Is ‘Weaponised Incompetence’ Actually Weaponised? - "Despite trying to maintain an open mind, anecdotes, claims and opinions from relevant professionals, without reference to any formal study or body of literature prompted me to remain sufficiently sceptical. Such information was at the lowest rung on the hierarchy of evidence, and so I decided to dig a bit deeper into the origins of the idea of weaponised incompetence... why is ‘mental load’ defined so narrowly in the context of a household? Doesn’t every person experience a form of mental load while performing activities of varying physical and cognitive intensities through a typical workday? Couldn’t a construction worker be risking his physical safety due to various mental pressures? It seemed apparent that ‘mental load’ had been specially appropriated by feminist scholars, possibly as a technical term to be used in explaining inequalities in performing household chores. But the problem with that seems fairly obvious – appropriating a phrase that ought to include many types of people in it is confusing, catastrophising, and deliberately exclusive... If ‘weaponised incompetence’ was built upon these problematic concepts, how strong was its conceptual validity in the very particular realm of household relationships? Like mental load, has it been improperly particularised to the realm of performing household chores? And wouldn’t that deliberately discount the mental load that men carry while at work, especially if theirs could possibly be more physically and mentally demanding? It doesn’t mean that there are no men failing to put in equal effort, but does priming people to think in such a narrow way in favour of women’s personal experiences and struggles (alone!) encourage a compassionate and collaborative dynamic between couples? Despite the attempt to appear balanced, the above imbalance is clearly baked into the comic. For example, one panel depicts a distraught mother executing several ‘micro-skills’ such as ‘organising’ and ‘planning’ and ‘cleaning’. In contrast, her partner donning a work suit simply ‘works for money’, while sardonically commenting that it ‘looks fair’. Anyone who is reasonably employed knows that ‘working for money’ involves a myriad of mentally exhausting micro-skills as well, such as ‘organising’, ‘planning’, ‘managing multiple stakeholders’, ‘achieving timely results’, ‘not failing high-value, high-risk tasks’, and many more. These tasks are no more or less valuable or challenging than household work and childcare. But it is an oversimplification to portray men as being completely put together and having no other responsibility other than generating income, which is supposedly an effortless task (especially if you’re an executive wearing a suit in an oppressive, capitalistic society)... I then advanced to an incredibly strange panel, claiming that men had been socialised from boyhood to not want to pick up ‘daily knowledge’ and ‘navigate society’. This sentence made absolutely no sense to me – anyone who has gone through adolescence and ‘adulting’ knows the challenge of having to navigate an increasingly bigger world, regardless of gender. But a glance at the war in the comments section suggested that all of that meant…doing housework? And picking up their socks from the floor?... How lame must a man be to attribute his failure to put his shoes away to an incompetence in picking things up? And if navigating a supposedly modern and egalitarian society meant tying ponytails, then do we also speak of women learning to do rough and tumble play with their sons as well?... the comic had the tendency to attribute character deficiencies to men, by raising questionable claims that strayed from a reasonable definition of ‘weaponised incompetence’. As with many other ideas in psychology, weaponised incompetence seemed to me just as susceptible to concept creep, especially within popular discourse... In certain cases, malicious actors may weaponise pseudoscientific psychological narratives to advance certain ideological agendas. An example of this is described by Dr. Michael Scheeringa, who developed an interest in toxic stress theory, which posited that stresses in childhood can rewire one’s brains permanently in a negative way. It was used as the basis for enacting certain progressive policies in certain areas in the US. However, upon reviewing the scientific literature Dr Scheeringa found little support for the theory. Instead, he found out that the term was invented by a paediatrician, and then popularised and propagated via social justice activists and institutions. After publishing his findings in Psychology Today, Dr Scheeringa’s article was eventually censored for questioning something that had become scientific and public health dogma, and provided the false justification for political action."
