Jess Zimmerman’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I am not a big fan of psychic charlatanry, which often preys on people who are in genuine grief. So when I read about psychic fraud Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, arrested in May for second-degree grand larceny, I should have felt smug about her downfall. Delmaro had induced a male client to give her over $700,000 worth of payment and gifts, including a diamond ring and a Rolex – all in exchange for her mystic advice on how to woo a woman, Michelle, who’d made her lack of interest very clear. Technically the diamond was to “protect his energy,” the Rolex was to “go back and cleanse his past,” and some of the money was to build an 80-mile solid gold bridge into the spirit world, but that was the general formula: woman has no interest, man needs to feel hope, Delmaro is willing to provide that hope for a price.
Psychics in New York are supposed to clarify that their services are “for entertainment purposes only,” but Delmaro was clearly advertising concrete results, even if some of them (like the bridge) were also intangible. It was obviously a con, and thus probably a more justified arrest than two-thirds of the ones NYPD made that day.
But that wasn’t my first thought when I read this story. My first thought was “how do I get in on this game?”
Here’s the part that made me thoughtfully stroke my imaginary beard:
Ms. Delmaro told him the trouble had come from a spirit that was stalking him. She needed $28,000, then $28,000 more. Michelle had grown cold so suddenly, he thought, that the spirit explanation sounded right, and so he paid.
Recall that this was a woman who’d made it explicitly clear that she had no romantic feelings for this fellow. A reasonable person might note Michelle’s complete lack of interest and come up with a few more plausible explanations for her coldness than “evil spirits.” But for this guy to follow that thread, he’d have to give up on an article of deeply-held faith: that any woman he wants is rightfully his and just needs to be collected. Much easier to believe in poltergeists, and pay to have them removed.
Believe it or not, I’m not unsympathetic to the man, who must be very lonely. But when I see how desperate he was to have his delusion of entitlement confirmed, when I read that he found “Michelle is influenced by evil spirits” easier to swallow than “Michelle is a human being with preferences and agency,” I find it harder to feel too sorry that someone took him for what he was willing to pay. “Men gonna men,” as the New Yorker’s Caitlin Kelly tweeted; they often ignore women’s explicit stated opinions, and it’s always annoying, so why not get a Rolex out of the deal? The real travesty is that Michelle didn’t get a cut. The other travesty is that I didn’t think of it first.
*
Of course, I don’t really want to make a living giving men false hope. But what if I wanted to make a living yelling at them about why their false hope is dumb?
This is a thing I do frequently now for free. Somehow, despite increasingly noisy misandry, I have amassed a small cadre of men who think I’m a good person to confide in. These are friends and partners, so it goes without saying that they are generally not confiding fucked-up attitudes about women, but they’re also straight men with feelings; consequently, I’ve seen my share of “how do I make her fall back in love with me,” “how do I make her regret rejecting me,” “how do I change her mind.”
The answers are “you can’t,” “you can’t,” and “you can’t,” respectively, but I’ve come up with enough different ways of saying this that occasionally one gets through. It’s something I’m happy to do for the people I care about, but it is not effortless. I’ve fielded hundreds of late-night texts, balanced reassurance with tough love, hammered away at stubborn beliefs, sometimes even taken (shudder) phone calls. I’ve actually been on agony aunt duty for male friends since high school, so if it’s true that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, counseling bereft dudes may in fact be my only expert skill.
And yet, it is basically impossible to monetize, short of demanding funds to build a gold bridge. Not that I’d charge my friends – but I don’t charge to edit stuff for them either, nor do usually they charge me when they knit me something or draw me a picture or feed my dog. Yet that work is still considered to have value. I’ve offered to pay for dogsitting, they’ve offered to pay for editing; often we arrange some kind of barter in lieu of payment. If we wanted to charge someone else money for these services, it would not be considered absurd. But emotional labor? Offering advice, listening to woes, dispensing care and attention? That’s not supposed to be transactional. People are disturbed by the very notion that someone would charge, or pay, for friendly support. It’s supposed to come free.
Why?
