As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.

Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.

Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).

Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.

What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

Don't forget to adhere to the emotional dress code at work today! Negative or non-approved emotions are bad for business and should not be worn while on the clock!

Also remember, under socialism there is no individuality or freedom of expression! It is capitalism and the free market that gives us that!

~Sincerely, Corporate!

Hey, I've recently discovered a Youtube channel, The Financial Diet, and they have some really good material. I've mostly been listening to the stuff about how domestic chores aren't evenly distributed in marriage. Whether a woman chooses to be a career woman or a housewife, she's still getting the short end of the stick and will usually bare the majority of the weight for the household. I'd recommend this video in particular, Solving The Problem Of The Adult Toddler Husband. They bring up some really good points that have sat with me since I first watched it. For example, a group of very accomplished women left the house for 2 hours and WWIII broke out at home because their husbands couldn't manage. All the women had to abandon their plans and go tend to the house. Hearing stuff like this gives me pause. I'd really like to get married and be a mother, but it just seems like a bad business move, no matter the type of man a woman marries. I'm not the sacrificial type--I want to be a mother and a wife and still maintain my own identity. Just thought I'd share this here because I live in a region where I'm not allowed to bring up these issues lest I sound like a, feminist (*gasp*).

Hi love! Yes, I think The Financial Diet channel is great. Chelsea has some great, easy-to-understand tips regarding personal finance/money management, and I love her guest contributors/podcast guest episodes. Oh, this notion highlighted in this episode is SO true IRL. A 2008 study found that husbands add 7 hours of housework a week to their wives' plates, while wives decreased a husband's household chores by 1 hour per week.

Check out Melanie Hamlett on TikTok if you want to dive further into this topic. She labels the man in this dynamic under the patriarchy as "King Baby," and it gets me every time!

The Commercialization Of Intimate Life by Arlie Russell Hochschild is a wonderful read on this topic (and the most intersectional text I've found on the subject).

Glad to share more on this topic in the future if there's interest xx

Being the oldest daughter of a divorced father means going home for the holidays involves such a great level of physical and emotional labor I don’t know that I classify this time as restful in the least.

“. . . [I]t is the absence of reverence for male status and the absence of concern for the consequences, which symbolises the permission that [Rebecca] West represents today. I know that females are required to massage male egos, to—in the words of Virginia Woolf—reflect men at twice their natural size —for this is one of the ways that the illusion of male mastery is maintained. It is hard for women to break free from those unwritten but deeply engrained rules which make us refrain from showing up a man in public: instead our training and social pressure prompts us to pretend ignorance of male ineptitude, to gloss over glaring errors, to change topics of conversation so that a man may appear at his best and most impressive. And we smile all the while that we do it. I suspect that even the most elementary research project would disclose a veritable 'underworld' of women's meanings—communicated by glance or gesture—as women make unspoken arrangements to 'rescue' a man in difficulty and without fuss or disturbance, restore him to his prestigious place. We perform these services so often and the fact that they are not talked about, not widely recognised as part of women's daily reality, probably has much to do with the understanding that if women were to document and legitimate the enormous amount of unfair unpaid work they are required to do in the task of emotionally managing men, they would in all likelihood stop. They might even start reflecting men at their natural size, as West did, and begin to put an end to the illusion of male superiority.

Rebecca West encouraged women to see and make real this aspect of oppression. As Jane Marcus has said, Rebecca West attacked the concept of service to men as ‘dangerous and reactionary . . . self sacrifice was the most mortal of sins, a sin against life itself.’ As Virginia Woolf and Mary Beard were to do later (and as countless women had done before, see Dale Spender, 1982b), she urged women to break free from the belief in their own oppression and the behaviour required by it: she roused them to weed out the victim in their souls. 'A woman must no longer choose the role of the woman behind the great man, mother, sister, lover or wife to his genius. She must stop being the muse and become mistress of her own art, her own science, herself,' states Marcus (1982) summarising West's philosophy (p. 3).”

