#rose hackman

“I don’t know how to cook the chicken! I don’t know what to do! People are arriving in an hour! It was a stupid idea to have people over! I should never have done this! This was your dumb idea!”

Gray streets of Brussels flashed by. I quietly listened and took in the information. Gradually, a picture started to form in my head. Eric, a man who believed that meals were not real meals if they did not contain protein of a formerly alive kind, had bought chicken to make for dinner but did not know how to cook it. I had been a vegetarian since I was eight. Clearly, I didn’t know how to cook chicken, either. I was pretty sure this had been his initiative, not mine. But that’s not what I said.

“There is absolutely no need to worry. It’s all going to be completely fine. I can make the chicken when I arrive. Couldn’t be easier. What else do you have in the fridge? Have you prepared anything?” I asked.

Dessert, the answer came back, a little calmer this time. If I felt exasperation, I didn’t let the feeling live for more than a nanosecond. Patience, reassurance, and love were what I knew I should give, and that’s what I expressed.

“Amazing,” I chirpily said into the phone. “I love it when you make that. Okay. Don’t worry about the rest. I will figure something out to go with the chicken and make some sides when I arrive. I have pesto with me. We can do something with that. So delicious.”

His mood shifted: I could almost hear it lift. He was totally calm now. The panic had gone. His voice was slower; it had gone back to a cadence that suggested a more relaxed, happy state of mind.

“Are you good? Sorry you had that scare,” I continued, bringing my task to a secure conclusion. “I will be there very shortly.”

He muttered acquiescence, possibly thanks. “I can’t wait to see you,” I finished, and pressed the button to end the call.

I put the phone back in my lap, my shoulders dropped, and I breathed out, letting go of some of the anxiety I had been suppressing and feeling relief that I had contained the situation. In my head, I hadn’t even arrived at the part of how I was going to cook this dinner. I had absolutely no idea what to do with raw chicken, the very fleshy peachy vision of which was enough to make my stomach turn. But that wasn’t the point. The point was rather getting my boyfriend to feel good, calm, and collected again. What was important—I had known immediately upon picking up the phone—was conveying that the situation was under control to him, even if it wasn’t yet. The concrete cooking activity ahead was truly secondary.

I looked at my mother. She smiled. That’s when I remember her saying it: “You are an excellent man manager. You handled that brilliantly. I couldn’t be more impressed.”

Man manager, I repeated back to myself after she said it. I turned my body in the passenger seat toward her. I had never heard the term, and I had no conscious idea it was something I should be striving toward, let alone something I had been performing. But I felt the glow of the compliment, and some kind of a shift in her words, a complicity, perhaps even a new form of respect.

We moved on to discuss ways to cook chicken and what to do with the pesto. She told me about timing and oven temperatures, and even how I should handle the chicken to cut it. My mother incidentally also didn’t eat meat, for health reasons, but she had learned how to prepare it and cook it to make the stomachs of the people around her happy.

As unremarkable as it may sound, I never forgot the pesto chicken man manager exchange between my mother and me. Today, it’s clear to me that this is the first time I can pinpoint the emotional labor I performed, as a part of my gender and to the benefit of a man, explicitly being acknowledged and elevated.”]

The next step is marking the emotional labor provided and relied on as valuable, and sometimes even vital. Such a marking needn’t necessarily be rewarded with money. Marking a performance as valuable can involve nonmonetary rewards like affording the doer of the task real status, expressing gratitude, and marking the performance as deserving of reciprocity or even an IOU for another type of performance.

For couples seeking to make their relationship more egalitarian, emotional labor sweat equity can start being attained with timekeeping as one way of measuring output, as long as emotional labor is seen as its own category on top of other activities and chores. Whose feelings are being put first? Whose experience is being protected? Who is filtering their emotions for the benefit of the group? Who is taking up space? Negotiating different responsibilities, including sharing the overall responsibility of the well-being of a family unit or a group, or deciding in a way that feels fair who can carry the burden of that responsibility, is an obvious part of it too.

Licensed psychotherapist Shirley Johnson said that she often reminds people who have been in relationships for decades that it is never too late to renegotiate labor divisions or dynamics. Communication lines need to be open. Johnson, who works with individuals and couples, explained in an interview that emotional labor came up especially as an issue in “hetero cis” couples. She agreed with studies and interviews that this was mostly an unequal burden carried by women even if they worked, or by those playing traditional feminine roles in non-breadwinner situations.

