That box might not even be domestic labor. It's entirely possible that box is where it was supposed to be.
It's interesting, the Harper's article does indeed misdescribe as emotional labor things that are better defined otherwise ("the concept of emotional labor: that I was the manager of the thousehold, and that being manager was a lot of thankless work"), but the box bit is part of a longer story that definitely includes emotional labor as well, including carefully managing her partner's emotions at being called out for his initiativelessness in household matters.
carefully managing her partner's emotions at being called out for his initiativelessness in household matters.
Exactly. The reason why I would disagree with:
She feels very real emotions about that box and what it represents, but feeling emotions about the failure of someone's else's domestic labor is not the same as doing emotional labor.
Is that managing those emotions is an important part of managing conflict and so is directly connected to, "get[ting] someone to do something they might not otherwise want to, or to keep your household functioning."
Although the very next sentence in the OP excerpt is:
What might follow is an argument in which Hartley performs emotional labor to make her husband feel better about this oversight, but the root problem here is about domestic, not emotional, labor.
which gets closer to what you're saying.
Yeah, in my experience those two things are more closely connected than that description suggests. But I'm just reading the article now and finding it interesting, so I don't want to complain too much.
For example, this seems like a helpful term to keep in mind.
The work of thinking about [what needs to be scheduled] has another term, which Bartz actually uses in the piece, "mental load," a common problem felt in all kinds of management relationships, emotional, intimate, or otherwise.
That box is exactly where it's supposed to be. It's only something that seems like emotional labor to her because she's the box dictator.
A slight tangent: my husband and I were talking last night about taking turns leaving the workforce to do unpaid things we each want to do, and how it would go -- how long the other spouse could stand the breadwinner role and putting their own unpaid-labor activities on hold. I hadn't thought about it at all in advance, but I found myself saying: "one of the difficulties of being the supported spouse, apart from all the domestic labor, is dealing with all the emotional issues that arise: feeling inadequate, bored, frustrated, that ennui that comes from having a really sweet deal and feeling unworthy of it. So you have to make a plan for dealing with that shit, because there's a limit to how much I [in fact either of us] want[s] to hear, 'Waaah, I'm so lucky, why am I so unhappy?!'" This is a real thing that I have seen in the wild! But it was funny to me that my answer was: sure, I can work while you make artisanal piñatas and fix your boat for two years, I don't have that television pilot ready to pitch yet anyway and my job is cushy. But I would lose patience really fast with having to soothe the privilege-guilt, and I think it would be the same if not more so with roles reversed.
It does seem like it might be possible to define "emotional labor" rigorously, to avoid the popular sense in which it's used as a cudgel and double standards abound.
Thinking about my own experience, I feel like I spend a fair amount of energy just keeping track of everybody's moods and trying to keep things running smoothly (less so for the last couple of months since I got an office, and it's been a nice break, but I still do a fair amount of that).
A big reason why I do that is I am temperamentally conflict averse, so I'm more motivated to try to head-off conflicts before they start. But I'm also actually decent at doing that (I'm also really introverted, so it's tiring).
To be able to do that I have to be ready, when we hit a stressful situation, to be the person who can step back and manage the situation, and not the person who's stomping around or venting, and, given the option, it would be nice to be able to be the cranky person every once in a while. But I feel like if I'm cranky it's just going to make things worse, because then it will just escalate.
I could be wrong about that belief; I haven't tested it much. But that's why I say that managing my own emotions seems directly related to managing the interactions with other people.
And the article says exactly that when it offers a definition which pairs, "consciously regulate their own feelings" with "attempt to shape the emotions of others."
In my experience dealing with the frustration at somebody else who's (unintentionally) making my own life more difficult is very much a side of the same coin as trying to shape their emotions.
to be the person who can step back and manage the situation, and not the person who's stomping around or venting, and, given the option, it would be nice to be able to be the cranky person every once in a while. But I feel like if I'm cranky it's just going to make things worse, because then it will just escalate.
Bitching behind people's backs may be a useful skill for you to develop.
Bitching behind people's backs may be a useful skill for you to develop.
I chuckled, but that's not really my personality.
I would be extremely wary of using "emotional labor" as a tool of analysis* without first asking myself how much emotional labor is done by other people (female and male) for me-- and only after that, moving on to investigate my own potential exploitation. The first part of that shouldn't take too long if I'm doing a hugely disparate amount of the work. (Spoiler: pretty sure I'm not.)
*Or maybe I should say: I'd be wary before going on record in the media or trying to plead my case. I've complained about doing emotional labor in the past, but it's totally possible that it was unjustified bitching. I'm a really fucking difficult person; I'll bet that even on this very website I have ungraciously benefited from other people's emotional labor. Thank you! Accept my gratitude!! Accept my fucking apologies or I'll cry right now!!! Where is everyone?!
So, what I'm hearing is that this article might not be using the term entirely accurately.
OMG! I've been billing my time wrong all these years! What if I get audited???
Oh, wonderful, whose job is it to calm peep down? Jesus, at least buy us a round of drinks before starting this shit.
13: I laughed at this headline. I didn't check the text for a Shakespeare quote, because that would make it unfunny.
she's the box dictator
The overlord of cardboard. The crate potentate. The chest baroness. The ayatollah of item holders!
See, this is why having a household where you do all labor, emotional or otherwise, makes things so easy! Except the part where you have to do the labor, but surely once I've figured that out the profit will come too. (Seriously, I don't know how I could manage another person's needs of any sort on top of all I juggle already and do feel incredibly fortunate that the other half of my bed is full of books and cats.) It really is easier and better except that the emotional labor gets done and the rest of it never does. Or maybe done doesn't exist. The laundry can sit in the washer until morning, right?
16 is glorious.
The laundry can sit in the washer until morning, right? -- er, after washing? Before, certainly. After: you might be looking at a do-over, but that's super easy because it's in there already. But it would be much more fun to build a Rube Goldberg machine to spring the laundry from the washer and roll it all out onto a vast unfolding net approximately six feet off the ground. Or okay something more boring like "right into the dryer."
This will be an after and that's why the god of whatever washer sweethome recommended came up with the quick cycle or whatever that I will run again. Or maybe get out of bed and go down to the basement to deal with now, but it's been too long already and I already took off my ankle brace. Ehh. Sufficient unto the day is the two loads of laundry I did completely and now I have a head start on tomorrow.
9
See, I fight the patriarchy by being the bitchy cranky one in my relationship.
I make my husband do the emotional labor as well as the dishes.
Though actually, sometimes I do feel like I deal with more of the mental load, and while my husband is alright at doing what I tell him to, having to tell him to do stuff is taxing too. I don't know if there's a point where I'll fully relax into the idea that I can trust someone besides myself with the day-to-day logistical stuff, even though I'm not objectively good at it.
"Emotional labor is simply the management of feelings (your own or someone else's)... to get someone to do something they might not otherwise want to"
See, I'd say that sounds like a pretty good definition of "leadership". Management is allocating people and time and assets to achieve objectives. Leadership is, basically, making people want to achieve those objectives.
23: Good point. Of course the type, quantity and difficulty of the labor varies tremendously. So for instance my academic director emotionally labors to keep her 20 (competent, self-motivated, adult) teachers working, whereas each teacher emotionally labors to keep 80-400 (unmotivated, undisciplined, juvenile) students working (or just shutting the fuck up).
