot to mean "women's work" and especially to refer to the largely invisible parts of what women are expected to do.
I don't like that usage, but I usually don't bother to nitpick it. I do understand why this is kind of a hot topic and why the term emotional labor gets applied to it.
I don't have a better solution. It seems like there simply isn't a good way to talk about these issues.
I think the economic term would by "economic externalities". That's used as well when, for example, a coal plant dumps sewage into a town's water source, and the town is then forced to clean it up. Someone has to pay for that, but the coal plant avoids the responsibility. We're starting to get past that as a society now, with coal plants being required to pay for the environmental damage they do, and it might be time to start noticing that "women's work" - childraising and housekeeping - is an unaccounted externality as well, that someone has to pay for.
It does seem kind of confusing. The first time I encountered the term "emotional labor" it referred to aspects of customer service work (like responding politely to abusive customers, being performatively cheerful, etc) and it was intuitive to me what it meant. Using the term to mean unpaid, typically female labor seems less intuitive.
Emotional labor is a real thing and a large part of what women are expected to do is rooted in catering to the feelings of other people. But, yeah, it gets used kind of sloppily. Just about anything women want to complain about gets lumped in with it and the writing frequently fails to make it crystal clear how x, y and z actually relate to or are rooted in the expectation that women cater to everyone's feelings.
Another issue writers run into is that if you aren't using any of the hot catch phrases, no one will read your piece. I wrestle with this fact a lot. I blog at times about such issues. I try to be evenhanded and sympathetic to both sides. I really struggle with titling stuff and my writing gets damn little traffic.
My refusal to use the standard catch phrases, because of their frequently toxic framing, is a barrier to being heard at all. And I sometimes wonder which is worse: Putting out a fucked up message in hopes of some partial solution emerging or simply howling into the void and going entirely unheard.
Making any progress is incredibly challenging.
This piece was published in a major publication. If it didn't use a popular catch phrase, they probably would not have published it at all. Those popular catch phrases are important hooks for titling things and for communicating with the public.
On my own personal blogs, I have the luxury of refusing to use phrases I don't like. You generally don't have that luxury when trying to get published by an organization that needs to hit certain traffic targets to survive and keep their doors open.
The part of this that genuinely is an issue of emotional labor is her desire for her husband to actually be considerate. That is the crux of the issue here.
The article perhaps is not as clear as it could be about that fact.
Its just the common term for it. Is it the most correct term? Probably not. But its this invisible labor that many people don't even recognize exists, so to lump it in with regular physical labor pretty much to ignore it.
I don't know, this is the first time I've really ever heard this term. If I had heard the term outside of this context, I would imagine it to mean "interactive/inter-communicative/social" work, instead of physical work, but it feels like there's some kind of historical/feminist context here that I'm not aware of.
As the other commenter said, it has nothing to do with elitism. Research takes time. Calling people takes time. And god forbid you have to call a government or medical entity, you might be on the phone for hours.
Do you realize how hard it is to get a straight answer on how much things SHOULD cost with regards to housekeeping, lawn care services, plumbing, tree services, roofing, foundation repair, and the list goes on? Sure you can call the company and ask, but are you getting ripped off? Now you have to call 5 companies and compare to see what the average price is and where you might get the best price. There goes 45 minutes of time (if you're lucky).
Plus you have to vet these people. If they're going to be in your house/yard handling your things you want to make sure they are trustworthy and possibly licensed/bonded as may apply. So you go down the rabbit hole of yelp and NextDoor and Thumbtack and whatever else you may find only to read about things that you didn't even realize you needed to be worried about. Well, there goes another hour.
Finally you have to actually call them back and schedule. Does this day work? What do you need to do to prepare for them to come? Do you need to be there? Who needs to take off work for that?
Its just... a lot. Its a lot of work. And keeping track of what needs to be done and when and your husband won't use a damn google service so you can't just sync calendars and he won't even look at the one on the fridge anyway is just exhausting. There's a reason why one of the highest ranked reasons for strife in a marriage is an imbalance of housework.
I actually do hope that my comment reads as anxiety inducing as I think it does. Its a lot, and it feels stupid at the time to even have to do it. You think we don't know that we seem like over-anxious worriers? We're in 2017! Why can't we have automated this? But then I'd have to be the one to figure out what automated service to go with and determine if we can trust it to not rip us off and figure out what their customer service is like if something goes wrong, ad nauseum.
Leftist cynicism aside: I'm talking more about the "socks on the floor, chair in the way, keeping the house in order mentally" side of things