But Johnson warned that better dynamics when it came to emotional labor also involved women letting go of what she called “compulsive caretaking at one’s own expense.” This was something the psychotherapist had observed in all people who at one point had been socialized as women, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, or religion. “I see this so prominently in my practice that women are very much in this compulsive caretaking role. And often they don’t know it, and it is so entrenched as the norm in our society. Even the idea that they should keep someone happy. It becomes very toxic.”

Erica, my coffee shop interviewee, was particularly reflective on the amount of personal responsibility she carried in performing an inordinate amount of emotional labor and household duties, on top of working and being the primary parent. “The men say, ‘I didn’t ask you to do it, nobody cares if our kid’s sandwich is cut into little stars.’ That’s always a balance. My husband, when I get frustrated, I come home and I am going to have to do the dishes, and he says, ‘I will do them, I will do them!’ And I say, ‘I know, but I want to start dinner,’ and he says, ‘Why don’t we just order something,’ and I say, ‘I know we can just order something but I have this nice really healthy meal planned for all of us. So that we can stay healthy and not die.’”

Erica’s emotional labor lies in the details of the tasks she performs—injecting thoughtfulness into pretty sandwich cutting and doing what needs to be done to get her husband to be healthy and avoid hereditary heart disease. Some of it she sees as superfluous, and some of it is necessary, even if she ends up caring more for her adult loved one than they are caring for themselves. “The world wouldn’t stop if I didn’t do it,” she told me. “So part of this is that whole balance of how much of this is because we choose to do it, because this is what we think we are expected to do.”

Johnson explained that “often the person doing that labor is scared of handing over that labor because their identity is baked into that labor.” This was something I also encountered in some interviews with parents, particularly a few mothers of toddlers, who were desperate for more hands-on help but were also unwilling to give up much of their role. Erica despaired at the amount of labor, including unpaid emotional labor, she did, but also took some of the blame.

“Part of it is me. I like keeping everyone around me happy. I want to be a good hostess, I want to be a good mom, I want to be a good wife, I want everyone to be happy and healthy. I want to keep our son’s teachers happy. I want to make sure he has all his extra clothes, and he doesn’t run out of diapers.”

Johnson suggested a two-pronged approach to address compulsive caretaking. First, women, or people socialized in feminine roles, needed to learn “to tolerate a bigger array of emotions” and accept that not everyone was going to be happy all the time. Accepting this would lead to the withholding of the labor to other members of the family or the group, who—through the absence of the labor—would be forced into acknowledging it was there. The second component involved each person taking responsibility for their needs, identifying what they were, and seeking to fulfill them, including through communicating them to their partner. “The more each person is caring for their needs, self-caring, the stronger the relationship is,” Johnson said.

Doing an inventory of needs and sharing that with a partner was key not only because it helped fulfill that need but also because it decreased a key component of emotional labor: constant preemptive thoughtfulness. “We are supporting decreasing anticipating one another’s behavior,” Johnson said, as constant projection into the future causes anxiety. This exercise disrupts the notion that one person or group should have their needs seamlessly anticipated and catered to, and another person should be in a constant, anxious state of multidimensional projection.”]

In a 2017 study that surveyed more than one thousand young men in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mexico, respectively, led by the organization Promundo, the man box is defined as the combination of seven pillars. The first pillar is self-sufficiency, or the idea that men should be self-reliant emotionally and physically. The second pillar is toughness, understood as the ability to display physical and emotional strength in all circumstances. The third pillar is physical attractiveness, achieved without signaling too much effort. The fourth pillar is fulfilling traditional gender roles, financially providing for a household, and avoiding tasks deemed feminine. The fifth pillar is being both straight and homophobic. The sixth pillar is being hypersexual with no ability to say no. The seventh pillar is having the final say at home, having control over women’s movements, and the belief that violence and aggression are sometimes necessary tools to gain respect.

To be clear, these pillars, which are sometimes also referred to in the context of what is called “toxic masculinity,” are not a positive list or a how-to for men; rather, they are a condensation of the restrictions imposed on men. Harsh emotional rules are not just for women but apply to men, too—with very different requirements and consequences. Gender performance and oppression, at its most harmful, is a tight, two-way street. Penalties for those who deviate are severe, and in some ways harsher for men than for women. Calling a girl a tomboy is mostly an affectionate description, but calling a boy a sissy is an insult. In a misogynistic world, anything at all feminine is tarnishing.

