It's not a public duty to eat snails if you don't like 'em.

So my betrothed's exes are now married to each other. This story is about North. She and her husband have a baby together. These people are family to us, so that little girl is our niece and we love the shit out of her. Her name is Zelda.

When she was born it turned out Zelda would not, under any circumstances, drink milk that had been pumped. It was really weird, she'd nurse just fine but when offered bottles she'd just cry and cry.

North pumped religiously trying to find some method of actually using this excess milk, but Zelda remained adamant. North researched the phenomena after months of trying, and pumping, and stockpiling, and freezing. Some breast milk apparently has enzymes that turn it sour on contact with air? Or some variety of: the second the milk hit the air it became disgusting.

So then North had a freezer full of breast milk the baby wouldn't drink. I think even after finding out that her milk couldn't be consumed she had to keep pumping cause a baby only drinks so much. She didn't want to waste all the milk, but the baby was no help at all. She did what any reasonable person would do, and googled ways to dispose of excess breast milk. There's co-ops for breast milk, but no baby was gonna want her milk, as Zelda had proved.

That's when things got. A little less mainstream. Some people suggested making cheese from it. That's a real thing. Breast milk cheese. But again, North was pretty sure her milk would not taste very good, so she dove deeper.

Her husband did regularly drink kefir, and he wasn’t afraid of stinky milk so he decided to try to make kefir out of it. But breast milk is a fucking beast, and it was so antimicrobial that it killed all his bacteria. He attempted to boil it and break down the proteins and not only did it smell rank but it still killed his kefir.

What she eventually found was soap. It turns out that breast milk makes amazing soap, it has tons of good skin properties and doesn't go bad. More importantly no one would have to consume it.

But North had. A lot of milk. When faced with the prospect of waste milk or make soap, North grabbed soap making by the throat and made it her bitch. She bought molds, stocked up her essential oils, and went to work.

She made piles and piles of soap, because again, there was so much milk. At a certain point she goes, "Hey, do you guys want soap? One thing though, it's made of my breast milk."

And we did have a moment of like. Hm. That's weird, but is it? It's soap, it'll smell nice, it'll be good for our skin. Sure.

So then, being a lovely thoughtful person, she customized soaps for us with scents we specifically favored. It arrived in a massive box, all wrapped up and pretty, and we had to store them in the freezer until we were ready to use them cause they were a little melty by nature but man it was good soap. It smelled lovely, she got great scents into them.

She’d never done this before but she just made this gorgeous artisanal quality soap.

For scope, here’s a PILE of the soap she made and this wasn’t even all of it.

Her example was in call centers, where an agent might take 1 difficult call in 10, which is stressful, but the person has the 9 easy calls to offset that stress and recalibrate their nervous system. But when 'AI agents' take those 9 easy calls, you, the human, are left with 100% difficult calls. What used to be a small, unpleasant portion of your day now becomes your entire day, all day, every day.

And to make things worse, your boss fired all the other humans, so rather than spreading out the bad amongst a team of people who could commiserate and provide support, it's just you, absorbing the stress, alone, forever.

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

Look me dead in the eye and tell me that people being able to sit at home and watch The Game -- the fandom that encourages, the ongoing investment over the years, the memories and traditions of Watching the Game with family and friends -- harms the ticket sales of real live go-to-the-stadium sports. Of course it doesn't. Of course all that *is the reason* that people care so much about sports they'll invest a small fortune on not only tickets but often travel costs to be part of it all in person. And the people who aren't doing that *can't* do that and weren't going to regardless, but their at-home participation and investment still boosts the profile of pro and NCAA sports as cultural institutions.

“It’s tempting to assume”: someone’s assumption is about to be criticized

"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.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Are Women Human (1938)

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

One person says that Steinbeck is one of their favourite authors for prose, and then they share an example of what they would consider purple prose. It is so violetly awful that I think the poster must have written it themselves as a kind of parody of purple prose. Other people assumed the same.

But as it turns out, they are quoting from a book written by a YouTuber whose channel ia dedicated to talking about writing (namely, their own writing, which is genius, but often not comprehensible to the drooling plebs).

Naturally, I read the free sample of their book in awe and horror, and I'd like to share some screenshots with you. If you also have trouble defining or understanding what purple prose is, it's this.

'Noctilucent orbs'. Even fanfic written by a 14-year-old wouldn't dare.

found the post. to be fair to them. not the most egregious thing said on this post, but they did endorse the rest of it so.

ignoring "horny frat boys" being an insane way to describe percy, byron, and polidori, not to mention poor fucking claire lmao. theres a pervasive issue of people really wanting mary shelley's life and career to be a story of a woman being greatly underestimated and silenced by her (male) peers but persevering nonetheless and this idea is generally pushed in popular culture and by some ill informed biographers to the point that it is just no longer reflective of her actual experiences. i think people forget a lot that mary shelley existed in radical circles that, while not devoid of misogyny, had moved past the idea that women shouldn't have opinions and be writing and have lives outside of their relationships with men and who certainly were not discouraging her from pursuing a career in writing. she was deeply admired for being the daughter of wollstonecraft and godwin and then as a writer in her own right, and i think its sad that this idea that she was discouraged from pursuing writing by the men in her life, especially by her husband, is so pervasive because one of the most interesting things about her social group to me is the creative relationships built among them. people joke a lot that percy shelley is just remembered as the wife of the author of frankenstien as a diss on him but everything he is on record saying about her work implies that he would be fucking honored. they had a deep creative partnership and mutual admiration for one another's work that was much stronger than even their romantic relationship and its deeply frustrating how that is often disregarded and put down because people are so fixated on this stereotype of how they think 19th century women should exist that they dont let themselves engage with what her life was actually like.