Slightly OT because nursing a delirious mother isn't emotional labour on the sense discussed here -- it's emotionally wearing, but I am not trying to influence her into doing anything except not trying to climb out of bed and break something -- but much too good not to share: Nell had been helping for an hour (and that is emotional labour) and some time after she had gone, Henrietta Maria said "Such a nice woman. She'll help you get your thoughts in order and she'll charm the jury."
THanks, your majesty, for this testimonial to her character, and to mine, since I am clearly to stand trial for something or other.
Of course the type, quantity and difficulty of the labor varies tremendously
Well, that's labour for you.
This place really is turning into a Nancy Mitford novel: even our discussions of labour now have a subtext of u or non-u
"Honour?" I cried, working myself into a fine fury. "What do Americans know about honour? You can't even spell it!"
I'm a descriptivist. Except when Americans are just clearly wrong.
The trick isn't to find somebody who will charm the jury. The trick is to pick a jury with very low standards.
I don't know if there's a point where I'll fully relax into the idea that I can trust someone besides myself with the day-to-day logistical stuff, even though I'm not objectively good at it.
There needs to be the equivalent of a "ropes course", but for domestic tasks. That way, after you've learned how to load the dishwasher while hanging 30' up in the trees, nobody will feel compelled to re-arrange everything in it to be just their way before they run it.
The work of thinking about [what needs to be scheduled] has another term, which Bartz actually uses in the piece, "mental load," a common problem felt in all kinds of management relationships, emotional, intimate, or otherwise.
I see what they're trying to say here but "all kinds of management relationships, emotional, intimate, or otherwise" is sort of unintentionally hilarious.
35: There is no force on Earth that would prevent me from rearranging it just the way I like it before I run it.
The other place has ruined me: I feel lost without a like button!
The trick isn't to find somebody who will charm the jury. The trick is to pick a jury with very low standards.
Can I steal this for my firm profile?
Yes. But you can't use "All In Firm" because a local lawyer who is either oblivious or great took it.
[W]hile my husband is alright at doing what I tell him to, having to tell him to do stuff is taxing too.
This. If I hear "if you just tell me what you want me to do" one more time... Well, I guess I will probably give him another list and quietly seethe about also having to monitor whether it gets done.
There should be an app for seething/monitoring. The app will seethe for you until there's an uploaded picture showing the task was done.
[W]hile my husband is alright at doing what I tell him to, having to tell him to do stuff is taxing too.
This is hilarious.
43: Why? This takes up a large part of my mental space: spouse agrees that it will be his responsibility to take out the trash. But then, it becomes my responsibility to remind him that trash night is Tuesday, and by the way, today is Tuesday, and also to remember that reminders must happen within a few minutes of the trash being taken out. Ditto for any other division of chores.
Individually, each item is not a huge cognitive load, sure -- but if it's not that huge a load, then why the hell is it so hard for him to do it?
Hypothetically speaking, it's entirely possible that being repeatedly reminded makes it less likely he'll remember both because why bother if you're going to get reminded anyway and because you're not the boss of me.
On the bright side, imagine how awful it must be having a house full of servants.
Also 45. What would happen if you didn't remind him? Do you think he would keep forgetting until six tonnes of rubbish were piled up in the corner of the kitchen, or would he miss a pickup or two and then learn to remember for himself? Bear on mind that this is a functional sane employable human adult you are talking about here, not a three year old.
46: Servants that have to be told everyday the routine tasks that they are supposed to do? That's basically children.
47 somehow reached the same conclusion as 48.
Anyway, I was definitely going to eat that. I didn't just leave the dish on the table, you threw away my snack too soon.
Anybody remember that show Jerry Seinfeld produced, in which married couples explained their arguments and a panel of celebrity judges determined who was right? This thread is giving me flashbacks.
45: I think it's less that and more learned helplessness. It must not be Tuesday, because if it were Tuesday, someone would say, "remember it's trash night."
47: Since it's happened on more than one occasion, and he's not learned, I feel pretty confident that no reminders mean that most weeks means that it doesn't get done.And I have stopped reminding him to do the kids' laundry, which led hilariously one morning to the 4-year-old having no pants to wear to school, and then just laying into his father about the necessity of having clothes to wear to school. Perhaps I need to put the four-year-old in charge of trash.
I think learned helplessness is in 45.
If it weren't for learned helplessness, I would be completely unteachable.
There's probably more to relationships that fighting over household chores, but I forget.
Also 45. What would happen if you didn't remind him? Do you think he would keep forgetting until six tonnes of rubbish were piled up in the corner of the kitchen, or would he miss a pickup or two and then learn to remember for himself? Bear on mind that this is a functional sane employable human adult you are talking about here, not a three year old.
Hi, recently divorced woman here, who is living in a much more sanitary apartment now that I'm not trying to rely on an unwilling man to do half the domestic work.
I have low standards and I'm very tolerant of things not being done my way, so I really didn't nag or manage Tim at all, in terms of housework -- I just did about half of what I thought needed to be done, and left the rest for him to take care of.
Our apartment was disgusting and I was ashamed to have people in it. Now that I'm the only responsible adult in the place, it's still kind of untidy, but not horrifying any more.
(People with long memories will recall that I used to talk about how Tim did more than his share of the domestic work, and that was completely true for the first ten years we were married or so. During that period (when I was working long hours in law firms) I was vocally thankful and appreciative, and I was still doing a fair amount of domestic work, just probably not a fair half. As he checked out of the marriage, he also checked out of caring if the recycling ever got taken down, or if the dining room was filling with empty cans and cardboard.)
So, if my experience is at all typical, the answer to: What would happen if you didn't remind him? is that he would never do it, regardless of the obvious physical consequences.
But it's simply not the case that, without women to tell them what to do, men disappear gradually and happily beneath a growing mountain of unwashed clothes and un-recycled cardboard. Witness, well, my current flat, and previous ones I have shared with male flatmates. Somehow, miraculously, bins do get taken out, toilets cleaned and socks washed, with no female intervention.
I had an uncle who never married until he was close to 60. He did actually come close to disappearing beneath a mountain of unwashed clothing. He would have a trash barrel for his clean clothes and one for his dirty clothes. When the dirty one got full, he'd do laundry. My dad wouldn't let me go into the house when we picked him up to go to lunch.
Anyway, I think men with military backgrounds do better at not letting the house to anarchy.
60: Sure. The assumption isn't that men can't live without women taking care of them, it's that many (#notallmen) will refuse to take care of their households if there's a woman to offload it on. We're not calling men inherently incapable, we're calling them sexist.
Tim's apartment wasn't disgusting when he was a bachelor, he was capable of caring for himself. Our apartment was disgusting when he decided that it was entirely my problem to deal with it.
And I am serious that it's #notallmen. Tim wasn't like that until he began the process of checking out of the marriage, which took a surprisingly long time in retrospect, and was very puzzling to live through from my end.
But people talk about it as a common enough pattern that dismissing it as completely implausible seems unfounded of you.
In case anyone was wondering, Henrietta Maria finally fell properly asleep at noon after a week (I think) of delirium, and woke three hours later hungry, thirsty, and aware of her surroundings, if still only about 70% lucid. She is now asleep again and I believe that the crisis is over.
Yay! And so glad to know that she thinks Nell can be relied on to keep you out of jail if need be.
I was well pleased to see the second definition of emotional labor, since that is what I do all day -- leaning on people to get them to do something they don't want to do. That takes more out of me than "nice" emolab.