A man doing something different from how a woman expects it to be done is "Weaponised Incompetence". Presumably when two women disagree on how to do it, it's "patriarchy"
When two women disagree on the proper way to do something, you realise that "incompetence" is whatever a woman doesn't like
When are fakers also drinkers? A self-control view of emotional labor and alcohol consumption among U.S. service workers - "Some employees tend to drink more alcohol than other employees, with costs to personal and organizational well-being. Based on a self-control framework, we propose that emotional labor with customers-effortfully amplifying, faking, and suppressing emotional expressions (i.e., surface acting)-predicts alcohol consumption, and that this relationship varies depending on job expectations for self-control (i.e., autonomy) and personal self-control traits (i.e., impulsivity). We test these predictions with data drawn from a national probability sample of U.S. workers, focusing on employees with daily contact with outsiders (N = 1,592). The alcohol outcomes included heavy drinking and drinking after work. Overall, surface acting was robustly related to heavy drinking, even after controlling for demographics, job demands, and negative affectivity, consistent with an explanation of impaired self-control. Surface acting predicted drinking after work only for employees with low self-control jobs or traits; this effect was exacerbated for those with service encounters (i.e., customers and the public) and buffered for those with service relationships (i.e., patients, students, and clients). We discuss what these results mean for emotional labor and propose directions for helping the large segment of U.S. employees in public facing occupations."
I wonder how much being in a tipped job (or other job where compensation has a strong link to personal performance) matters - the dataset lumped together "Baristas, cashiers, customer service representatives, sales associates, pharmacists, restaurant servers, bus driver, custodian, police officer, and security guard"
Socialists Need to Take Back the Term “Emotional Labor” - "The concept of “emotional labor” can help us better understand work and exploitation. But when it’s used to keep score between friends and family rather than examine our relationship as workers, it doesn’t bring us any closer to liberation... The term was coined in 1983 by sociologist Arlie Hochschild to describe the way workers must manage their emotions while on the job, and the kinds of jobs where that behavior is expected"
Emotional Labor Invoice : stupidpol
Comments: "I hate the scolding, condescending, passive-aggressive tone of the idpol Left so damn much. It so totally does have more to do with feeling superior to others and virtue signaling to one's peers than it does with actually helping anyone. It so completely kills any impulse I have to lift a finger in "allyship". I cannot imagine that prolonged exposure to it isn't pushing other prospective allies away as it did me. If a boss spoke to me like this, I'd be handing in my resignation before the day was out - thanks, but I know all that I need to know about what working here, for you, is going to be like. I mean, instead of addressing people in this form's tone, just be upfront and directly spit in people's faces, why don't you?"
"I find it hard to believe that the attitudes of correct idpol obsessed blacks is actually the product of decades of oppression. Oppressed people do not talk like this. Entitled, spoiled, letter people do."
Woman Up: I taught my husband about the 'mental load'. You should talk about it too - "I came across a whole body of research on what people call the “mental load” — all the "worry work" and intangible chores that women disproportionately bear, mostly related to household administration and logistics. I could relate wholeheartedly... I recalled how in the beginning, my husband was quick to say things along the lines of: "Just tell me what you need me to do and I'll do it." But you see, like most other women, I don't want to have to tell someone to take out the trash. That still requires the work of observing that the trash can is full and then delegating the task of clearing it. I want him to take the initiative of noticing when it needs to be done and then doing it without having to be told, so that I can completely offload the issue from my mind"
When one lives with one's wife and mother, one realises that it's not that men do things the wrong way - but that women have their own ideas about how to do them and get upset when they're not done their way
The Myth of the ‘Lazy’ Father - "You’ve probably heard a lot of complaints about dads over the past few years. We fathers are not pulling our weight around the house. Poor Mom is stuck working a “second shift,” doing more than her share of household chores even after a full day at the office. In fact, even “good dads” aren’t so good after all, and don’t deserve all the praise that is apparently heaped on them whenever they are seen in public within 50 feet of their kids... Among married couples living together with kids, if anything, it’s dads who do more work in total—adding up paid work, housework, child care, and even shopping. Moms do work more in some specific circumstances, but the data acquit fathers as a group of the slacking charges so frequently leveled against them. Further, the biggest complaint that is actually consistent with the numbers—that moms and dads do different blends of home work and paid work—is not necessarily a problem at all, and to insist otherwise is to devalue parents’ own preferences... Combining housework, child care, and paid work, dads put in just as much time as moms do—in fact, a little more. The Pew Research Center found this in the 2011 American Time Use Survey (though a gap of just 54 vs. 53 hours per week) and again in the 2016 round (61 vs. 57), and a joint panel of