*
In May, Lauren Chief Elk (@ChiefElk) started the Twitter hashtag #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, based on a conversation with @cheuya and Bardot Elle Smith (@BardotSmith). The basic idea behind the hashtag is that a woman’s time and regard has value – it cannot be had for nothing. Men like to act as if commanding women’s attention is their birthright, their natural due, and they are rarely contradicted. It’s a radical act to refuse them that attention. It’s even more radical to propose that if they want it so fucking much, they can buy it.
The originators and adherents of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen didn’t just suggest that women should get paid for existing, although yeah that too if you’re buying. Rather, women should get paid for all the work they typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single day. Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150. Smile hollowly while you make a worse version of their joke, $200. Explain 101-level feminism to you like you’re five years old, $300. Listen to your rant about “bitches,” $infinity.
It was beautiful to watch #GiveYourMoneyToWomen unfold. Men got angry, and then women explained to them that to have their anger acknowledged, they would have to pay. This made them angrier, of course, but without a donation, who was listening? Even now, when you Google the hashtag, nearly the whole first results page consists of furious MRAs. (I didn’t click through, though. Who exactly was going to make it worth my while?)
But women – purportedly feminist women – also expressed confusion and affront. Huffington Post UK blogger Katy Horwood, who has boasted in print about getting out of a £50 traffic ticket by flirting, suddenly came over all high-and-mighty when it was suggested that female attention might have direct monetary value. “You want money? Cut out the bitching and moaning and go the f**k out and earn it,” she wrote. Because affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, weathering abuse: these earn nothing. These have no worth.
*
It’s not just emotional work that’s supposed to come free of charge. Feminist scholar Silvia Federici wrote in 1975:
[N]ot only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.
Emotional labor has followed the same path. We are told frequently that women are more intuitive, more empathetic, more innately willing and able to offer succor and advice. How convenient that this cultural construct gives men an excuse to be emotionally lazy. How convenient that it casts feelings-based work as “an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depths of our female character.”
It’s also hard not to draw a connection between #GiveYourMoneyToWomen and sex work. Sex workers are selling something that’s legal to have, that belongs to them, and that people are willing to pay for – and yet the sale is subject to both moral and legal censure, unlike almost any other transaction of that kind. For all the rhetoric about protecting workers, a lot of opposition to sex work comes down to “this should not be sold, for reasons.” That moralizing, paternalistic viewpoint – “please ignore the fact that there’s a market for this, because we think it shouldn’t have monetary value” – has roots in common with Horwood’s call to “get a job.” It has roots in common with people who look down on domestic workers, or judge their employers for apparent failure to keep up their own homes.
Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.
*
All that said, I’m not sure how I would monetize the emotional labor I do, how I would turn my hard-earned expertise into something that puts capitalism to work for me. Maybe I have to become a therapist – once your feelings work is ratified by a Sainted Old White Man like Jung or Erickson or a college dean, it does seem to magically turn into a job skill. Maybe I should advertise “friend services” on Etsy, an agreed-upon number of carefully customized supportive texts just when you need them, like Joaquin Phoenix’s job in “Her” but less twee. Maybe I really should hang out a psychic shingle, and tell men I can give them insight into the minds of the women who spurned them. Sure, all the tarot cards come up as the Queen of Brass Knuckles, representing a woman who already goddamn told you she wasn’t interested, but each time I read it directly from her mind! Also, if you believe that, I’ve got an 80-mile gold bridge to sell you.
The “how” isn’t really important, which is lucky because these are all probably bad ideas. What I’m trying to do, for now, is just recognize that this work has value. It’s very easy for me, and maybe for you, to wind up in a friendship or relationship or passing acquaintanceship, especially one with a man, where our labor is never rewarded, never returned, never even acknowledged. We let this happen because patriarchy is so good at training women as its proxies; we’ve internalized the idea that our effort is men’s birthright.
Enough of that. We don’t necessarily need to insist that men just give us their money – though you should, if that works for you, and write down what they say because I bet it’ll be funny. But we absolutely get to recognize that the constant labor of placating men and navigating patriarchal expectations is exhausting because it’s work. (Incidentally, women of color should probably be getting recompense from men and white women; emotionally pampering white people while living within white supremacist culture is just as much of an effort if not more, and they’re doing both.) It’s counterintuitive, but it’s worth trying to think of emotional labor as a service – one that’s provided in response to constant demand. Whatever your opinion of capitalism, we’re soaking in it, and by its own rules we should get some kind of remuneration for work that’s highly sought.
