Please Stop Calling Everything That Frustrates You Emotional Labor

On the Better Life Lab blog on Slate, Haley Swenson worked out some kinks in the ongoing conversation about emotional labor, what it is, and what it isn’t.

The stress and time commitment of calling around to find a house cleaner or having to explain why a box on the floor annoys you. The tedium of finding a train route for a male friend who wants to meet up with you or explaining to another friend why not communicating about plans is bad manners. What do these activities have in common? According to the authors of recently viral pieces at Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmo, respectively, they’re all examples of emotional labor. Unfortunately, this is a phrase that’s being used and abused as a catchall for what are either pretty complex, sticky situations or just straightforward cases of male helplessness. In our rush to bring greater awareness to gender frustrations that we’re just beginning to talk about publicly, we should remember that not all kinds of gender and relationship problems are in fact, emotional labor. To solve these problems, we need to get better at teasing out the many layers of labor and frustration leading to these perceived patterns, rather than throwing them all in the emotional labor bin.