The debate over emotional labor still puzzles me. If it's about labor, then it must be a debate over compensation and (or?) regulation.
In the relationship context, the issue is that labor should be fairly divided, and you have to take emotional labor into account to make a fair division. Or maybe it's specifically that emotional labor should be divided 50/50. Or maybe that emotional labor sucks and should be minimized and both parties need to work to keep emotional labor at a minimum.
In the context of Your Paid Job, I am just confused. Emotional labor should be fairly evaluated and compensated, I guess? Listed formally as part of your duties? Training available? That all seems silly. It seems less silly to have a formal process in place for evaluating dereliction, rather than having people canned routinely for not smiling enough.
In the context of Society At Large, there's so little clarity about how labor should be compensated or regulated outside the household or paid-employment scenarios that I don't see the point.
Fair warning: any response to this comment is emotional labor, and I can offer only intangible compensation like politeness or making fun of you in a salutarily shocking way.
Huh, I want to participate in this conversation, but I keep starting and deleting comments, which either means that I have lots of thoughts that I'd rather not voice even pseudonymously or I lead a very inarticulate innner life.
65: So glad she may be on the mend. It must have been a horrifying week. And I laughed aloud at the jury comment. My demented relatives have never been quite that amusing.
Uh, 69 was all inarticulate garbage, so I don't think the standard is super high. Go ahead and be inchoate in public.
The jury comment was great. Now all of us who haven't settled down know what to prioritize above even emotional labor in a future partner!
I'd like to know other ways we can get the salutarily shocking mockery 69.last promises. Maybe this will be reaponse enough.
What kind of labor is managing not to hit that stupid checkbox on a phone?? Not one I'm any good at.
In the context of Your Paid Job, I am just confused. Emotional labor should be fairly evaluated and compensated, I guess? Listed formally as part of your duties? Training available? That all seems silly. It seems less silly to have a formal process in place for evaluating dereliction, rather than having people canned routinely for not smiling enough.
Well, as I say, leadership is definitely emotional labour (motivating people to do things) as defined, and that's generally treated exactly as you suggest. Sales and marketing are also emotional labour - you're trying to make people want to buy something they wouldn't otherwise want to buy. Customer service can be but isn't necessarily. If your job involves any aspect of persuasion, or leadership, or really interacting with people, it's emotional labour under that definition.
74: I was surprised upthread that you found the idea risible that delegating tasks to others counted as a potentially "taxing" sort of labor. Don't managers typically get paid pretty well for that stuff, and rewarded/punished according to their ability to do it consistently? Do you find it risible when they regard it as an occasional headache, despite the pay?
I think emotional labor is when you have to get people to do things and you have no non-emotional leverage over them. Or at least, I think that distinction is important.
I think I actually do more emotional labor around the house than Cassandane. Not to brag and I hope I'm not falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect here, I know I do a lot less of other kinds of labor, but managing feelings specifically? I think I'm ahead of things. But then again, that might only be true right now, because she's having problems at work. Conflicts with a co-worker seem to be coming to a head. I almost never feel the need to vent about my job but she's doing it at least twice a week. I'm trying to be there for her and advise her on general principles, and I admit I've been trying to moderate her impulses because I'm just a tiny bit worried about her getting herself fired. Just a tiny bit, but still.
17
I don't know how I could manage another person's needs of any sort on top of all I juggle already
I thought you managed three other peoples' needs?
75
Don't managers typically get paid pretty well for that stuff, and rewarded/punished according to their ability to do it consistently?
Yes, so the invisible hand of the free market would dictate. In real life, though, they aren't always good at it. See above.
75: I don't think he was contesting that it's laborious where necessary -- he was implying that it's pointless self-imposed busywork arising out of bossiness. Women who believe that they need to manage male partners to get them to do a share of the household work are imagining it -- the men in question would function fine if left alone.
75: I too found the original 22 funny, not in form but in content. It reads a lot like a one-liner.
Um. 79 should read "I too found the original 22 funny (not risible), not in content but in form. It reads a lot like a one-liner."
I left my husband alone for 9 months in a foreign country. When I came to visit, the toilet had not been cleaned once in that 9-month time span, and there was a thin sticky film on all surfaces (floor, coffee table, kitchen counters, dining table, etc.), with a layer of dust and hair caked on.
Before living with me, my husband lived with his parents. His mother and/or the cleaning lady did all cleaning. My husband is capable of tidying up after himself and washing dishes, but he had zero clue at the level of work required to keep a place somewhat sanitary, and no concept of household entropy. I'm not very tidy myself, but I do draw the line at physically uncomfortable or actually unhygienic.
My husband isn't an asshole, and I would say he legitimately does more of the emotional labor in the relationship, but I have to deal with more of the mental load, because patriarchy.
79
In fairness to you and ajay I did write it in a way to be a little funny.
I get the OP impulse, and I like putting things in boxes and categorizing them nicely, but I wonder if there's an advantage to calling it all imprecisely "emotional labor".
All together, you can lump the dozen minor things together into a heap big enough that you'd have to be an ass to deny. I suspect that telling your partner that you're taking on an undue amount of each labor type, properly labeled, isn't as effective as lumping it all together and wielding it as a clue-by-4. If you limited your complaints to a specific element at a time (like, look at the clerical labor I'm performing), it's easier to dismiss or counter as offset by engagement in other areas. [I know that my Dad and Mom had an "inside/outside" split for chores that he only realized was wildly out of balance when he had to take on the inside chores during her illness.]
81.1: I cringed massively while reading this, because the floors in our place are irremediably filthy and no one's light-colored socks ever lose their gray soles in the wash, a failure of both floor- and sock-washing; but the toilet needs to be cleaned more like every 9 days. As far as being "unhygienic," I'm sure there's way too much dust in the house in general, but we're all pretty healthy people...
I am definitely the "husband" who does nothing if not nagged. Thank you for bringing this to my horrified attention.
83.last: Yeah, that's a fairer split if one of the outside chores is "checking the traps."
We don't have traps to check, but when the mouse climbed into a bucket and died, I was the one who had to throw away the bucket.
There's probably more to relationships that fighting over household chores, but I forget.
Combined with Buttercup's 81 and LB's:
"Women who believe that they need to manage male partners to get them to do a share of the household work are imagining it -- the men in question would function fine if left alone."
The relationship fight is so often over what is necessary and what is "pointless self-imposed busywork arising out of bossiness." And by "fight," we really mean one side fights with action and the other fights with inaction.
87: Right. I put in testimony from one slovenly woman with low standards who was willing to let things degenerate to around what would happen if I didn't do all that much more work than he did, and didn't give him a hard time about it. It was disgusting, and we had piles of garbage (recycling, so fairly clean garbage, but piles) in our dining room for months.
I'm not talking white-glove standards here.
I think we need a metric that can be objectively determined. Like percentage of volume of recycling over volume of dining room.
Hrm. The pile probably wasn't ever more than a yard high and maybe six feet wide?
88:
Stipulate to the near-universality of your experience. Have men just been trained to expect women to do it? Or are we naturally much more slovenly and disgusting? Or both. I am going with both.
Unless you actually have a spherical dining room.
90: Anywhere else in the country, the poor man could have thrown ten times as much recycling in the backyard with no repercussions. (I suppose quite a lot of repercussions, actually, but the fun kind.)
I think if it were the fun kind of recyclable, the whole apartment would have smelled like the living room carpet in a frat house.
