There’s been a sense of mission-creep from women don’t owe you sex, domestic labour, or prettiness to the idea that women don’t owe anybody anything. The recognition that the weight of emotional baggage is unevenly distributed has, amongst some contemporary feminists, morphed into the idea that any sense of obligation is itself the enemy. In mapping the language of emotional labour onto the terrain of relationships and the home, feminists found a way to articulate the invisible burden of interpersonal work thrust upon women. For some reason, it’s always you who’s responsible for making sure nobody gets upset at Christmas, or your partner doesn’t feel rushed into commitment, or monitoring the shared bathroom’s toothpaste levels. This care work can include obvious, discrete tasks like hair-washing and birthday-remembering, or the much more insidious business of finding yourself trapped within a particular social role. Over time, the concept of emotional labour became unmoored from its origins in the world of employment, and applied to the domestic and interpersonal sphere.Įmotional labour came to describe the caring work disproportionately undertaken by women and femmes to look after, manage and nurture people within their social orbit. The term emotional labour was coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1980s to describe the unpaid, interpersonal work that accompanies certain professions: Pret baristas being required to smile maniacally when taking your order, for example, or retail staff in The Kooples looking menacingly cool. THE AMOUNT OF EMOTIONAL LABOR I’VE PERFORMED IN THE PAST TWO HOURS HOLY FUCK “THE AMOUNT OF EMOTIONAL LABOR I’VE PERFORMED IN THE LAST TWO HOURS HOLY FUCK.” While this was roundly mocked (and perhaps, unfairly so – who amongst us hasn’t tweeted something galumphingly stupid?), these tweets are indicative of the most absurd edge of “not my problem” feminism. Earlier this year, a micro-scandal was born when one parent took to Twitter to complain about washing their 11-year-old child’s hair, and the 18-year-old “using me as a therapist and a crisis counsellor”. There’s no need to retread old ground, but the centrality of particular kinds of emotional labour as an object of examination in feminist pop culture deserves a bit more prodding. I’ve written before about the limitations of influencer activism, and the blasé cruelty of some of its leading lights. But the list of things that women are told they are not obligated to do, be, or provide, range from the self-evidently reasonable (the title of Given’s book, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty invites as much disagreement as Labradoodle Puppies Are Cute ) to the remarkably callous. If I had access to a time machine, I’d first kill baby Hitler, and then go back to 2016 to shake my younger self and scream “you’re not going to change him” until I got the message. Though “dump him” feminism may be a little reductive, it’s a timely reminder to young women enduring relationships in which they feel disempowered that they do have ultimate agency in deciding whether or not that continues. To be fair, there is some good advice to be found. The solution, advocated by the likes of Florence Given, Slumflower, and their many imitators, is to simply check out of social interactions that are spirit-sapping or otherwise emotionally taxing. Recent years have seen a revived focus, driven by feminist-tinged content creators, on the burden of emotional labour – and how to be relieved of it. In the canva-designed space between influencing and feminism, these are the rallying cries of young women sick to the hind teeth of the demands placed on them by gender. “You are enough”, “it’s a wonderful day to dump him”, “you don’t owe anyone anything”.
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