-Dale Spender, There’s Always Been a Women’s Movement This Century

I really wish people who think trans women aren't treated like women could see the endless amounts of social and emotional labor demanded of them, both to be legitimately seen as women, and as payment for rejecting maleness. Because holy shit I don't think they understand. The amount of people who have asked me to be their lifeline when they need a suicide watch is insane. The amount of people treating me as their personal therapist is astonishing. There is genuinely no other explanation for some of the shit people do than that trans women are the proverbial whipping girls of the queer community and we have to shoulder people's emotional burdens alone.

I've sent in asks about caretaking and my grandmother. She passed away and her funeral was last week. After working with my aunt to close her accounts and other stuff, I'm going to look for a new job. Thank you for your advice and validation about the struggles on caretaking.

Oh honey, we are so sorry to hear this. We remember your story, and we're sure your grandmother's passing was eased by having such a caring and compassionate grandchild taking good care of her. You did the right thing, and all your mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion are valid.

Take some time to just focus on you and recover from this struggle and grief. The job can wait while you heal.

For anyone in a similar situation:

Ask the Bitches: “I Took a Career Break to Care For Someone. How Do I Explain My Caregiving Resume Gap?” 

If this helped you out, join our Patreon!

So here's a my hot take about "social anxiety," and "being afraid to ask others for help."

After years and years of personal growth, I still get people treating my "aversion to asking for things" as some internal problem with my brain.

But let me tell you one thing.

You might be able to conquer any nagging sense that you "don't deserve" help from others. Then you might go on to vanquish any exaggerated idea of how much harm or trouble or inconvenience your request would cause someone else. And after that, you could totally wipe out any excess of anxiety about how angry someone else might be at you for asking.

But all this WILL NOT CHANGE the fact that:

Other people have lives of their own

Your requests usually are not (and should not be!) another person's first priority

People cannot be expected to have perfect memories and keep your request in their minds all the time

And therefore, if you have any ability to do a thing for yourself-- even something far outside both your skillset and your responsibilities-- even if it's very difficult to do on your own-- it's still very often MUCH EASIER than trying to get another person to do it for you.

Example:

I mention a project I want to do. I think I can do it with just a saw and hammer and nails that I already have. But my roommate, who has more woodworking equipment and more experience than me, says he'll help.

I say thanks, and ask him when. He says "well, I can't today, maybe Saturday?" So I wait til Saturday. At which point he's forgotten and planned something else, so he can't that day. Is Wednesday afternoon okay?

Sure (I put notes all over the apartment to make sure he doesn't forget this time). And he doesn't forget-- but he has to cancel anyway because the dog unexpectedly has to go to the vet that day. We reschedule for Friday. We get started on the project… at which point he suddenly concludes that we actually need a part that we don't have right now, and he'll have to buy it. That'll take a few days at least, so we have to reschedule again.

And now his schedule's busier than he thought, and he doesn't know when's the next time he'll be available. He says he'll let me know when. But weeks and weeks go by, and he doesn't. If I remind him, either he'll reassure me that he promised to tell me if he has any free time, and he's still gonna let me know when, I just have to be patient… OR he'll apologize for forgetting, and reassure me that he'll remember to tell me NEXT time he has a free afternoon.

Maybe a couple times he does message me, with less than an hour to spare, to give me a heads up that he's free now. But of course, on such short notice, I myself can't always arrange to be free-- and if he does this enough times and gets a "no" from me each time, he'll start feeling it's no longer worth trying and he'll stop.

At this point, my entire self wishes that I'd just done the project on my own, with my own inferior skills and whatever equipment I could scrounge up myself. It wouldn't be as good, maybe. But even if I had to try a few times to make it passably okay, then at least I would have learned something-- and in any case, it would be DONE now. I wouldn't be sitting here waiting, dependent on someone who does not have my project anywhere NEAR the top of his priorities.

Same goes for asking for something back that someone's borrowed from me. (Assuming my time is worth minimum wage, it's usually cheaper just to buy a new one.)

Same goes for asking my boss for an accommodation that would really help but I can sorta get by without. (I've seen coworkers having to remind management repeatedly about accommodations they get. It's almost a whole second job.)

