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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31838 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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The concept was originally applied to job, if I remember correctly. Ex: the flight attendant whose father passed away yesterday but still serves snacks and drinks on the flight with a smile and pleasantries is performing emotional labor.

I don't mind it as an idea in that context, honestly, but the people applying it to personal relationships are insane.

I always found it strange for activists to complain about emotional labour (rather than simply describing it neutrally). I mean sure, most emotional-labour heavy jobs are predominantly female, but that's because those are the jobs women want. A woman doesn't become a nurse because she likes changing bedpans, she becomes a nurse because she likes caring for people. The emotional labour is the main appeal of the job.

Emotional labour for someone that appreciates it can definitely be one of the appeals of the job. Emotional labor for someone that's screaming obscenities at you is crap and probably the worst part of the job.

Activists complain about the latter and don't talk about the former because they're activists. If they thought "yeah, everything's okay actually" they wouldn't be activists. People tend to complain when their jobs are bad and not say anything when it's good anyways, so I'm not surprised you don't see much talk about good emotional labor.

Uh, I’m pretty sure women go into nursing because it pays very well and is female gendered:

because it pays very well

This study suggests its appeal lies in it being a caring profession. This one too. I don't know how things are in every country but in the UK, nursing doesn't really pay well. The average nursing wage is only slightly above the average wage for the country as a whole. Also, we see in other jobs that higher salaries attract more men than women, relative to the pleasantness of the job. High salaries should make nursing more male, not more female.

and is female gendered

That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.

That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.

Because of conditions on the ground in ~1950 when it was one of the few acceptable female jobs?

That doesn't explain why its female dominated now though. Medicine and law used to be male dominated. Now women make up a majority of new doctors and lawyers. These things can and do change.

A better explanation is that nursing, a caring profession, is majority female because all caring professions are majority-female, because women enjoy caring (for obvious biological reasons relating to maternity).

That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.

At some point, no, it just reinforces itself.

If you want the historical root cause: Because women have always been predisposed towards care work on acount of remaining at home with the young, sick and elderly while men went out and abroad.

The purpose of inventing the term "emotional labor" is to justify why nurses etc. deserve more wages or more status. It would be strange for them not to be complaining about it

I always found it strange for activists to complain about emotional labour (rather than simply describing it neutrally).

Is it ever strange for activists to complain about anything? That seems to be a fundamental part of the job description.

Less pithily and more specifically to your point, the types of activists you're talking about, i.e. feminists of a certain stripe, tend to buy into the idea of the patriarchy which has literal brainwashing powers that falsify preferences, and they tend to genuinely believe that but for the patriarchy, women would have exactly the same set of interests as men. As such, women being more into jobs like nursing because they like the "caring for people" aspect of the job is considered merely yet another way in which women are victimized by the patriarchy.

The concept was originally applied to job, if I remember correctly. Ex: the flight attendant whose father passed away yesterday but still serves snacks and drinks on the flight with a smile and pleasantries is performing emotional labor.

Remember the name of this forum. That's the motte. The common meaning is the bailey.

The people who treat romantic relationships as jobs are just generally insane.

Women who treat romantic relationships as jobs end up with richer husbands, and therefore a higher material standard of living, than comparably hot women who treat romantic relationships as a source of emotional validation. Taking advantage of this fact is frequently not insane - and was in fact "just common sense" for most of human history.

Or in other words, more proficient [sex] workers tend to end up with more lucrative exclusivity agreements.

Which is why it's understandable that a generation of people who just take being well-off/stable for granted will deny this dynamic exists.

Women who treat them as jobs are otherwise known as gold diggers(barely more positive connotation than the word it rhymes with) or trophy wives(neutral connotation), and most of these women have a high but not above a normal upper class standard of living because rich husbands put their much younger wives on allowances and make them sign prenups and all that.

Women who treat them as investments are the ones who come out ahead, and this is the historical attitude you’re referencing.

Maybe “vocation” would be a suitable term here?

"Career" would surely be the common English word?

Roman Catholicism recognizes marriage, religious, and ordained life as the three vocations.

As I poasted about only a few days ago. So one useless internet point to you.

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