I don’t expect to get $700,000, now that I’m trying to remember that emotional labor has value. I don’t expect to get anything, really. But at least now I know that when I get nothing, I’m being cheated. That’s a start.
Tags: emotional labor, feminism, friendship, jess zimmerman
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Oh here's a little apropos anecdote.
In law school I took aboriginal law, and found the whole thing so consistently demoralizing (at its most mild) and devastating (more often) and I would get upset and finally one day my amazing aboriginal law professor told me, in front of the class, to quit my hand-wringing (the "white girl" was unspoken but so clearly implied). I was appropriately chastened. I'll never forget it. My sadness over being white in a white supremacist culture was not interesting, welcome, or helpful, and was making it all about me, and IT'S NOT ABOUT ME ANYMORE. Yup.
She was the fucking coolest woman alive. I was in her office once and complimented her (massive) sapphire ring, and she was like "that was for tenure at [renowned institution] and this one (proferring an even more massive diamond) is for tenure at [other renowned institution]." Ok, lady, I'll follow you to the ends of the earth, please teach me how to live.
"the effeminate man who lets his female friends confide in him all the time? Who makes a point of being a listener? Do you genuinely not believe these people exist?"
why is this person who is good at doing emotional labor described as "effeminate"? you are making the author's point.
For years, being a paid friend was my day job. This is not a euphemism. I was paid (well), on retainer, for my friendship. Long, weird story – obviously – and maybe I will one day pitch it to The Toast. For now I will say: I genuinely enjoyed and cared about this person, and our overall dynamic was clear and respectful. I had been prone to friendships with the intense and self-absorbed. Monetizing my tendency to listen, pitch in, and advise, without asking for the same, put it in clear relief and let me work through some of it. Weirdly, during that time, two other people asked if they could hire me to do the same thing. Both were people I encountered through other projects and neither knew about my paid-friend gig. I must have looked like a professional friend…? (I declined). By the way, I'm a woman and my client (?) is a woman.
I think I should be able to skip to the tongue part personally.
This has happened to me with women, but I've been able to go to them for similar support, too. Not all of the women I've known who complained often were willing to listen to me complain, too, but most of them. I've had a much lower (non-zero) number of men who complained to me actually listen and offer sympathy and non-patronizing advice when I went to them for support, and all but one of that non-zero number were male relatives. Most of the time, there was suddenly much glancing away and fiddling with phones and a quick, "Dang, that sucks, so let me tell you more about something that happened to me today–" and within 2 and a half sentences we weren't just not talking about me anymore, we had moved on to such a totally different conversation that it would sound ridiculous and rude for me to try to bring it back around to the original point. I can't ever remember a woman cutting me off before I'd even finished describing my problem to her, and obviously ymmv, but I think that's part of the problem. With women, you can be reciprocally needy. With men it's much less likely to be reciprocal and more likely to be unidirectional, so that the woman never gets what she needs emotionally out of the relationship and the man's just kinda… feeding off her.
You are SO correct! I'm tempted to perform a social experiment and put an ad on fiverr selling, "carefully customized supportive texts" to men only and see what happens LOL
One of my favorite things that one of my housemates learned to do while we lived together was to check in with me beforehand if she needed some emotional support. Example: "I'm having a lot of feelings about my relationship, do you have the time/emotional energy to talk about that with me and share some advice?" Then I'd give an answer like "yes, I have the time" or "I can't handle that emotionally but I can have a fun, distracting conversation about a lighter topic" or "no, I'm not free right now, but I hope things are going okay."
I haven't lived with many dudes so I've never tried to teach one how to do that same thing, but wow it is such a different and amazing feeling to have someone ask for support in a way that recognizes the value of your emotional labor rather than assuming it as their right to demand it.
THIS is what I've got in my life right now. Wish there were a support group for it!
May I just say that, in a horribly morbid way, the idea of getting someone so drunk they'll work on your teeth gave me a laugh, perhaps because of what a horrible idea it would be.
The analogy has seemed a bit backward to me this whole time, though, because dentistry impacts the purchaser's bodily integrity, whereas sex work impacts the seller's bodily integrity.
Perhaps that's why, while both are disturbing and violent, the idea of forcing someone to perform sex seems so much worse than forcing someone to perform dentistry.