In the Promundo study, which interviewed 1,318 men in the United States aged eighteen to thirty across all backgrounds and demographics, representative of the overall populations, three quarters of the men agreed with the statement that “society as a whole tells me that guys should act strong even if they feel scared or nervous inside.” The one form of emotional labor men are actively socially trained to perform is emotion suppression, followed by displays of strength or aggression. Anything beyond is transgressive.

This kind of restricted emotion expression stands in huge contrast to what emotional labor usually refers to—as a form of work that prioritizes other people feeling good. In fact, many of the pillars are the perfect opposite of emotional labor, not only requiring men to cut themselves off from truly understanding and managing their own emotions but also, through the imperative of aggression and dominance, priming them to disregard the emotions of others, thereby centering their own.

In my interviews with men, this often made it feel like the topic of emotional labor was a complete dead end. This was not only because the concept of emotions requiring time, effort, and skill astonished them to the point of deep confusion but also because so many professed themselves to be nonemotional.

One of the men I interviewed, Jeff, a straight white man in his late thirties in a long-term relationship, was dumbfounded by the concept. After I repeatedly explained what emotional labor referred to, Jeff finally announced he had understood what I was talking about. He then proudly made another firm assertion. “I am not an emotional person, so I do not need emotional labor!”

As Jeff expressed the thought that emotional labor was irrelevant to him, I realized our interview would not last very long. I initially thought the interview would go into the unusable pile, but it soon dawned on me that Jeff was actually expressing the crux of the problem. “I am not a particularly emotive person,” he continued, “which I am sure is somewhat familiar for men. I am generally considered pretty flat.”

If the first man box pillar is in part the idea that men should be self-reliant emotionally and the second pillar is in part emotional toughness, it didn’t take me long to understand that getting men to open up would also be asking them to violate core guidelines of gendered behavior. To an extent, all Jeff was really doing was refusing to play with those very rigid boundaries. But to another, Jeff was engaging in a bad-faith power play. By refusing to acknowledge the existence of his own emotions, Jeff was relinquishing the need for any emotional effort or the belonging to any emotional network, further rendering the work of others around him, absorbing and caring for his emotions, invisible.”]

“Female swim coaches who don’t add enough upspeak in their voice when they are yelling ‘kick’ across the pool deck are often seen as mean, while their male coworkers can yell all they want,” Joann explains, referring to the practice of rising intonation at the end of a sentence so that it sounds like a question. She also suggests they add positive, encouraging phrases like “You got it!,” something men do not need to do.

If women do not sweetly modulate their voices as they question mark their way through “Kick? Kick? Kick?” leg movement directions, Joann says she has learned the hard way it will only be a matter of days before parents will come forward to complain.

Joann does not need a sociology textbook to teach her about counter-stereotypic backlash—that punishing effect that happens to women refusing to adhere to the kind, sweet, and demure trope mentioned in earlier chapters. She has seen it summer after summer, with every new cohort of swim instructors coming in. “That is the only way that people can take women’s voices,” she states bluntly.

Tweaking and altering your authentic self to adhere to what is expected of you as a woman, either to please others or for fear of serious repercussion—in the form of social penalties like angry parents, economic penalties like job loss, or physical penalties like violence—is emotional labor. It is not only emotional labor; it is emotional labor with the threat of a slap on the wrist or more if you don’t do it.

When performed in public, before an audience, emotional labor imposed on subjugated groups serves to infantilize and delegitimize those doing it. As an active expression of a submissive, nonconfrontational status, it also presents the power status quo as inevitable, paralyzing those doing emotional labor in place.”]

Reichert spoke plainly on this. “We are more rigidly wedded to masculine norms, norms for male development. This is for a variety of reasons. There hasn’t been a movement comparable to the women’s movement advocating for freer expression of male emotions and challenging stereotypes. Also, I think it’s important to say that reproducing a prototypical male identity is more at the core of our social organization.”

Female identities, because they are not cast as the leading forces but rather as the following forces of our society, are treated as secondary. “The idea that a boy may be empowered to define himself as a man on his own terms is too threatening to the predictable reproductive process,” Reichert said, referring to reproduction in an academic sense—as the social organization that reproduces itself from generation to generation.

All of this has culminated in a notable absence of a gender revolution for men. While the idea that women are naturally communal and emotional and men are naturally self-interested and rational has stuck over time, women have been narrowing the gap when it comes to embracing more masculine-type behaviors including being competitive and individualistic. But there has been very little narrowing on the other end.

