The idea of women as innately “nurturing” is a problem.
Women are expected to be “nurturing” and expend vast amounts of energy on being emotionally supportive toward men, while men are expected to ignore others’ emotional needs, fail to adress their own, and depend on women to do the emotional work in a relationship.
Emotional labour includes things like: listening to someone talk about his day and being emotionally supportive when he talks about his problems, encouraging him to go to the doctor when necessary, being the primary resolver of conflicts in the relationship, both between the two of them and with people outside the family unit, etc., etc.
When girls are very small we are taught to be quiet, to listen well, to be supportive, to put others’ needs first. This training continues into adulthood, while at the same time boys are expected to be loud, careless with each others’ feelings and not to process their own in a healthy way. Through adolesence and adulthood these pressures increase.
Girls and women who aren’t adept at or invested in emotional labour are treated as cold, heartless, and self-absorbed, while men who perform the bare minimum of emotional labour are considered very sensitive and men who perform the amount of emotional labour expected of women are considered emasculated.
This social pressure is enforced through media also. Stories featuring both men and women frequently stress the importance of women doing emotional labour while portraying men as being incapable of or uninterested in doing emotional labour. When media does portray men doing emotional labour, it’s often played for laughs, as the man is now emasculated, and therefore a target of derision.
This leaves women to see to our own emotional needs as well as to those of the men in our lives, praising women for being “nurturing” as though it’s an innate characteristic requiring no effort, and not expecting men to do it because “it doesn’t come naturally”.
Being “nurturing” is work, and it’s about time we shared the load.
gummygunk
pixelskylines
blakekathryn