For the time-being, I (male) do most of the housework in our house. My wife is going through a more stressful time with her job and I figure it's the best way I can pick up the slack. I don't claim to be perfect at it--most notably letters that require hard decision making but aren't critical will sit around for months, and I'm behind on yard work, but trash gets handled promptly, I vacuum at least every other week, for a while I was making almost all dinners (backed off a bit on that due to tiredness; she's picked up some, with a lot of take-out), I do the cat-based chores, etc. Having good tools has generally made the experience more enjoyable; we bought a new washer/dryer a few months ago and I look forward to laundry (except for ironing, but I don't care if I look a bit slobbish). Podcasts have also helped; chores are something to do with my body while I listen to comedy or news or whatever.
But the balance might change at some point. I think both partners have to be flexible.
91: I don't know about naturally more slovenly and disgusting. Sally's going away to college has improved the cleanliness level of the apartment almost as much as Tim leaving. Newt's probably the naturally neatest of all of us. I refer to him as catlike, and it's not because he's graceful.
The idea that cats are clean animals amuses me. Our cat is by far the messiest family member--an absolutely awful roommate. But I think she's unusual among her kind.
97:
I think you have to throw teenagers into their own subspecies.
Admittedly, I'm also not thinking about our actual cats, who are trash. They break things, they rifle through the kitchen cupboards, they're terrible. But hypothetical cats are clean.
Hypothetically my house could be clean.
I don't think I've vacuumed, dusted, or swept the house once in at least 10 years. Or done laundry other than an occasional clean-up of a kid's disaster.
Also, literally zero yard work.
Very patient spouse, or do the many eager acolytes of Halfordîsmo do it all?
Also, literally zero yard work.
I am willing to bet that LizardBreath has done almost zero yard work.
It's also possible that I haven't made my bed once in that entire time.
Basically, a combination of paid labor and a patient spouse. Pretty sure that if I lose the ability to pay my domestic help I will be murdered.
91: Hard to say. I'm going mostly with patriarchy, etc.; shiv's naturally a lot more tidy and organized then I am (see, desk.) But the mental labor which concerns household management is almost entirely me, and that is taxing.
Making the bed is an unnecessary pain because duvet covers are the stupidest thing ever.
108:
I am willing to buy that. At the other place, someone was talking about how song lyrics on the radio are horrifically bad. It seeps into our brains constantly.
Same goes for housework. Halford said domestic help. But what do call someone who cleans hotel rooms: maids. When you watch tv, women clean the houses professionally and in their own homes. And then we teach our own children about what are tasks for men and what are tasks for women by how we divide labor.
We need a word like "chef" for cleaning, so that men can feel good about themselves doing it.
Also, nobody is fooled by bed skirts so why not just admit there's a ton of shit stored under the bed and fuck that stupid, dust-collecting bit of cloth that you can't even wash without lifting the mattress.
In the worst living situation I've been in, a shared house where everyone was a responsible adult along some dimensions, there were times when I got home, walked into the kitchen, looked around, and left and got takeout because I wasn't even going to try to deal with the messes I had no part in making. What happened, with me and maybe the other guy who had some sense of decency, was that I started cleaning dishes I used both before and after using them. I got tired of having to inspect each dish until I found one I was pretty sure was clean.
In college, I lived with six other guys in a rented house. One of them decided that we absolutely had to clean the refrigerator. Everybody else admitted he was right so we all gathered to do it. The guy who removed the bottom drawer vomited from the smell/sight of the stuff under the drawer. Fortunately, he made it outside before lift off.
106: But do you take out the trash? That's the big question.
111: "Internal affairs."
112: The solution is a storage bed--you can be honest that you're using that space, it's easy to get into and has built-in organization. The downside of ours is that the cat, much like the velociraptor of lore, has learned to open its drawers. Occasionally she'll open one up and just scatter the underclothes inside all over, the little perv.
This is sort of separate from the man/woman issue, but with roommates, things go bad unless either everyone is willing to do slightly more than their share, or you have one or two martyrs. Everyone willing to do only precisely their own work, and the system breaks down pretty fast, and with any freeloaders at all it's even faster.
118 - usually. I mean, I'm not a slob like LB.
78 I think there is a divide of temperament as well as gender here. I speak as someone whose ex (Catherine of Braganza) would undoubtedly complain at huge length about my uselessness, idleness, passive resistance, etc about the house and the immense amounts of both housework and emotional labour she had to do in our marriage. All this is true, yet one of the reasons I wanted to split up was to stop it being true, and to be left to do that stuff on my own, as it pleased me and to my own standards. This is partly a matter of mutually acceptable standards of tidiness, cleanliness, etc. I keep things pretty clean, but messy. I like mess. I feel disorder makes a nest more natural. There should be books on everything. This is not, I think, a moral flaw, just a moral difference.
But it is also a matter of imbalance. A relationship in which one party does all the emotional labour and the other does all the paid work -- as ours became -- is not comfortable. It breeds resentments. I felt constantly got at, manipulated, treated like an elephant: a great blind, raging brute who had to be controlled by the deft cunning of a weak mahout.[1] Catherine, of course, felt that she was doing the almost impossible task of civilising a thankless MALE horribleness who had no feelings or sensitivity at all.
So what appears on each part to be a relationship of selflessness becomes a limitless field of opportunity for little jabs of spite and cruelty; eventually a kind of wasteland of frozen mud and barbed wire where nothing lives for long.
wow. that was cheerful.
[1] Fuck anachronism. I'm sure Charles II knew all about elephants.
Labor around the house... Cassandane does more cleaning than me. I definitely do more cooking. She makes dinner probably once a week. She's usually not just watching TV or doing her own thing at the time, though, she's usually playing with Atossa. Keeping her out of trouble without just parking her in front of the TV is work. I'd estimate I do 25-40 percent of the laundry. Less than half, but definitely not zero. Cassandane is much better about cleaning than I am.
I'm unsure of whether this is a little unfair or very unfair, because I work from home one day a week and she does it twice a week, so that's extra time with the house to herself. I certainly couldn't blame her if she spent less of her time on housework.
113: Agreed. Related to the question of emotional and other kinds of labor in the household, what is the Unfogged/feminist/forward-thinking-peoples consensus on whether responsibility for house work is shared evenly, or proportional to whose idea the task was? I'm not talking about pretty much essential stuff like cleaning up to the standards of hygiene, I'm thinking of things like gardening when she likes flowering plants and I'd be OK with one creeping bit of foliage, one cooking herb, and mulch everywhere else. I first thought about this in terms of decluttering. I have four coats in our downstairs closet, Cassandane has 16. Someday that's going to be a problem. Sorry if a fashion-related example sounds sexist, I pick that both because the difference is particularly stark and I can put exact numbers on it. ISTR Bitch, PhD. had a post about this way back before she had co-bloggers, or roughly that early.
The obvious solution is for you to buy 12 coats.
[1] Fuck anachronism. I'm sure Charles II knew all about elephants.
Suddenly I'm trying to imagine us writing comments in the vernacular of the pseudonyms we're using, as opposed to modern English. I imagine it would last about 20 minutes but could easily last for six hours if neb is feeling motivated.
123 is so excellent that it retroactively redeems the entire relationship.
123 is nicely written.