_In the end it was quite easy to stop being friends with her. I just stopped putting in all that extra effort, and she got upset_
I recently had a relationship end, and it made me feel a lot better about letting her go when I traced back the progression of things and realized that the beginning of her hostility toward me came when I was working so much that I was too tired to emotionally coddle her and started asking for space to take care of myself. I really put the nail in that coffin when I started to ask her to fulfill at least half her promises, and she had already found herself a replacement emotional supporter who was also a yes man.
So glad I'm not alone here.
BRB, gotta prepare an invoice for mansplaining and hand it to my husband's friend.
This is the best thing ever.
you know what, I do like this article, but I have to admit, I think women are guilty of this too. I wonder if it is really is a gendered issue, or just indicative of how emotionally illiterate our society is? I've seen many women who think that if they are hungry, tired, or upset for whatever reason, that they can make it their partner's problem too, and they just throw a fit until their partner tries everything imaginable to try and calm them down, instead of taking responsibility for their own emotional well being. Although I would consider such behaviour in women to be a problem caused by patriarchy – women encouraged to act like helpless princesses basically.
Just now stumbled on this. I already know it will be life-changing. Thank you.
Is it an either/or? Seems to me that society’s emotional illiteracy is an aspect of its misogyny—that is, emotional labour is seen as ‘not real work’ precisely because it is seen as ‘women’s work’, in common with housework, childrearing, et cetera.
Similarly, men frequently mansplain to other men; this doesn’t detract from mansplaining being a fundamentally gendered dynamic.
I am doing this with White friends, especially White woman friends. The latter always seem to be on the lookout for a Mammy and always want me to play that to their Miss Scarlett O'Hara.
I feel that the emotional labor I put into someone is paid in reciprocity. I give them freely because when I need their compassion, advice and concern, I hope they will return it to me. This only works, of course, in healthy relationships with people on the same emotional level. Of course, as I r grown older, I've found that those relationships are the only ones I wish to put any effort into. So pacifying a random male, stroking his ego, is something I just won't do and as such, I don't feel cheated.
But the entire point is that it's not women's work. I'm not sure where in the article it says that this is "women's work," but this is work that is expected from women but not expected from men, to the point that it really often results in some kind of major praise when a guy actually is emotionally reciprocal and supportive or does things around the house or takes part in child care (when that's not seen as a skeevy thing because children are considered a woman's domain as well).
We can't lose the high ground by accepting an idea that is incorrect. And this article is challenging that idea. It's a mistake to imply that by acting out against this treatment, especially when it's been literally impossible to address in so many men, that we're somehow going to lose the status of women who work too hard for men. If women want to use money as a tool to point out that they do work for men that is never acknowledged, I think that's fair, and I also don't think whether or not the article is serious about that monetization is really the point; money is a symbol of value, and emotional work has that no matter who is performing it, which society does not understand. We're allowed to be angry. We're allowed to make demands. We're allowed to be deeply, deeply disappointed in the men who won't ever quite see us as worthy of the level of emotional investment they demand from us. If we could get that equality by politely asking for it, we'd have it by now, and if you wait around on history you'll just become a part of it.
So if men want to get upset about what women think of their crap (here's the beauty of it!) then their feelings are not our problem.
Scuse me but what are people to you? Potential sources of emotional support? The entire point the article is making is about the value of a woman's time, which is generally not respected by men. If you have to have "not all men" spelled out to you and underlined twice so you can safely eliminate men you care about (and yourself if you are a man), then you're missing the point. Men who are not included in this assessment already know that they are the exception to the rule, and have already had to tussle with (and likely still struggle with) their own ability to emotionally relate to women. They know this article is not referring to them personally, and that what they feel about it is not at the heart of the issue. Therefore, they do not need to have their feelings coddled in favor of women's. Kind of like the article's, y'know, talking about.
Also, exactly what qualities given in your example justify calling this hypothetical man effeminate? If there are none, then why is that concept relevant to your argument? Just saying, I would really hesitate to trust the self-assessment of a man who both equated femininity with emotional labor and made a point of calling attention to his own proficiency at it. Especially if he were to do so in order to (very condescendingly) give men a platform to talk over women on an article complaining about men talking over women.