the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute confirmed the results using the 2015 data.. Some have also taken the approach of quantifying leisure rather than work, finding that dads get more of it—but, as also noted in All In, the additional leisure that dads get is canceled out by women spending more time on sleep and other personal-care activities... It is absolutely true that women’s work time tends to be weighted more heavily toward home work... To someone committed to “gender equity,” the problem is obvious. But this neglects the desires of the men and women whose behavior creates the inequity. If men and women behave differently because they have different preferences, and if we won’t force them to behave the same way, we cannot expect “equity.” Just look at the gender disparities that remain in Sweden, which does much more through policy to encourage equal work arrangements... it's awfully hard to square two decades of declining female labor-force participation and rising social liberalism with the idea that women’s labor-force participation is to this day primarily a function of their oppression. There’s additional insight in opinion polls asking women about their “ideal” work situation, which can tell us if the nation’s mothers do somehow have a repressed desire to do much more for GDP than they already do. In general, per a recent IFS/Wheatley Institution survey, just 28% of moms want to work full-time, 40% part-time, and 23% not at all (with the remainder saying they’re not sure). An earlier survey of the general public reached a fairly similar breakdown about the ideal situation for mothers and provided a contrast with fathers: Only 12% of the public thinks full-time work is ideal for moms, while 70% thinks it ideal for dads. A goal of pushing moms to do more at the office and less with the kids goes against the preferences of a lot of those very moms."
The Complexities of Interpreting Changing Household Patterns - "Despite substantial increases in married mothers’ employment and the expressed desire of the majority of women and men to share employment and caregiving responsibilities, gender remains the most influential determinant of who does the housework and child care today. Many observers have attributed the seeming unwillingness of men to increase their time in housework and child care as the linchpin of gender inequality, a manifestation of men’s patriarchal power to prioritize activities that provide economic rewards, such as paid work, or enjoyment, such as leisure... Women still did 1.7 times men’s housework in 2012, compared with 6.8 times in 1965. This is progress, but why haven’t we seen more change? Comparisons of housework by marital, parental, and employment status offer some clues. One would think that single women and men without children would have similar levels of housework, because they aren’t living in the same household with a partner or children. This reduces the demand for cooking, cleaning, and laundry, meaning that individual standards of cleanliness may be a bigger determinant of housework then the more inflexible demands of family life. Yet time diary data show that in 2012 single women with no children reported doing almost twice as much cooking, cleaning, and laundry as single men with no children... This is lower than the ratio in 1965, when single women with no children were doing about five times as much core housework. And single women and men have more similar patterns than with married parents, where mothers report doing almost four times as much core housework as married fathers. Nevertheless, there is still a substantial difference in household workloads between single, childless men and women, and it is not one that can plausibly be explained by men’s exercise of patriarchal power. Closer inspection suggests that it is laundry and cleaning, more than cooking, that accounts for most of the differences in the amount of housework single men and women choose to do or not do. For example, in 2012, single women with no children report 13 minutes a day of laundry and 31 minutes cleaning. By contrast, single men report only seven and 17 minutes per day respectively in the same tasks. Differences between single women and men with no children, and women and men who are married and/or parents follow similar lines... Unlike the downward trend in women’s housework and the more modest uptick in men’s housework (which stalled in the mid-1980s), mothers and fathers have both steadily increased their time investments in daily and developmental child care since 1975... Mothers’ and fathers’ high levels of developmental child care time reflect new cultural norms of parenting that demand high investments of resources – time and money – in children. “Good” parents are those who prioritize children’s care and activities over their own needs and desires. Good parents are “experts” in children’s needs and developmental processes, and exercise intense, hands-on supervision of children’s whereabouts and activities. “Free range” children, meaning those who independently play outside or walk to activities, were relatively commonplace in the 1950s, but are remarkable enough today to result in visits from child protective services. Child care remains a highly gendered activity. Again, this does not seem to stem primarily from fathers’ intransigent exercise of patriarchal power. Mothers are held accountable to standards of intensive parenting to a greater extent than fathers, but qualitative data suggest fathers today feel that children are entitled to men’s close attention and time (Daly 1996; Daly 2001) and fathers and mothers both report feeling they spend too little time with children (Milkie et al. 2010). In fact, studies suggest that some mothers may limit fathers’ involvement with children to maintain control over childrearing, a phenomenon referred to as maternal gatekeeping (Allen and Hawkins 1999; Schoppe-Sullivan et al. 2008)."