My son is tidy, so we're a household where there's a little of this imbalance without gender dynamics. My mom is untidy, though not quite unsanitary. She explained something about her mess that gave me a fair amount of sympathy for her-- the piles of stuff (mostly paper, with scattered nonfood stuff that she's bought) are a way of organizing; those bills are there, she can use one of the old telephone books to look stuff up. SO if anyone tries to clean or rearrange, they're messing with her filing.
To me dysfunctional and unmanageable at her level, but I get having a pile that you look at where there are things to be done, and having it stay until you get around to them. But when I set out a paint can by the basement door, I'll actually do the thing within a month or shrug and decide to put it off and then move the can.
I saw someone I follow on twitter but don't know post apartment photos and ask people if they wanted to buy any furniture. The apartment was immaculate and neatly arranged and there was almost no visibly used storage and I found myself hoping that was all for selling purposes because how could anyone live like that? I was genuinely horrified.
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Student A (white female) walked by Student B (black male) in class today and ruffled his hair, and he gave her shit for it and made it clear, in a congenial way, that he wasn't amused. They had a short exchange where she said all the naively racist things ("It just is so fluffy today!") and he was firm in his responses without causing a scene. Should I have done/said anything? I was certainly struck cold by the violation.
In context, she is very outgoing and assertive, he is one of the most well-liked kids in the class, and he definitely has the upper hand from a social capital point of view.
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I think "Don't touch other students" is a reasonable rule to enforce.
Wow i STRONGLY believe you should say something to white student AND separately to black student. Jesus fucking christ that is offensive as shit. Probably for effectiveness' sake do both in private.
128: It's interesting; I've considered whining to the mineshaft before about lifestyle standards, labor division, and their shifting/failure to shift with life updates. When I get frustrated to the point of needing to vent, life delivers some impediment that makes asking her to step up unreasonable and I shrug it off for a few more months.
Long story short, when we met she was the career driven woman and I was less dedicated to my job. We agreed that I'd take on the majority of housework, since she frequently worked crazy hours. She bragged about our reversal of roles to friends and we soldiered on.
After a few years, we were both suddenly unemployed at the same time. We built a business together, then I got hired somewhere new and began my long commute... but the roles stuck. Instead of it being a division based on total effort (she was more committed to her career, so I made up 'work' time with home chores), I got labeled as the person who cared about home things. When I'd return home on Friday night after another week away, I'd do the laundry, cook and clean for us on Saturday and Sunday, and let home cleanliness slide otherwise.
In 2017, I'm the one who rises 2 hours before she does to begin paid work, and I'm still working when she returns home. I still do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and any vacuuming or other things... but given her shoulder injury, I'd feel terrible asking her to take on more. So it bubbles, and I sometimes stew... I worry that it's a frequent undercurrent of thought, marring our earlier relatively carefree relationship. But we're both super conflict avoidant, so it'll persist.
So it bubbles, and I sometimes stew... I worry that it's a frequent undercurrent of thought, marring our earlier relatively carefree relationship. But we're both super conflict avoidant, so it'll persist.
Given this, I recommend venting here periodically.
It's pretty fucking easy to make enough noise on rising that your sleeping partner has to at least wake up enough to notice you're resentful. The key is a snooze alarm.
Express renegotiation is a thing, which you should think about -- shoulder injury or not, there are probably tasks she could do.
Because everything is about me, I will note that I thought that non-express renegotiation was what was happening when Tim stopped participating in the household -- that he was reasonably moving from doing somewhat more than half to somewhat less than half of the domestic load. Took me forever to realize he'd just checked out entirely.
Make conflict avoidance work for you is what I say.
128: That was my Dad's organization system; it drove me crazy. He was a stickler for getting things clean/sanitized, but you couldn't find the furniture under the stacks of papers. I eventually moved out to stop dealing with it and have a place where I could control the clutter.
I'm pretty sure I don't want full communism unless I can also have a 3x/week maid service.
Obviously Moosequeen just needs a highly demanding job an equally long commute the other way. Then you spend weekends in a motel halfway.
Express renegotiation seems like a good fallback position. But ask yourself this. If you are both managing to ignore the elephant in the room, how much harder would it be to ignore a second elephant?
Also, if open communication of your wants and needs in a relationship is such a good idea, why didn't humans evolve to be better at it.
I am simultaneously the cleaner and more cluttery one in the relationship. I also own like, 80% of the things. Some of that's because I had a full set of furniture and kitchen stuff while my husband had just moved from somewhere else, but part of it is because I have 20+ pairs of shoes while he has, like, three pairs. My stuff takes up most of the closet AND spills out everywhere, and I know he's pretty patient in dealing with it. Right now we're in a 300 sq ft studio with no space for his stuff, so we are going to have to figure out a new organization system ASAP.
Maybe move into a 315 square foot studio.
134 sounds... not great. Have you considered/can you swing hiring help? A hurt shoulder allows cooking, and possibly folding/putting away the clothes, which is the worst part of laundry.... A cycle of resentment and no communication is bad, easy for that to get worse.
137: Yes, as an ATM, that's the approach I would have taken--basically, "How do you renegotiate things when the underlying circumstances have changed, but haven't been acknowledged?"
At the moment, I'm well trained to avoid the topic. Her mom was a merciless taskmaster, so she can't really engage with housework at all. The worst was when she wouldn't let me clean--because it'd make her feel guilty not to also be cleaning. So the house had to slide, because I'd both do housework and get sulked at for ruining her free time when I cleaned. (Cooking and dishes have fortunately always escaped that defensiveness.)
Now, it's easier to pick up the slack. I can do some mixed tasks (like fold laundry when in front of the TV), and she's okay with me cleaning during hobby time, so the house isn't a sty. I'm calling that success, at least for now.
(Cooking and dishes have fortunately always escaped that defensiveness.)
If those are outside the scope of what makes her skittish, can you explictly offload everything kitchen-related onto her? I don't know that it's half the work, but meals and kitchen cleaning are at least a big chunk of it.
147. Hopefully not sounding harsh here, but outgrowing the way your mom and dad fucked you up is a pretty normal goal that many people at least partly achieve. Exporting neuroses so other people have to accomodate them is something to work on, maybe with a therapist.
146: Honestly, I can't see using a service to laundry, cooking, and dishes, which is where the majority of my time go. Decluttering is the heart of what I need, and is what paid services seem to be worst at. (After all, if things don't have a place, they can't clean them to that place.)
I do keep the door hangers from maid services around for a few weeks, and suspect that'll be the direction I go. It's certainly easier than a conversation about dividing housework.
148: Unfortunately, I meant that she's willing to let me cook and do dishes, and when I do it doesn't trigger her defensiveness about not matching my effort. (Unlike my vacuuming/cleaning, which ruins her day by compelling her to also resentfully clean, or feel guilty for not doing so.)
She was a passable cook when she was single, but has convinced herself that she wasn't in retrospect--that she only had a few trusted dishes, etc. We have found recipes that we make together for fun (like granola), and a few that she'll experiment with on her own, but routine "come home and cook" isn't her thing. It's more a birthday treat to do so.
123 is wonderful. These are such rough conversations and I'm the poster child for taking men out of the equation not solving anything because oh god no, but there are complicated pressures on everyone. It's awful, right?
137 & 146-151: Thank you so much for your kind ears! Work deadline compels, so I'd better close this window or I'll keep refreshing and not accomplish what's needed.
Good luck working things out, or sympathy if it all just keeps ticking along as is.
I'm so good at understanding this stuff that I'm sometimes amazed the universe doesn't just spontaneously give me a MSW.
