So I took today off from work. I wasn't planning on doing anything in particular but what I ended up doing was cleaning the house. Top to bottom with chemicals - bleach, floor shine, windex, counter cleaner... There's not an inch of this house that I didn't touch.
I also cooked. All three meals for me, my girlfriend (who works from home), and our kids.
And you know what I realized?
I would do the same thing every single day of my life if it meant I'd never have to work again. No more commuting. No more worrying about money, fighting for promotions, stressing about layoffs, or having to kiss ass every day.
Now I'm not saying it was easy. In fact I think I'm about as tired as I would be coming home from work. But I'm strangely energized if that makes sense. I just feel better. (Plus, for the sake of argument, you don't have to do cleaning like that every day).
Anyway my point is that men definitely get the short end of the stick with this work vs cleaning stuff. It's completely unfair. Not just because women get the better end of the deal. But also because society won't admit to this and instead looks down on men and the work we typically do for the family.
If women don't want to do housework then that's fine. Get a job. A real job that requires real work and pays enough to cover the bills and not just your spending money. And then leave me home. I'll make that sacrifice. I'll take a bullet for the team. And you'd better be appreciative of me even if I don't appreciate you going to work and paying the bills. And when you get home, I get to boss you around and make you do whatever housework I decided I didn't want to do that day. Not to mention the yard work, running errands on the way home, fixing things, and everything else that doesn't entail "cooking and cleaning".
Because that's the world that men live in. And it sucks. It's not a privilege to leave your house and work all day only to get nagged and hassled when you get home. It's not a privilege to bust your butt every single day but have all of that ignored because your wife or girlfriend cleaned that day and is "tired".
Granted me and my girlfriend both work and we both regularly split chores. Not a whole lot of people live in traditionalist households anymore. But a lot of couples tend to split their responsibilities in that direction. With men working more (or at harder jobs) and women cleaning more.
I'd definitely do it though. So long as I was the one who got to stay home.
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Yep. The concept behind emotional labor (or mental load or whatever) is actually sound. It's true that there is work being done by people even if they are not visibly working. Plenty of careers are based on this. If you walk by a computer programmer's desk, the most they will be visibly doing is typing. And other times, they'll be sitting there without typing. But in both cases, the work they are doing is thinking. And that stress adds up.
My point is that there's truth to the idea that you have to consider how much work a person is doing by thinking, not just how much physical action they are taking. But as with many other things, feminists have completely perverted the concept into something stupid.
Because you are absolutely right. Any time you see a list of emotional labor or mental load, it almost always includes talking to their spouse. And it's just disgusting. If you consider talking to your partner to be some major chore, that speaks volumes about how much you hate your partner.
One of the things which shows up commonly which I agree with is the idea of one person having all the responsibilities in their head, and the other only ever asking "what needs to be done". Even if both are doing equal physical work, the former is going to be more stressed, because they are having to juggle a lot of things in their head. Consider a coach, a head chef, or a manager. They might or might not be doing physical work at any point in time. But they are absolutely doing work by managing the big picture. The problem with how this concept is presented is that it's always presented as the woman being the manager and the man being the lazy one who just wants to be told what to do. And that's not always the case. That's just stereotyping. For many couples, it's the man who carries that mental load of having to mentally manage the entire household's needs, and the woman who occasionally helps with something when told.
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