So-Called "Emotional Labor"
There was an online publication and some people used to kind of joke that Metafilter was "friends of" this publication. Frankly, I don't remember the name and I'm not sure I can be bothered to try to find it.
My mind has a certain structure and it remembers certain kinds of info without trying while other stuff slips through the cracks and is forgotten even though I wish I could remember. I'm not good with names and titles, so I don't remember the name of the publication BUT I do remember it was founded by a woman and a friend of hers who happened to be a gay man.
Neither one of them really had much business acumen. It got promoted heavily on Metafilter, thus the "friends of" jokes, but they somewhat frequently covered their "business" expenses by her asking her well-paid husband to kick some money towards it.
I guess he got tired of doing that or they realized they were never going to figure out how to turn it into A REAL business and eventually shut it down. I think not hugely long before they finally threw in the towel, they published a piece about something they termed emotional labor to kind of explain how people tend to expect things from WOMEN for FREE that they don't expect from MEN.
The phrase was sort of "popular" for a time in online spaces I hung out, but it's really a lousy term in my opinion. They really were trying to say "women's work" without saying "women's work."
A lot of art, like music, movies and plays, has substantial emotional bits that are often a primary purpose of the piece. It's well known that one reason to consume art is catharsis but the term emotional labor doesn't seem to get applied to things of that sort.
It's really talking more about how women get expected to behave like your personal servant and if you are a woman and any good at the social and emotional stuff, people don't chalk that up to skill or feel like you deserve to get paid for that.
Napoleon Bonparte could talk to a soldier once and a year later ask about the welfare of his wife and kids by name and remember their ages. This didn't get him treated like everyone's bitch.
Instead, it convinced everyone he deeply cared about all his men and this helped him be a callous jackass who threw their lives away at will and counted on others to remain loyal to him anyway because they FELT that he CARED.
When I was younger, my mind worked like that. I'm older and not so good with names these days, but still tend to remember the social details.
And, no, it hasn't helped me become some kind of great military leader and doesn't convince people to be crazy loyal to me while I treat them like shit.
My feeling is the publication in question foundered because it was created by and run by a "married-well" woman and her gay male friend. These are demographics that tend to get you cut out of the old boys club.
Not all (cis het) men know how to make money and cut deals, but you tend to need to be a cis het male to gain entrance to the group of insiders who do learn whatever causes that. So I think neither of the founders knew whatever it was they needed to know to turn their sort of successful publication into a real business able to at least sustain itself financially.
I wrote a blog post a lot of years ago about a woman's post mortem of her failed business. I felt that it didn't fail because it was perpetually "a day late and a dollar short" but more like a decade late and million dollars short.
My feeling was that if she had been a guy who went and had beer sometimes with her IT guy or whatever, she would have gotten smaller nudges much SOONER in the development process and the business died because she repeatedly made major pivots months after she should have made a minor tweak that led them away from all that.
Heteronormative culture is all fucked up and is the root cause of a lot of issues on planet earth. We expect:
I have a skill set that if I were male would be seen as things like diplomacy but because I'm a woman people just think I'm their bitch and sort of ASSUME some man is paying my bills -- or SHOULD be -- and no one needs to PAY ME for that.
How the world overcomes this stupid shit I do not fucking know. I write well and I'm clear what the issue is and can't make headway on MY goddamned problem.
So who the hell can solve this?
My mind has a certain structure and it remembers certain kinds of info without trying while other stuff slips through the cracks and is forgotten even though I wish I could remember. I'm not good with names and titles, so I don't remember the name of the publication BUT I do remember it was founded by a woman and a friend of hers who happened to be a gay man.
Neither one of them really had much business acumen. It got promoted heavily on Metafilter, thus the "friends of" jokes, but they somewhat frequently covered their "business" expenses by her asking her well-paid husband to kick some money towards it.
I guess he got tired of doing that or they realized they were never going to figure out how to turn it into A REAL business and eventually shut it down. I think not hugely long before they finally threw in the towel, they published a piece about something they termed emotional labor to kind of explain how people tend to expect things from WOMEN for FREE that they don't expect from MEN.
The phrase was sort of "popular" for a time in online spaces I hung out, but it's really a lousy term in my opinion. They really were trying to say "women's work" without saying "women's work."
A lot of art, like music, movies and plays, has substantial emotional bits that are often a primary purpose of the piece. It's well known that one reason to consume art is catharsis but the term emotional labor doesn't seem to get applied to things of that sort.
It's really talking more about how women get expected to behave like your personal servant and if you are a woman and any good at the social and emotional stuff, people don't chalk that up to skill or feel like you deserve to get paid for that.
Napoleon Bonparte could talk to a soldier once and a year later ask about the welfare of his wife and kids by name and remember their ages. This didn't get him treated like everyone's bitch.
Instead, it convinced everyone he deeply cared about all his men and this helped him be a callous jackass who threw their lives away at will and counted on others to remain loyal to him anyway because they FELT that he CARED.
When I was younger, my mind worked like that. I'm older and not so good with names these days, but still tend to remember the social details.
And, no, it hasn't helped me become some kind of great military leader and doesn't convince people to be crazy loyal to me while I treat them like shit.
My feeling is the publication in question foundered because it was created by and run by a "married-well" woman and her gay male friend. These are demographics that tend to get you cut out of the old boys club.
Not all (cis het) men know how to make money and cut deals, but you tend to need to be a cis het male to gain entrance to the group of insiders who do learn whatever causes that. So I think neither of the founders knew whatever it was they needed to know to turn their sort of successful publication into a real business able to at least sustain itself financially.
I wrote a blog post a lot of years ago about a woman's post mortem of her failed business. I felt that it didn't fail because it was perpetually "a day late and a dollar short" but more like a decade late and million dollars short.
My feeling was that if she had been a guy who went and had beer sometimes with her IT guy or whatever, she would have gotten smaller nudges much SOONER in the development process and the business died because she repeatedly made major pivots months after she should have made a minor tweak that led them away from all that.
Heteronormative culture is all fucked up and is the root cause of a lot of issues on planet earth. We expect:
- EVERYONE to be STRAIGHT.
- MEN to be providers for a wife and 2.5 kids.
- Women to be wives and moms who do "the women's work."
I have a skill set that if I were male would be seen as things like diplomacy but because I'm a woman people just think I'm their bitch and sort of ASSUME some man is paying my bills -- or SHOULD be -- and no one needs to PAY ME for that.
How the world overcomes this stupid shit I do not fucking know. I write well and I'm clear what the issue is and can't make headway on MY goddamned problem.
So who the hell can solve this?
