Nobody is calling you useless. Clearly, you've done your share (quite possibly, more than your share) of emotional labor / domestic work in your relationship. But surely you know that you are defying norms here? Statistically speaking, those burdens do fall on women far more often than on men: http://blogs.reuters.com/equals/2014/03/12/more-work-and-les...
It's not the greatest article in the world, but the main message, that women are expected to perform unacknowledged emotional labor to a higher degree than men, is largely valid, even if the author's examples were not the greatest. Even from a young age women are pushed into emotional labor. For example, the only "odd jobs" I was ever offered as a pre-teen were for babysitting, which is a very emotionally demanding job (kids are jerks) that I hated. I wasn't even paid at minimum wage because I just didn't know any better at that age, and despite asking around, I couldn't get any gigs for different work. Meanwhile my male peers got neighbors asking them to mow lawns and clean cars, which I would have greatly preferred to chasing little jerks around and making them happy enough to not complain to their parents about everything.
From a software dev perspective, I usually see this come through in the form of unequal expectations placed on male vs female PMs. I remember overhearing a colleague describe a highly professional PM to a new dev candidate as as the "Team Mom". Now, I've never ever heard anyone call a male PM call "Team Dad". But because this PM happened to be female, a parent, and not emotionally idiotic, they would always make her take the burden for working out inter-personal conflict, even for teams she wasn't responsible for. She had tons of other work, and there were male PMs and managers who could have assisted, but none of them would. They would just wait for things to get terrible and then throw a meeting at her about "conflict resolution". She hated it, but was afraid that she wouldn't be seen as a team-player if she didn't go along with it, so she just did it.
So that's another example of why emotional labor stinks and does disproportionately impact women, even in tech. Fortunately, the easiest way to fix this is just to pay attention and notice when it happens, in other words, perform emotional labor to notice when emotional labor is not equal. If you're doing that, great, this article wasn't about you.
Doesn't mean that the author was wrong for calling out a pattern of inequality that can be identified, or that HN readers are wrong for taking interest and engaging with her arguments. I suggest you perform some emotional labor on yourself right now, because this article is really not about you or your feelings at all. It's about a widespread pattern of inequality that impacts women disproportionately.
This type of conversation needs to occur more. The 'Not All Men' rebuttal and counter-rebuttal offers absolutely no benefit to anyone but more often than not, on any medium I would have seen that posted here instead of your written piece.
I understand your perspective seattle_spring, truthfully I find myself in your place more often than not. But I find my self at ends with my own personal beliefs and alliances. For the purpose of discussing this topic at greater length I'll be focusing on why this conversation needs to occur in a similar thought process shown here.
I find your argument seattle_spring, to be similar in tone to the Not All Men rebuttal. Though your reasons, experiences and feelings for how you perceive this piece on Emotional Labour is not vilified, you have your reasons for feeling how you do. I also empathise the personal struggles you're going through (I've seen first hand the struggles of supporting those in the medical field). But I believe your argument is misplaced and steph above me articulates this well. Let me unpack this.
When the Not All Men brigade reared their heads on Reddit in response to the women only screenings of Wonder Woman (WW), there was a lack of conversation on both sides of the fence from both the brigade and the Feminist allies of the WW screenings.
I personally found the WW screenings distasteful and if I was asked my opinion on it, I'd discuss this. But I was neither inflamed nor agitated by the screenings. There's other topics that deserve our attention (as a feminist allied man) that deserved more of my energy than these female only viewings of WW.
What am I, as a men, really being deprived of by these WW screenings at a tangible level? It really has no direct consequence to me. Though from a perspective or trying to find and build unity between sexes I thought it was counter productive. Anyway, I digress.
However. The same men who were the most public around these discussions around why he was _so_ offended and vilified by these women only screenings. Where was their horror, disapproval, loud and defensive counter argument when the rights of his sisters, daughters or wives rights to sexual reproductive health, taken away from them by a group of older white men less than 6 months prior? Where was _their_ rage and hostility then? Why were they quiet?
Therein lies the meat of the conversation.
It's not _just_ that these Not All Men are defensive about protecting their image about what they perceive to be a gross generalisation. It's that the Not All Men brigade are ignorant and blind to their hypocritical contradiction, where they care _more_ about their offense to these WW screenings and it's triviality, and yet are so very quiet while America's women's sexual rights were taken from them.
I feel sudo_steph, you did well to both show empathy to seattle_spring and his own battles, whilst still offering him the perspective that as a man, we can still be disadvantaged by the same cultural and societal forces that disadvantage most women. So again, thank you.
It's not the greatest article in the world, but the main message, that women are expected to perform unacknowledged emotional labor to a higher degree than men, is largely valid, even if the author's examples were not the greatest. Even from a young age women are pushed into emotional labor. For example, the only "odd jobs" I was ever offered as a pre-teen were for babysitting, which is a very emotionally demanding job (kids are jerks) that I hated. I wasn't even paid at minimum wage because I just didn't know any better at that age, and despite asking around, I couldn't get any gigs for different work. Meanwhile my male peers got neighbors asking them to mow lawns and clean cars, which I would have greatly preferred to chasing little jerks around and making them happy enough to not complain to their parents about everything.
From a software dev perspective, I usually see this come through in the form of unequal expectations placed on male vs female PMs. I remember overhearing a colleague describe a highly professional PM to a new dev candidate as as the "Team Mom". Now, I've never ever heard anyone call a male PM call "Team Dad". But because this PM happened to be female, a parent, and not emotionally idiotic, they would always make her take the burden for working out inter-personal conflict, even for teams she wasn't responsible for. She had tons of other work, and there were male PMs and managers who could have assisted, but none of them would. They would just wait for things to get terrible and then throw a meeting at her about "conflict resolution". She hated it, but was afraid that she wouldn't be seen as a team-player if she didn't go along with it, so she just did it.
So that's another example of why emotional labor stinks and does disproportionately impact women, even in tech. Fortunately, the easiest way to fix this is just to pay attention and notice when it happens, in other words, perform emotional labor to notice when emotional labor is not equal. If you're doing that, great, this article wasn't about you.
Doesn't mean that the author was wrong for calling out a pattern of inequality that can be identified, or that HN readers are wrong for taking interest and engaging with her arguments. I suggest you perform some emotional labor on yourself right now, because this article is really not about you or your feelings at all. It's about a widespread pattern of inequality that impacts women disproportionately.