you’re getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didn’t enjoy and in the moment you just didn’t say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesn’t inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.

and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasn’t right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they don’t like the changes and wish they hadn’t transitioned. that doesn’t mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesn’t mean that transition shouldn’t be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.

"people have to hide their emotions to perform specific types of labour where their apparent emotions influence another person's. Eg. Flight attendants have to be cheerful all the time, so that passengers feel welcome and safe. This suppression and masking of emotion can cause a sense of disconnect within the individual where they dont know what their true feelings are. This is part of the Marxist idea of alienation from labour and from the self."

To

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983, specifically describing it as emotional performance required by a worker for a job. This alienates the worker from their own feelings. The expected emotion can be care, joy, etc. but it can also be harshness or simply the expectation to not show your real emotions in the workplace.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild also coined the term 'the second shift' in 1989. describing how in families where a man and a woman both have a job, the woman is often still expected to do all the child raising and house cleaning, meaning she is carrying a double workload.

Already in 1983 (before coining the term 'second shift' but already developing the concept), Hochschild herself connected the two ideas, writing: "In a typical nuclear family unit, it is thought that women become responsible for much of the emotional labor by default, meaning they are responsible for shaping and managing the family’s feelings." So we have the person who coined the term, immediately after coining the term, also using emotional labor to describe unpaid household work! This is part of the term since its inception!

Around 2015 the term gained a lot of popularity and began to be more broadly applied. Some things that are, according to Hochschild, NOT emotional labor include:

Doing physical chores around the house

Doing mental chores like remembering birthdays

Hochschild: "if we talk about all the unpaid labor women do in the home as “emotional labor,” we’re insinuating that any kind of labor that falls most often to a woman is “emotional.” Like chores are just labor. Writing Christmas cards is just labor."

Also not emotional labour:

Expressing genuine emotions that you feel

Doing things that make other people feel better

Hochschild emphasizes that doing things to positively impact other people's emotions isn't 'emotional labor'. Managing and suppressing your own emotions is. That's where the alienation that is central to emotional labor comes in: it's alienation from your own feelings.

It's also essential that there must be an expectation on the person to do this. Hiding your real feelings by choice isn't emotional labor. As with emotional labor in the workplace, non-caring emotions and suppression of emotions typically expected of men are included. So when a wife expects her husband to suppress his pain and not cry in front of the children, that is an example of emotional labor. So to summarize, emotional labor according to Hochschild doesn't have to always be paid labor, but it does always involve:

The management of your own emotions

Alienation from your real emotions, as a result of being forced to perform other emotions.

Pressure/expectation, there are negative consequences if you don't do the performance.

There is a system, (the workplace, genderroles, etc) shaping these expectations, putting specific expectations on categories of people.

My summer project for myself is to make a collection of 16 of these embroidered thimble rings (called kaga yubinuki), these are my first 2 ^^

using this as an opportunity to add this link to this post too:

Clodsire coffee jelly with a little surprise on top! ☕🍒

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

But on top of that, you know who the most ardent conservationists are once security has been achieved? The people who had once been forced to poach or slash-and-burn to survive. You know who’s great at tracking down gorilla poachers? Ex-poachers. Who’s good at understanding and advocating for people forced to do these things to survive? Ex-poachers. Who can convince others to take a chance on finding a better way to survive? Same answer.

The former illegal fishers are now sought-after experts, because they know how to spot the arapaima and tell juveniles apart from adults. They get to keep practicing the fishing skills that were passed down to them. The actual process of fishing is easier because they can work together and don't have to sneak around. The profits are higher because they can sell the fish openly to restaurants and to the public. The fishing organization members make sure that other people in their communities don't fish illegally. And the numbers of arapaima keep going up and up, so there's plenty to go around even as more people join the fishing organizations.

If you click all the way through to the report from the conservation org that started the fishing organizations project, there are quotes from fishing organization members:

"We built a second house and I'm putting my oldest two kids through college on the money we get from fishing."

"Nowadays you have young people walking around with pockets full of cash saying "I got 6,000 from fishing this year!" It used to be you wouldn't even get 50 reais of pocket money."

“SCROLL UP IT’S GLASS”