Same goes for the colored pencils I just ordered while staying at my mom's house, upon which she reminded me that I really should have asked her first, because there are "tons" of art supplies in the house already. (Sure-- but how soon can you be available to look for them? And once looking, how quickly could you find them? And if they aren't quite what I was looking for, but you "feel certain" that the thing I was looking for "is also around here somewhere," then how many days should I give you to remember where it is? And how many times during those days should I check in with you, just to see if you actually still remember my request and are actually still trying to find it?)

In my experience, more often than not, asking another person for something (no matter how well-meaning they are) will put them in a position of oblivious, incompetently wielded power over me, long before they even begin to grant my request.

And in my experience, more often than not, that is a fate to be avoided if at all possible-- by any means-- up to and including doing things for myself that I "shouldn't have to do."

And no amount of therapy and self-help on my own brain is gonna change that.

When I answer questions that seem to be asked in bad faith, I’m putting in some emotional labor to respond to people who won’t appreciate it. I hope maybe they’ll see a different perspective. 

More importantly, I hope my responses give others the words and ideas they can use to push back against those same messages in their lives.

Grr I hate people misusing the term emotional labor to make some kind of victim signal about having to still be polite and have manners even if you’re not a straight white man and ignoring it’s intended use as a way to describe the way that certain professions expect you to always have on a smile and to take mistreatment from others while in that position and how exhausting it is to have to wear a smile while just doing your job and cowtow to a customer trying to get you fired over nothing or being in positions like nursing where you end up consoling patients families when a patient dies on a basis more infrequently than a normal person would be expected to handle and be expected to just move on with their day.

You are allowed to say "no" when you don't have the bandwidth for them, or when you know that whatever it is they're dealing with is better dealt with by a therapist than you. Healthy venting respects this, whereas dumping tries to make you feel like a bad person for saying no (or trying to say no). Healthy venting does its own emotional labor; dumping tries to make you do someone else's emotional labor for them.

Last week I attended a seminar at my university on how to write a good DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion) statement. I misunderstood the nature of the seminar topic: I was thinking it would be advice on how to write a diversity statement as part of an academic job application (as I have to submit for the great majority of applications I do now-a-years; as recently as 2015 or so it was only a few California schools that asked for this). Instead it was on DEI statements for companies and institutions. I had only noticed the existence of these in the back of my mind (although I suppose I'm going to take more notice of them from now on), because I don't know when I'd ever find myself in a position of having to write such a thing as part of the face of an institution/department.

But the seminar was interesting in its own way. Since 2020 or so, I've attended a good handful of different seminars/talks/meetings/orientations at my academic institutions that are in some way related to DEI or marginalization within academia or something closely adjacent. I typically find something thought-provoking and a potentially useful concrete idea here and there among all the insubstantial and unreflective fluff. I would say that this time, the fluff-to-meaningful-idea ratio was unusually skewed, however. I want to jot down what I recollect from this meeting before the details start to fade, as I think a lot of it is emblematic of this moment in our academic culture.

The seminar began with a bingo get-to-know-you game, where we had to go around the room acquainting ourselves with each other and seeing if we could find someone to fulfill each characteristic on identical sloppily-written 3x3 bingo boards (using one person to satisfy multiple squares was cheating). I think I hadn't done this kind of thing since high school. I found a number of the squares to be a recipe for awkward conversations, in a way that seems to be becoming a typical norm within this particular subculture: for instance, "is of Gen X" (do we need to be estimating each other's ages?), "uses they/them pronouns" (misspelled as "pronounce" -- I personally hate going around asking and telling people my pronouns, and I'm pretty sure a significant number of trans people feel the same way), and "someone that has a different racial identity than you" (shouldn't be too awkward, but it kind of is). Also, "observes religious holidays": are we going to be asking each other's religions now, or do non-religious people celebrating something like Christmas count, so that the description applies to a vast majority? Bemusingly, nobody in the room of 15 or so people used they/them pronouns, and we all wound up with bingo cards completely filled out except for that one square.