155: And then your salary would spontaneously go down.
Review submitted. I meant to appreciate Moby's 142 and 143 sooner.
141 is just cruel, Mossy, but a hotel would solve the whole "who cleans" issue!
Generally related to the OP, I have been helping mind four kids for the past two days, and I have never been so grateful for not having ovaries. I should be selling "scared straight"-style tickets for likely teen parents.
I love my godchildren immensely, but I think I'll start liking them a lot more again once they become teenagers. This 5-9 range is killing me--they were so much easier as babies.
There's lots of way to get kids without ovaries. There's fathering, theft, adoption, and teaching pregnant women to spin straw into gold.
NMM to no charges coming out of the Mueller investigation
That's so cheering. I wonder who is the G. Gordon Liddy of the Trump administration.
Well, Gorka is kind of a Mini-Liddy
I wonder if any of them will convincingly find Jesus. Let say at least .75 of a Colson unit.
The first indictments are probably just going to be Manafort and Manafort's toupe.
Best case scenario: It's someone low enough down that they can be pressured, but well-informed enough that they will be able to grass the big guys.
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One of the last places in town where people are happy to see me is closing down in a month. I went in last night and had some poutine for old time's sake, but it was all so sad. Guess I'll have to start bussing over to the CC Club or something.
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If Mueller has them for treason they can probably be pressured, however high.
69, 74, 75 etc: I don't think that anyone made this point before the conversation moved on, but the idea that a manager is performing emotional labour is actually pretty relevant, and illustrates the usefulness of the term* in feminism. That's because a manager is a traditionally male role, and the emotional labour is acknowledged and paid. Traditionally female roles (caregiving, hospitality and teaching**, for example) tend to involve considerable emotional labour, which is unacknowledged, and these roles are generally paid at much lower rates.
I have Thoughts about division of domestic labour too, but anything that I write could become a hostage to fortune, in light of the fact that Seed of Seeds appeared yesterday and my new, likely long-term domestic arrangements will evolve over the next few months. So far, I'm doing all of the bathing, changing and dressing. Semillas (recovering from surgery) is feeding. Rocking and cooing over has been outsourced to the hundreds of friends and relatives that visit by tradition in El Dorado (presumably to get the neonate's immune system off to a good start).
Turns out that they weren't joking about the sleep deprivation involved in having a newborn***, so I hope this comment makes some kind of sense.
*at least until it slides into becoming the new "neoliberalism", a fate that the OP article is trying to avert.
**"teacher" was the last example to occur to me and a bit of a throwaway, even though it's the only one of the roles I'm listing that I've done professionally for any length of time. Having typed it, I know see that Mossy pwned me on the manager / teacher distinction - although I think that the aspect of "doctors are boys and nurses are girls" is still worth making explicit.
***nor the part about getting covered in piss and shit. After a spectacular disaster last night, I thought I'd got the hang of the changing, but he suddenly unlocked the ability to pee across a room this afternoon, in the company of the aforementioned friends and relatives.
Each of my non-paying gigs has, over the last month or so, devolved into a Sorbornian bog of emotional labor. My paying gig is only saved because I'm continuing to work with a man who uses the term "Sorbonian bog" in casual conversation. And in court.
While "Seed of Seeds" is most Unfoggedy I feel it's rather unfair to the child. A bit like "Napoleon Shahanshah Stevens", say.
Generally called the Serbonian Bog as a legal metaphor, I think. Unless you have a case about Sorbs.
Every time I clean my apartment (poorly and partially) I'm amazed at how much nicer it is, and yet, I still clean my apartment extremely rarely. Right now atop the table at which I theoretically dine (in fact I only dine there when there are guests) are several books, a pack of playing cards, a folding knife (open), some tape, bike lights, Lexol, clothing tags, crumpled napkins, movie tickets, a water bottle, blue and white chalk, some kind of program for something, and an iphone case, presumably stolen, given to me by a grateful dude in a bart station when I gave him a dollar, and my earphone/mic combo thing that came with my phone. (Also, the vases etc. that theoretically belong there.) There are probably still pins all over the floor (in addition to all the other random crap) and all the chairs except the one I'm sitting in are either dusty or have clothes on them. I don't even want to tell you about the state of my desk.
This is all in reference to the hair-touching thing.
Update: there is also a seam ripper on the table.
Yes, Milton used an E, and lawyers without imagination follow him, but you'll find plenty of authors have gone with the O, for effect.
so, seeds, as I understand it, is no longer sinsemilla. The standard of dope as of all else continues to decline.
Congratulations, anyway. Wait till he projectile shits on a relative.
Is there a useful distinction to be made between emotional labour as "causing someone else to feel the right emotions" and emolab as "having all the emotions which that clod fails to have at all?"
Or between aggressive and passive aggressive emotional labour?
183.2: Yes, I think (though the "aggressive" framing maybe isn't useful). For instance a manager/teacher emotionally labors to change the behavior of their subordinates; that is to make them feel they ought to do their jobs/do the work.
Whereas a receptionist emotionally labors to change the feelings, but not necessarily behavior, of those they interact with: smiling at customers to make them feel welcome, regardless of their behavior.
Obviously not a hard distinction, because the receptionist is still trying to get the customer to come again, or not be an asshole, whatever. But there is a significant axis there, and different roles will fall at different points on it.
183.1.2: I don't see how that's labor, rather than just the effect of interacting with an asshole. One can envision situations in which one has to perform emotions on behalf of one who fails to do so; for instance repairing relations with clients in the wake of an asshole colleague. But the emotional labor there is directed outward, away from the asshole; whereas the presentation of 183.1.2 suggests labor directed at the asshole, within a marriage, say. In that case on the face of it I don't see that it's useful to frame it as labor.
Catching up on the thread, I think dalriata might be my partner. In which case, totally appreciate it, Babe!
Truth, my partner does virtually all of the housework. The routine stuff, he is 1000% better at than me. We are both shit at making decisions, but he is far more skilled at not making decisions than I am, so a disproportionate amount of that labor falls on me. I also have the job of remembering to pay all the bills, which may be the letters dalriata mentioned that have been sitting around for months. My brain hurts too much to clean the cat box!
(Yes, I am starting to question whether I am doing my "fair share." I hate this thread. Unfogged is stupid.)
I'm pretty sure it's spelled "your stupid."
Your stupid is smaller than mine.
Honestly, I think Semillas did the hard part.
185: I think you're not thinking of the right dynamic. Here's one that works better pre-Facebook: couple has friends and falls in a social circle that exchanges gifts. One partner puts events in a calendar, decides what to buy, buys gifts, wraps them, and arranges to mail or deliver them. One partner shrugs and wonders why they bother. The answer, of course, is so the couple continues to have friends. The dutiful half of the couple would feel terribly guilty and embarrassed about bucking the standard. The other just wouldn't. Apply to any number of situations - blowing off plans at the last minute, remembering food allergies, being late, and it adds up to half of a couple feeling all the load of duty and the other drifting along happily. You can, I suppose, differentiate all the tasks in some sort of taxonomy of labor, but the fear and anxiety re: consequence is the key.
Charley, do either of these candidates have a chance or is the linked just an unremarkable 'weird vanity candidates are weird" story?
You people basically made me vacuum the house.
Vacuuming the whole house was barely 1,000 steps. I guess because even though I was constantly moving, my feet didn't often move far enough to register as a "step".
