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"Emotional Labor" is just a buzzword people with "Emotional Intelligence" use to abuse you. I'm increasingly certain that "Emotional Intelligence" is just a measure of how good you are at emotionally terrorizing, gaslighting and lying. It's a measure of your capacity for toxicity in relationships. And somehow the same type of person who complains at having to be their spouse's "therapist" will also launch into a 3 hour free roaming tirade leaping between islands of seething negativity triggered by their salad not having adequate cranberries on it. She isn't paying $25 for a salad with only, what, 12 cranberries on it? And another thing...
And after not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, she walks away from the interaction confident in all the "emotional labor" she did for you.
The fact that we only control the capacity for destruction/abuse in men, but not in women, is closer to the root of the problem. Men are normally attracted to women with a high capacity for destruction: social popularity is a direct measure/expression of that capacity (and conversely, creates "nice girls finish last" problems if they can't secure a boyfriend powerful enough to resist hers when she sends him through that social pressure to take your resources).
Punishing women for doing that is harder, which is why it's normally (and traditionally) imposed by men-as-collective at a group level by default. Which makes things harder for the women who are responsible with that power, and something the ones who aren't interested in using it that way will (rightly) complain about being assumed guilty of wanting to abuse it by default.
The woke are once again more correct than the mainstream- gendered violence is a sex crime- it's just that most of the problems in society arise because the female gender isn't punished for its violence (and because feminists are all about encouraging its use...).
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In my Lived Experience from years of performing the Emotional Labor of mostly-consensually consuming content such as online discussions and mainstream media publications, my Emotional Intelligence has led me to conclude that replacing the adjective in female- and left-coded “adjective + noun” buzzphrases with “imaginary” usually causes the phrases to make more sense in the contexts in which they’re found. For example, mentally substituting in “imaginary” for the first word in the following phrases:
Maybe the term gets "abused", so to speak, but "emotional abuse" seems like a perfectly reasonable way to characterise a pattern in which e.g. one partner in a romantic relationship routinely insults the other, calls them names, accuses them of infidelity for no good reason, belittles them, lies to them etc.
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I strongly disagree. Emotional Intelligence is like any skill - it can be used for good, and evil. I would say my priest, who is able to look at me and bring me to tears with a few well meaning questions, has strong Emotional Intelligence (in addition to the Holy Spirit.)
Just because you mostly see negative examples, doesn't mean positive examples aren't out there.
I think "pathos" is a better and more neutral term for this concept.
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