Stop Calling Women Nags — How Emotional Labor is Dragging Down Gender Equality

This article really makes me not miss my ex. Or …. just about every male coworker I’d had.

(via jadegordon)

This whole article is gold. The day I broke up with my first boyfriend…we’d been together 5 years and we were engaged, I was working and a full time student, he was essentially unemployed and spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft. In February I asked him to take the car’s oil to be changed. It was now mid-April. Upset over numerous issues in our relationship somehow all of it came out as, “why haven’t you taken the car to the shop?” And he replied, “if you’d made the appointment I’d have done it.” I’d never heard any of this emotional labor talk and was used to seeing competent women take care of semicompetent men but I remember thinking…this is going to be my whole life. I will have to do all these tasks and nag and push – while dealing with a man who had once told me that when I nagged and reminded him of tasks I *decreased* the likelihood that he’d complete them because he didn’t want to be nagged. Nothing got done if I nagged. Nothing got done if I didn’t nag. Unless I did it myself, when I was already working so hard. Breaking up with him remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. God forbid we’d actually gotten married, started a family…so anyway yeah this article really resonated with me.

(via unforth-ninawaters)

When I was a small child, my mother pulled my hair badly every day while combing it, and I would cry and struggle and whine. The same was true for my sisters. Mom would try, but there were snarls, and there wasn’t time, it had to get done. It was a daily battle for her to get the four of us groomed and out the door every day, hair styled well enough not to have CPS called.

Once a week, if that, and really only in the winter, my father would comb out our hair after our bath, of an evening, with careful picks and loving strokes and the hairdryer so our wet hair wouldn’t chill us as we slept, taking ages and getting it just right, starting at the ends so as not to pull. We all clamored for our father to comb out our hair, because it was so lovely, and he was so gentle, and so loving. We’d hold still for him, sure, and he’d send us off to get our PJs on, all warm and rosy and silky and lovely.

Very recently (I am 38) I finally apologized to my mother for the intervening years in which I’ve waxed so rhapsodic about my dad’s prowess at hairstyling. Because my father was *never* up against a time constraint. He was already gone for work when my mom was getting our tiny ungrateful asses out the door; he chose the time of the combing and if he didn’t have time, didn’t do it. She did not have time to sit and croon and pick and lovingly dry our hair, she had to get us out the goddamn door. What she did was much harder, and what’s more, much more often. 

Of course I’m grateful for those wonderful memories with my father and the hairdryer and his big callused hands being so gentle. Of course. We were lucky; anyone with truly loving parents is lucky. I still have him and I’m still grateful for him.

But it had never before really occurred to me to be grateful for the fact that every single goddamn morning, I went out that door with my sisters looking like a reasonable enough human being that the courts didn’t have to get involved, because my mother was a fucking hero. Could she have been nicer? I don’t know, because I can’t even imagine dealing with four children. I can handle one, sometimes, as a loaner, and that’s it. 

(via bomberqueen17)