It's hard to find words to describe the overall tone and vibe of the seminar leader, except to say that she somehow epitomized a certain inflection and sense of humor that I'm coming to strongly associate with marginalized-demographic SJ activist types I see in real life. The closest I can come to describing it is coming across like a deliberately crafted attempt to appear superficially upbeat and energized and constantly inserting good-natured, almost light-hearted, shallowly tame jokes here and there while at the same time looking like that takes real effort because beneath it all you're just so tired and the world around you sucks so much.

The leader of the seminar began with a spiel about how she refuses to be just a black face used as token for these roles, but requires that everyone actually care about her voice, or else she would rather not be chosen at all. She talked about how our university is often praised for its diversity and would appear at first blush to be doing pretty well at that, yet when you look at the athletics program you see some kind of racial disparity among the students (she was vague on what) so clearly we're not as anti-racist as we pretend to be. This was probably the closest the discussion got to the topic of concrete evidence that we (or any particular place) are falling short, rather than basing it on the wording in DEI statements (what?! see below) or vague ratings that marginalized academics give and that nobody claimed even exist non-hypothetically.

There was a good bit of discussion on the "cultural tax" of members of marginalized groups having to do the lion's share of the work in organizing/running programs/initiatives or otherwise working to get departments' attention with regard to DEI issues. Whenever this comes up, nobody shows any sign of reflecting on the obvious severe tension between this complaint and the popular notion that only marginalized people should be in leadership roles for social justice activism and only their voices can be the source of valid ideas in this arena.

There was also some minor discussion about how to measure results (with "results" being how marginalized academics feel about their environment), which might even start to get one's hope's up that something concrete will actually come out of this, except that the consensus was that it seems almost hopelessly impossible to track anything like this (it would have to be done through surveys, and it's hard to get enough colleagues to even participate in surveys).

Obviously some of the seminar was on what to include or not include in DEI statements, with examples given of good DEI statements at certain companies and universities. There was one main point, which I would summarize as follows: don't just say you work towards diversity and inclusion in vague tidy-sounding language that doesn't actually mean anything, but demonstrate concretely in the statement exactly how you work towards diversity and inclusion... through vague tidy-sounding language that doesn't actually mean anything. Or in other words, don't just say something in a flowery way about DEI being great; say something longer with more pointed-yet-flowery phrases about how much you care about DEI. This was honestly pretty much all I could glean from what was clearly meant to be the leader's overarching point.

She picked carefully over examples of DEI statements at a couple of companies and four universities. Her only criticism was with one of them using the phrase "all types of people", which she condemned as problematic without explaining why or offering an alternative (nobody asked; I almost did). She spent a lot of time reading meaning into particular (very stock and cliche) phrases of different statements. To what I consider a ridiculous extent, she claimed with confidence and an air of wisdom that each phrase about intent reflected a corresponding problem that the department had had just prior to writing the statement. For instance, Boise State's DEI statement includes an email address to report problematic behavior to, which means hooo boy there really must have been a particularly large amount of problematic behavior at Boise State that needed reporting. More absurdly, much was read into particular words in Cornell's statement -- specifically, the phrase "communicate, cooperate, and collaborate with diverse individuals", whose inclusion of the word "collaboration" indicates specifically that oooh Cornell must have had an unusually serious problem with collaboration for instance! -- that couldn't possibly just mean the writers thought it would sound nice to put three fancy-but-vaguely-commonplace verbs beginning with co- in succession.

Everyone else in the room nodded along in solemn reverence for all of the points being made in the seminar. I guess I'm just weird and obtuse for coming away from discussions like this one feeling that they consisted mostly of waffle and twaddle.

I found extremely infuriating how some feminist complain that men don't show their emotions and feelings, but as soon a guy starts to show their emotions and trauma, they are shot them down with excuses like:

Emotional labor.

Dismissal of their experiences

"Women have it worse"

Man up

"don't be such a man baby"

And they use their trauma against them

Like which way you want it.

Using the patriarchy to destroy the patriarchy, will only keep the patriarchy going. You purpel space wizard!