On the plus side, my son made me a fried egg this morning. It wasn't very good, but I didn't have to move at all.
Anybody can break a yolk, but putting the egg on the pan before the pan heats up is an unforced error.
I am still in a headless-chicken hopeless panic about the kitchen. I cleaned the stove top! I spot-cleaned and vacuumed the floor!
I have more thoughts about how to distinguish emotional labor from just having emotions (there needs to be a separate objective) but no time to type at the moment.
Our chicken is not only headless, it's boneless, skinless, legless, wingless, and organless.
193: No disagreement, but I'd call that effects of interacting with an asshole. I'm hanging up on "labor". I'm referring to the emotional components of paid labor, you're referring to unpaid social labor.
200 made me clean the oven, but only in a really shitty way because I didn't want to get into toxic stuff.
Because I don't have a woman to patriarchy, my apartment is, by my own unaided efforts, not bad at all.
With surgery now scheduled for two weeks' time, I'm thoroughly enjoying the prospect of sitting in a chair in the kitchen and telling my teens exactly what needs cooking/cleaning/vacuuming/washing/hanging out/folding up/putting away. Emotional labour my hat - this is going to be a benign dictatorship. Charles says I'll make a good Tito [who got his nickname because he was always telling his subordinates "Ti!" (you!) "To!" (do that!)].
195 They don't have a chance. Sen Tester will be the Democratic nominee. The Republican field is open, but no-name nutjobs are not getting the nomination over either our (apparently Bannon aligned) State Auditor or a long serving judge, from a political family in our largest city, who resigned so he could run.
The Republican Party can get well known nut jobs.
Thanks, all!
Just wondering if I should be excited* about Mueller filing charges for arrests on Monday? I'm certainly excited about Trump having a giant tantrum, whatever the eventual outcome is.
*Were it not for the birth of my firstborn son, I'd be sipping fizzy wine at a motor race taking place today. Instead I get to catch up on my Spanish homework between the nappy changing etc. Obviously I'm reserving most of my excitement for the whole fatherhood thing - he smells so good! How do they make fingernails that small!! - but reading about politics is a nice distraction from antecopreterito usage.
How do they make fingernails that small!
LIke Krusty the Clown's line of toys, they're built by children for children.
210: Maybe a little, but no hosannas. It could be just a minor player like Page. It could end up a fig leaf of action - Mueller has been signaling seriousness like crazy but that could be posturing for the Beltway. Or if it is serious charges, it could trigger a firing and a new level of lawlessness. We are the ones who will save us.
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How is it that Capoteis so very good, and Foxcatcher so very bad?
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Congratulations, seeds, and best wishes, Nell!
In the context of early American history, I really want to believe that "Pitt's offense" was a novel-for-the-time sexual act which we now know by some more ordinary name...
It would involve Slavic men with moustaches.
I'm grilling outside in 45 degrees and light rain. Because I'm not letting the kitchen get t dirty so soon.
221: they all do, darling.
222: they all do, darling.
"Despite the name, 'Pitt's Offense' was a rearguard action, involving..."
Spelling hasn't been standardized yet, especially the spelling of my name.
It would be hard to explain to the family.
This thread got into my head enough that I cleaned the two ceiling fans that I can reach without a ladder, but not enough that I cleaned the ceiling fan that I can't reach without a ladder.
I bought a new ladder to paint my bathroom and clean the venting fan and put a new light bulb in, but haven't yet managed to buy what I need to clean up my painting mess. Does that count as Moby-level competence?
I've painted my bathroom, but not recently. I've also installed a new venting fan twice, but the second one drips water on cold mornings.
I don't usually do reddit, but somehow ended up reading that story about the wicked stepmother. Man!
231 Same here. That was truly awful.
Must be this, no?
Original post on Reddit has since been deleted.
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The details of the Schleswig-Holstein controversy have always been taxing to follow - the more so as nearly everyone involved in it was called either Frederick or Christian
I didn't even know Germans named their cows.
Møøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøøø møøøøøøøøø møøøøøø møøøøøøøøøøøø
We laughed, too, and we have just sat through half a set by the Doobie Brothers. Picking them for a support act was surely the bitterest and most twisted of all the Becker/Fagan jokes.
The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is in a can dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.
Sorry I've been so absentee. Crazy week at work, and then my parents are in town.
This next week looks kind of awful, too. If you've been sitting on a guest post, this is a good week for it.
sitting on a guest post
So that's what the kids are calling it these days.
I'll try send something later, Heebie.
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OT: Has anyone heard any recent updates from Alameida?
OT 2nd: Togolosh's situation with his girlfriend?
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Tomorrow I have to participate in a round table, and the prompt is, "The idea is to discuss why it's important for women to be in STEM fields - from both the science perspective as well as an individual perspective. i.e. why is it import for women to pursue careers in math and science and what is the value added to science and math? Why should young girls consider or even think about science or math fields?"
Am I being overly picky, or is this a really annoying prompt? It reads like, "Why is it good for science for women to be a part of it?" and my first answer is, "Who gives a fuck?" Am I really supposed to think of a gender-linked benefit to science that would encourage girls to especially consider STEM careers, the way tall people are encouraged to play basketball?
Of course it's good for interested people to have access to STEM fields. Of course gender-related obstacles are an impediment. Young girls do not need to be told that they might confer a special benefit to science by virtue of their wimmenly ways. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive.
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You just don't want the slide rules to be painted pink.
249: Because excluding half the population from STEM careers leads to a lot less good STEM work getting done?
what is the value added to science and math?
Tell them that hetero male scientists and mathematicians will choose other careers if they aren't supplied with colleagues to date.
OTOH, that will just quicken the arrival of AI that will lead humans to become obsolete and ultimately decide to go extinct.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/10/a-different-take-our-robot-hellscape-awaits-us/
If you ask me, young people of all types need ridiculous amounts of preposterous encouragement to pursue various careers. Fulfillment, advancement, help make the world a better place-ment, etc. They should be happy with "You'll be able to afford a house and never have to ask anybody if they want fries with that."
The only bad answer would be to quibble with the prompt. It seems very open-ended, like it's more or less inviting you to say anything you think is pertinent. Be creative, I guess? Tell stories?
Yes. Basically, don't be overly picky.
Am I really supposed to think of a gender-linked benefit to science that would encourage girls to especially consider STEM careers, the way tall people are encouraged to play basketball?
Not remotely a scientist, but there probably are some. A lot of male scientists seem IMO like total egomaniac dicks and probably on the whole science could collaborate better and do overall better work with a better gender balance.
I have a problem with women in science making really long sentences using like four semicolons. Or at least not supporting me editing them out. I don't know which.
Yes. Basically, don't be overly picky.
Also good advice for hetero STEM men looking for dates.
For what it's worth, when I was a college student trying to decide whether to stay in a STEM field, I was really annoyed at how much of the advising was aimed at NOOOO, we can't have women leaving the field, and how little at helping me decide if it was a good field for me. It felt like I was being asked to sacrifice myself for the good of the field, and it was really off-putting. And I didn't stay.
249
Of course it's good for interested people to have access to STEM fields. Of course gender-related obstacles are an impediment. Young girls do not need to be told that they might confer a special benefit to science by virtue of their wimmenly ways. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive.