This saves me the trouble of going into time use data to debunk the myth of the second shift - men and women just have different standards for necessary housework. And that's why women need to ask men to do stuff - men don't see what women think needs to be done
The fact that laundry and cleaning (which are more discretionary than cooking) show more variance between single men and single women shows that women have higher standards than men - which is why they do more housework
Of course, they need to blame "gender stereotypes" for the disparity still - but at least the study debunks the myth of direct oppression
Emotional Labor and Invisible Household Work - A Male Perspective - "Here are three household management principles Kia and I try to live by...
1. Ask for praise/get acknowledged (no work should be invisible).
We take this to ridiculous, farcical extremes. Every time one of us cleans the kitchen, it’s either “Hey, did you notice anything about the kitchen?” or even more directly “Come admire the kitchen.” The other person is then obligated to ooh and aah with much enthusiasm. Which we both do gladly, because it’s easier than cleaning the kitchen.
2. Surrender control/don’t micromanage.
If you want your partner to step up and start doing a larger share of work in a particular area, you need to resist the urge to say “You’re doing it wrong.” Even if they are. Children, especially, are resilient, and will likely survive your partner’s clumsy, wrong-headed, uninformed attempts to feed them dinner, get them ready for bed, or drop them off at piano practice. After awhile your partner will get better at whatever it is, and you may discover that “truths” about your offspring (they won’t eat spicy food, they need x y and z to fall asleep, etc.) are simply habits built into your personal routine with that child.
3. Optimize for what you enjoy and care about...
Of course there are inevitably tasks that neither partner enjoys or is good at. For these, outsource? Or get rid of the job entirely? (Neither Kia or I enjoy car maintenance; we got rid of the car). Or divide up the work in a way that feels fair. Or put the kid(s) to work...
It turns out that the academic definition of emotional labor differs significantly from the way Hartley uses the term. Sociologists define emotional labor as the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. In other words it’s the work of not punching someone in the face who probably deserves it... Hartley includes some things that fall into this this definition of emotional labor, like communicating with in-laws and doing the greater share of childcare, but she also lumps in a bunch of other things, like household scheduling, tidying up, adding items to the shopping list, and doing laundry. Has the popular definition of emotional labor morphed to include all housework?"
Opinion | What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With - The New York Times - "“I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”... “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.” A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.” Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.”... A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”... If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than women’s. It’s up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out."
Basically, feminists say that women's needs, comforts and desires matter more than men's, and that there should be no compromise and that the feminine standard is the one that should stand
Arlie Hochschild: Housework Isn't 'Emotional Labor' - The Atlantic - "It was first coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book on the topic, The Managed Heart. Emotional labor, as she conceived it, referred to the work of managing one’s own emotions that was required by certain professions. Flight attendants, who are expected to smile and be friendly even in stressful situations, are the canonical example. In recent years, the term’s popularity has grown immensely—Google searches for it are up, and it’s being mentioned more and more in books and academic articles. Many people who write about emotional labor do tip their hats to Hochschild, and acknowledge that they are expanding her original definition, but the umbrella of emotional labor has grown so large that it’s starting to cover things that make no sense at all, such as regular household chores, which are not emotional so much as they are labor, full stop. “Really, I’m horrified,” Hochschild said of the concept creep when I called her to set the record straight...