This can be partially explained by a lack of cultural or institutional change in the ways in which we devalue female-type characteristics, activities, and jobs. Where “women’s work” is seen as less prestigious, less skilled, more menial or petty, the incentive for men to leave their traditional spaces and take on such work is very weak. On the other end, many women seeking upward mobility are incentivized by the high value—culturally and institutionally—of men’s work.

To put it bluntly, our gender revolution may have succeeded in helping some groups of women access opportunities their mothers couldn’t, but it has failed abysmally in changing cultural norms around what is valued. This has not been just a gross oversight of the movement; it has so far been a fatal one.

In this case, telling women to hoard male-type opportunities, and not insisting on a full revaluing of gendered roles and work, still leaves large groups of women forced into performing essential and invisible emotional labor at a discount—or worse. And denying men basic human features like emotions and connected relationships is a short end of the straw for them too. Forcing men to be hypermasculine pushes them into destructive behaviors that threaten us all.

In the Promundo study, men in the United States and the United Kingdom who identified more strongly with the seven pillars of the man box were six to seven times more likely to report perpetrating physical in-person or online bullying compared to men who did not strongly identify with the pillars. They were six times more likely to report perpetrating sexual harassment and were more at risk of violence from others. They were also likely to engage in destructive behaviors like binge drinking and less likely to have close personal relationships.”]

In order to modulate the backlash, and not be seen as too hungry for power or too eager to get ahead, women have to play a game of compensation. As they assert themselves as competent and confident, they must also dole out doses of reassuring emotional labor. Because these two sets of character traits are often cast in opposition to each other—as expressions of domination and submission rather than as complementary—conveying both at the same time can feel like an impossible bind. This becomes even more of a burden for anyone who veers from traditional, heteronormative behavioral scripts, particularly for those of us whose brains process social situations differently, whether because of neurodivergence or any other unseen reason. These charades of contradictory communication create roadblocks that compromise productivity rather than promote it, as some would have us believe.

One woman I interviewed, Hailey, who rose up to director in a large, male-dominated West Coast company, identifies and presents as queer, and tells me her instinctive communication style is outgoing, direct, and what might be seen traditionally as alpha. “I always came to meetings with all guns blazing,” Hailey says, adding she easily inhabits “a male space in the workplace.”

But as she climbed the ladder at her company and became surrounded by only men, she found that her gender expression was increasingly being ignored. Her female identity kept on being forced down her throat by her male colleagues, and her queer, more masculine- performing energy was squashed out. “I occupy this middle space. I am a dyke, of course: I out myself all the time. But I still had to fill some of those female expectations. I couldn’t just live in this male box.”

A male colleague sat her down and told her she needed to be more discreet and couldn’t just be her “outgoing self” anymore. She had to do double the work to ingratiate herself in a way that was more feminine, regardless of whether that felt authentic to her identity. It didn’t, in fact. She started using “soft skills” she had mostly eschewed up until then in her career and started having water cooler conversations and coffee meetings on top of formal meetings in order to win people over, be accepted, and get done the basic things she needed in the department she directed. “I used to think that the higher you get, the more it’s going to be based on accomplishments and skills, but I don’t know anymore.”

She couldn’t be herself: she was not afforded that space or that privilege. The emotional labor she was forced into providing wasn’t expected of men, and the expectation, which also violated her gender expression, felt debasing. By the time she left the company, she says she is not sure whether she was most discriminated against because of her perceived gender, her sexual orientation and related identity, or her ideas, which were pushing for greater sustainability and attention to underserved communities.

The ability to change, mask, or suppress the expression of our authentic emotions is a uniquely human characteristic. We can laugh to suit a situation even if we find it supremely unfunny, appear despondent to suit another when inside we are giggling, and appear passively pleasant in situations in between. We can all do this and, in fact, all engage in this, to varying degrees, all the time.

At work, the expectation that people should do the emotional labor to put on a professional face is not something reserved for just women. Being professional will likely include a basic level of politeness, the exchange of a few formal niceties—greetings, a smile, maybe a question or two about the weekend. There will likely be the expectation of a levelheadedness and an evening or modulating of the temperature of emotional expression in communications—whether in person, over the phone, or over email: not too hot and angry, and not too cold and abrupt.

But because deference and filtering of emotions go with power, in traditional work environments, the higher up you go, the less emotional labor you absolutely have to do. An intern will be expected to be more deferential than a junior associate, who will be expected to be more deferential than a vice president, who will be expected to be more deferential than the founder and CEO. This holds until you introduce elements of gender expression and identity, race and class, as further and less linear expressions of power. A male junior associate might get away with being abrupt with colleagues where a female senior associate will not. A white male associate may feel free to speak loudly and animatedly with colleagues, where a Black male associate may be told to quiet down and be issued a warning.”]