I think the part of that most in need of addressing is the last part, about the special perspective. Outside perspectives are valuable all the time, and yet people forget that and need to be reminded all the time. I'm sure there are good examples of this happening with women in male-dominated fields or minorities in white-dominated fields, but the examples that come to mind to me are left-handedness and color-blindness. The former is considered basically neutral these days and the latter is considered a disability, but in some ways they both actually have adaptive advantages. The interesting part is, they confer advantages because they are rare. A leftie, in hand-to-hand combat, will catch their opponents off-guard. A color-blind person will fail to make distinctions that are easy for others, but the reverse is also true.
If you're willing to do a little research, I'm sure you could find an example that's more on-point, like the first engineer or researcher to consider differences in gender or race on some problem where they seemed unrelated until they weren't.
251 assumes that the limiting factor in amount of good science being done is the number of geniuses. I'm not sure that's the case; I suspect it's resources and policies. NASA put 12 astronauts on the moon, all of them men. If they had recruited equal numbers of male and female ASCANs, I do not think it would have led to 24 astronauts reaching the moon.
It's certainly true you wouldn't have gotten twice as many people on the moon, but I think it's pretty obviously true that if the society from which the thousands of scientists, technicians, and engineers were drawn had given equal education and opportunity to women, the Apollo program would have accomplished more with the same resources or accomplished what it did with fewer resources.
At least we wouldn't have to pay those astronauts so much.
263: neither, I think - though it is pretty obvious that the society as a whole would have been richer, and the people in it generally happier and more productive, and so there would have been more resources to put into the Apollo programme. And everything else.
In theory.
In fact what would probably have happened is that it would have been cancelled in 1969 to free up more funds for the Vietnam War, just as happened in reality.
265: and women are shorter than men. They could have made the capsules smaller.
266: But if society were richer and with that many more resources, we might have invented a better napalm and won via near genocide.
259: People in science should try to look for dates among normal people to avoid the problems of too much assortive mating and the eventual evolution of the human race into a species that selects mates based on publication records.
Or as described in that classic from back on the veldt: Methodological issues in the fidelity of oral transmission of effective mating strategies.
266.1: To be really contrarian about it, I suppose one could argue that reducing sex discrimination makes us poorer and worse off because we no longer have so many smart, capable women in gendered fields like teaching and therefore end up raising a generation of morons. Hmm, might actually explain a few things.
271: That theory was set forth at length in The Peter Principle -- that one of the only ways to keep people from being promoted past their level of expertise was to artificially cap their potential for advancement. I've actually seen it in action: when I started in law firms in 2000, the near-retirement generation of legal secretaries were these terrifyingly brilliant women. Younger women with brains like that went straight into law school themselves, mostly, leaving a less impressive generation of administrative staff.
Never read The Peter Principle, but I've sure noticed the same thing with secretaries.
You've noticed secretaries not reading The Peter Principle?
Ah, but that's a problem that will be solved as soon as discrimination has vanished because then there won't be any reason to underpay stereotypically female jobs and secretaries will be paid enough to attract really able people to do the job.
Theoretically.
The problem is that a generation of morons may manage to kill us all off first because they never got help from good teachers and secretaries.
What if we disrupted education by replacing teachers with apps and using property taxes to fund only militarized police forces and interstate highways?
Depends on how our robot overlords feel about emotional labor.
249: I don't think you want advice, so I'm not about to give it, but I think "who gives a fuck whether it's better to have gender parity in science" is a pretty lousy response to what is admittedly not a great prompt.
Aren't there ridiculously overqualified people working at pink-collar jobs all over the place these days? Maybe LB's firm's secretaries are the intermediate group between the victims of discrimination and underemployed millennials. Maybe the latter are too demoralized and humiliated to wish to appear terrifyingly brilliant at work. Maybe everyone is demoralized and an idiot right now. This day can't end fast enough.
Well the whole legal market took a shit on the workforce, so there are certainly plenty of young lawyers making less than what good legal secretaries used to make.
Yes, I am helping to construct the sewer system. A good reminder that the hoped-for end of the day means I'm closer to the day I can quit this job.
Sewer systems are very important.
I realize this comment thread is now dead, but damn it, I've solved this problem and I'm determined to bring the wisdom of my household's system to the masses of the internet. So here goes:
Principles:
1) Any task can go on the list. If you think it shouldn't be there, give it 0 points.
2) The task division can be re-done at any time at the request of either party. The other party may not veto a reallocation of tasks.
3) The frequency or other details of a task shall be agreed upon at the time of the addition to the list (for instance, clean the bathroom *weekly*, clean the stove *with 409*.) The person assigned the task is responsible for meeting the parameters established.
4) Once a person is assigned a task, the other person shall not remind, plan, comment, critique, or re-do the performance of the task. Praise and thanks are welcome.
5) The people involved are loving, responsible adults who will follow through on the commitments made through this process.
The system:
Each person writes down all tasks, chores, or responsibilities that are of value to both members of the household. This includes cleaning, errands, cooking, meal planning, financial management, scheduling service providers, travel planning--literally anything that benefits the household as a whole.
Chores may be divided into multiple parts, or merged into larger sets. For instance "Laundry" might be a task. Or "Clean Laundry" and "Fold Laundry" might be two separate tasks. Try to keep tightly related activities merged into one task. "Pay bills" and "balance bank accounts" shouldn't be separate tasks, because you really can't do one without the other.
Merge the lists, and then delete anything that you do together. For instance, if you always grocery shop together, that should come off the list. These are tasks that will be the exclusive responsibility of one person.
Each person takes a copy of the list and assigns a total of 100 points to the tasks on the list. The more you dislike a task, the more points it should get. Cleaning the bathroom gets 10 points from me; doing the dishes gets 6 points; planning joint travel gets 2. You must assign exactly 100 points to the tasks, but there is no minimum or maximum for each task. If you would be actively happy to do a task, feel free to give it a negative number--but your total points must still equal 100.
Average the points each person gave each task to come up with a Task Value. This is the number of points that each person earns for claiming each task.
One person starts by selecting one task from the list. Person two selects a task. From then on, turns are determined by whoever has the lower cumulative point value at the end of the previous selection. So, a person might select two or three tasks in a row if they are low-value tasks. Continue taking turns until all the tasks are assigned, or one person reaches 50 points. Towards the end, you might have to do some trading to get the math to work out just right; be flexible and be willing to take a slightly higher value task than your original selection if that's what's necessary to get you to 50 points.
Note that there is an advantage in selecting tasks you hate less than your partner. If I assign a task an 8, and my partner assigns it a 4, the point value during the selection process is 6. He can get 6 points for doing something that's only worth 4 to him. That's 2 points surplus value. So when you're looking at the list, look for tasks that came out with a higher average value than your own personal value.
Once you're both at 50 points, you're done! Each person is wholly, completely responsible for every aspect of their selected tasks. The other person should not be thinking about, planning, wondering, helping, researching, suggesting, or any other -ing about the tasks assigned to the other person.
But, each person is responsible for keeping their commitment they've made. Be a good partner and complete your tasks well and in a timely manner.
"Pay bills" and "balance bank accounts" shouldn't be separate tasks, because you really can't do one without the other.
If you say so.
286: The closer to the bone you are, the more it's true. If you have a thousand dollar cushion, it's easy enough to split--but you don't want the bill payer to rack up overdraft fees.
I don't think I've balanced a bank account since they created those little machines that let you check your balance at any time.
OK, for me, that's actually "transfer funds from appropriate savings accounts", not technically "balance bank account". But fill in whatever your own personal financial management chore is.