Arlie Hochschild: Emotional labor, as I introduced the term in The Managed Heart, is the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. Some jobs require a lot of it, some a little of it. From the flight attendant whose job it is to be nicer than natural to the bill collector whose job it is to be, if necessary, harsher than natural, there are a variety of jobs that call for this. Teachers, nursing-home attendants, and child-care workers are examples. The point is that while you may also be doing physical labor and mental labor, you are crucially being hired and monitored for your capacity to manage and produce a feeling... It is being used to apply to a wider and wider range of experiences and acts... It’s very blurry and over-applied... There seems an alienation or a disenchantment of acts that normally we associate with the expression of connection, love, commitment. Like “Oh, what a burden it is to pick out gifts for the holiday for my children.” Or “Oh, it’s so hard to call a photographer to do family Christmas photos, and then to send it to my parents.” I feel a strong need to point out that this isn’t inherently an alienating act. And something’s gone haywire when it is. It’s okay to feel alienated from the task of making a magical experience for your very own children. I’m not just judging that. I’m saying let’s take it as a symptom that something’s wrong... One of the tragic effects of a stalled revolution is many women cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands.
Beck: Is it emotional labor if you are the person in the friend group who people keep turning to for advice or help solving their problems?
Hochschild: It can be emotional labor you love... If you have an important conversation using muddy ideas, you cannot accomplish your purpose. You won’t be understood by others. And you won’t be clear to yourself."
Emotional Labor: More Than Just a Feminist Buzzword - "I was more familiar with emotional labor as an excuse offered up by social justice warriors when they refuse to explain their points in online exchanges. The infamous 2014 HuffPost Live interview comes to mind, in which activist Suey Park told host Josh Zepps that she wouldn’t “enact [the] labor” of explaining why she took offence at his criticism of her ideas, when asked. A whole book about that entitled, huffy petulance? Sign me up for that dumpster fire, I thought... Hartley details her heartache and reluctance over that method, espoused by Tiffany Dufu in her book, Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less. Dufu advocates simply not doing the jobs that your family and spouse refuse to help you with. She doesn’t instruct women to neglect their children—merely to let go of the things they do because no one else will do them. Things won’t go smoothly. Timmy may forget his jacket one day, hubby may go five years without visiting the dentist, but those you take care of will live with the consequences and learn responsibility... I don’t call myself a feminist for the same reason Hartley thinks men should take on more emotional labor: a society in which women flourish but men suffer is just as unacceptable to me as the reverse... It’s very important that men get up and go to work to support their families every day, but if that’s all they do—if it’s the wife doing the budgeting, arranging things like doctor’s appointments and writing the family’s Christmas newsletter—what happens down the road, when the wife dies? A Rochester Institute of Technology study found that recently widowed men experience a thirty percent increase in mortality; women don’t seem to have any increased chance of dying after the deaths of their husbands... “When a wife dies, men are often unprepared. They have often lost their caregiver, someone who cares for them physically and emotionally, and the loss directly impacts the husband’s health.” Even worse, the risk of death rises by sixty-six percent in the first three months after men are widowed. Without their wives, men are less likely to watch what they eat and take care of themselves physically. They’re more likely to become socially isolated, because the work of maintaining a couple’s social relationships mostly falls to the woman. Depression rates skyrocket."
Urban Dictionary: Emotional labour - "Emotional labour was originally a word for people who have to put a lot of uncompensated emotional effort into their job. Recently, however, it's more along the lines of "idk, it kinda sucks when I have to listen to my boyfriend" or "now that I've made my statement, I don't want to defend myself or back it up because it's emotionally laborious""
“I don’t owe you emotional labor,” is another way of saying, “I don’t have the sources to back up my opinions but demand you accept them anyway.”