“It’s a lot in that she is learning and having all kinds of experiences that need to be synthesized because she is five and a half and everything requires an explanation. Being the adult in the situation, you have to be there for her when she’s happy or sad, or [try] to understand where she’s coming from. Be very sensitive to her and not lose patience or not get upset at her because she’s not being difficult, she’s just trying to understand what’s going on around her.”

[….]

Academics tend to talk about the topic of “care” when it comes to these categories of workers, while the term “emotional labor” in private or public is often boxed in to being seen as a problem of the middle and upper classes, to be treated separately. In some circles, popular renderings of emotional labor have become synonymous with whining: entitled white feminism at its worst. One academic I interviewed, a leader in her field, advanced that contemporary emotional labor concerns were totally outside of the everyday concerns of working-class people or people on the losing end of systemic inequality.

Such separations may seem noble, but they enable the overlooking of common origin problems that, if clearly denounced, would help move the entire conversation forward. It is the devaluing of feminized emotional labor that makes care jobs so precarious. It is the propagation of a belief that love and empathy in action are not work that helps hinder labor rights and proper pay. It is the requirement that emotional labor should just emanate, uncomplaining, from feminized and racialized groups of people in exchange for little to nothing that ensures emotional labor go hand in hand with exploitation.

Besides stopping us from seeing the whole picture, the idea that working-class women or women of color are not burdened with heavy, extractive emotional labor expectations at work as well as at home is not only ludicrous, it’s offensive. The fact that Anna, a nanny who identifies as Afro-Latina, provides vast amounts of expected emotional labor in her professional life does not, suddenly, somehow invalidate it as a site for scrutiny. And it certainly does not mean that Anna does not have to deal with complaints and pressure from her boyfriend, who wants more time and emotional presence from her in private. These kinds of dismissals deny full emotional landscapes to working-class women and women of color.

One woman employed as a domestic worker in Detroit confided that the extensive emotional labor demands of her ex-husband, who expected to be catered to at all times, had been the most defining aspect of her early adulthood. She left him and was now in therapy. Was her experience with emotional labor not real? Is it really that shocking that she went to therapy? If anything, the additional weight of financial concerns, of insecure wages, and being in an environment with more crime, more historical state violence, or more addiction—these are all factors that make the soothing work of love and the nurturing involved in sustaining communities even more indispensable.

The erasure of emotional labor concerns from the private emotional landscapes of less privileged women doesn’t just help further dehumanize them. Treating the topic as exclusively elitist helps ingrain the sexist idea that women’s concerns are just so very silly, dismissible as irrelevant, trivial. Complaining about emotions as work? What will these ladies find to complain about next?

There is, in the short term, undoubtedly a perverse incentive for more privileged women to simply kick the can of devalued labor down the road and pass its responsibility on to a less privileged woman they can underpay. Hanging on to the sense of their own injustice, they fail—or refuse—to see their own complicity in the system toward others. This division that impedes progress is a temporary fix only for some. As long as people performing feminized tasks, including women of different backgrounds, do not see one another as fellow workers, there can be no colossal change.

One woman I interviewed in New York included in her accounts of emotional labor the burden of having to deal with her toddler’s nanny, who had a teenage son and an abusive husband and had started confiding in her female employer. The irony in complaining about someone who you arguably depend on for the performance of her own devalued emotional labor left me dumbstruck. How could my interviewee not see the irony, how could she so brazenly heighten her plight above her nanny’s? The devaluing and invisibility of emotional labor may have felt real to this interviewee in her blood family dynamic, but it undoubtedly affected her nanny even more—and most certainly to the employer’s benefit.

The point with emotional labor is not that it inherently points to an injustice. When seen, when valued or appreciated, or when part of an exchange, a mutuality, an ecosystem where love is power—then it needn’t be exploitative. Quite the contrary: doing emotional labor for people who are doing it for you is the goal, not the problem.

We have to connect the dots if we are to expose the problem and heal. The inclination—a sexist, classist, and racist one—with which we jump at the opportunity to commodify-at-a-discount the emotions of working-class people and people of color in public but deny the existence of any full, private emotional landscapes is part of the same sexist inclination that silently extracts women of all classes’ labor in private.”]