Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/happens-talk-salaries-google/

4 days ago
6
@EricaJoy's salary transparency experiment at Google

But emotional labor? Offering advice, listening to woes, dispensing care and attention? That’s not supposed to be transactional. People are disturbed by the very notion that someone would charge, or pay, for friendly support.

In context she's offering up that viewpoint as being RONG, if u read it.

lol

@ no one reading that but still having opinions on it

I love Herland, but my own favorite spinster manifesto (which doesn’t appear in Spinster) was written almost half a century earlier, in 1869. It’s a chapter in Louisa May Alcott’s misleadingly titled An Old-Fashioned Girl, a novel about being a youngish woman in Boston (which Bolick once was, but there the resemblance ends). Polly is an unmarried music teacher struggling with loneliness and depression; her friend Fan is an unmarried lady of leisure also struggling with loneliness and depression. When Polly suddenly becomes happier, Fan assumes her good mood must be because she’s falling in love with a man, but Polly corrects her: “No; friendship and good works.” Polly takes Fan to see her new spinster friends, whom she describes as “lively, odd, and pleasant,” and the young women share an improvised indoor picnic (“it’s so much jollier to eat in sisterhood”) and a riotous feminist discussion at the home of Becky and Bess, both artists, who are partners in a Boston marriage. As Polly explains, Becky and Bess

...live together, and take care of one another in true Damon and Pythias style. This studio is their home,— they work, eat, sleep, and live here, going halves in everything. They are all alone in the world, but as happy and independent as birds; real friends, whom nothing will part.

I love LOVE that book and that exact passage!!! Oh bless, bless her.

But as a spinster who craves connection and community above all and who has found it outside of the standard couple form, I’ve come to realize that I owe an immeasurable debt to the intersecting groups of people who have historically been barred from the privileges of marriage by law and demography, and have learned to create intimate lives apart from it. In other words, I’m indebted to queer people and to African Americans, and to all who have seen their loves and families treated as nonexistent or pathological, and who have had marriage used as a weapon against them or as a compulsory straight and narrow path to equality. These people are more than “awakeners”: they have done the hard work of loving and world-making in defiance of the powers that be, and all unmarried people benefit from their centuries of emotional and material labor.

Goddamn that essay is brilliant.

ya lots there v otm
slate review she links to is good too

what I don't get about the emotional labor article is why the author finds being an emotionally giving person so annoying.

She finds it exhausting. And asymmetrical in practice--women perform it, men benefit from it, it's basically invisible. That article is right on.

i way over-identify with that article because emotional labor was my life and major source of identity while i was in graduate school. it is not worth it, trust me.

or it's more like, it's work that needs to get done, but it's not valued or even seen. it's the same people always doing it, it's invisible to most people, and it takes a serious toll on the people performing it.

now i am obsessively summarizing an article whose meaning is entirely manifest. clearly it struck a chord.

EMOTIONAL LABOR: DON'T DO IT.

(or force people to acknowledge that it's a thing and make its practice more shared somehow.)

agree
i didn't need to read it to know it was true
esp difficult when someone is required to do emotional labor for money (like as a teacher or in another caring profession) and then do the same outside of work for free
as i said, i think the hashtag is crass but there's no arguing with the idea of unpaid emotional labor

yes i think being a teacher has something to do with how hair-trigger i am about this.

it's probably part of why you were drawn to the profession in the first place -- me too! it's just that it takes a lot from a person and there's a finite amount of caring pie to eat and if there's only one slice left, i'm probably saving it for myself because i need some care too.

#giveyourpietowomen

also i wanna say lauren chief elk is a rad writer and i like her ideas a lot

Almost every job where you care for others is paid poorly, whether it is physical or emotional assistance you are providing. My overly generalized, but most times valid, observation is that the more your job benefits a group of people that you can identify as individuals, and more tangible the benefits you provide, the worse your job is compensated. Doctors are about the only glaring exceptions to this rule.

that spinsterhood article is beautiful writing

Bolick goes on to ask,

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.
But what if it wasn’t this way? […]
What would that look and feel like?

with dramatic line-drops between each question, as if she is blowing our minds; as if these exact questions haven’t already been asked and answered by generations of women for decades or centuries. I couldn’t help but wonder: why does Bolick’s account of women’s existence seem so much more archaic than a book published in 1936?

sly

Aimless did you read the article? The low wages of ppl in caring professions is not even remotely the point. That's obviously not news.

In this post-Obergefell world we need to reclaim these terms.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/chilly-at-work-a-decades-old-formula-may-be-to-blame.html?ref=topics

not sure if this is the thread for this, but this study has been tearing twitter apart today

chait's response. no fan of chait, but it seems pretty reasonable

i sometimes forget that air conditioning exists outside of supermarkets

Is gender a more important determinant of core body temperature than weight and body composition? I think this article is risible clickbait and pretty effective too, A+

The real reason Americans crank the AC so high is that we are a wasteful society. People find enjoyment in wasting resources, it's an end in itself.

well that was m/l the point of the study

omg chait's response is basically soft MRA trolling.

i have a fan at my desk. it kinda sux

office jorts

towards the abolition of jorts

Don't know don't care crank that AC because I am a woman-shaped furnace.

same, if slightly less woman-shaped

didn't want to read about chait's sweat stain today

i'm ok wearing a sweater
this is a distraction

ooo girl let me hold that thread while u walk away

i guess as long as i can still feel my toes i'm ok

god i am so pissed about this PP spectacle. my friend's brother (and my longstanding nemesis) keeps posting this really offensive stuff to her fb wall to troll her and it's just like how on earth can he exist and have 7 children

one thing's for sure, "planned parenthood" had nothing to do with it!

like i literally think he is my nemesis
he has hated me since i was 15
if i were drowning, he'd be like "later, witch"

chait's article was stupid

there is no good reason as a culture that we can't loosen the dress code for men at the workplace

academia has already done it except for a few tweed holdouts. i wear an untuckted polo shirt everyday in the summer w/ sandals. i don't wear shorts but i probably could and no one would care

exceptional case, academics are slobs

if men can't change the standards for men's attire and men are in charge of everything, who do they expect to get permission from? come on guys, just wear your sandals and deal with the fallout.

ain't nobody in charge of nothin

except the a/c

the men are in charge of that

believe

even at banks they normally have a 'summer dress code' where you can wear short sleeve button downs and khakis.

"women are always complaining about air conditioning and unequal pay. but they don't know how good they have it. men have to wear pants!"

shorts are great & feel great. no room for leg shaming in this sweaty world imo

"women are always complaining about air conditioning and unequal pay. but they don't know how good they have it. men have to wear pants!"

― where the sterls have no name (s.clover), Wednesday, August 5, 2015 2:01 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i remember the bit about income disparity in chait's piece

I guess since emil.y started this thread, it's as good a place as any to link up some Jack Halberstam:

http://www.jackhalberstam.com/on-pronouns/