If Everything Is Labor, Nothing is Labor, but Some Things Are Labor
The term "emotional labor" has gotten out of hand, but it shouldn't be dismissed just because it's annoying.
Last week, one of my all-time favorite Substack writers, Stephanie H. Murray, wrote about emotional labor skeptics such as myself, and why she disagrees with our “slippery slope” argument that the term emotional labor should begin and end with service workers and other forms of paid labor that involve personal interface. Even though we politely disagree on this topic, her piece was really good. Plus, it’s not every day that a fragile narcissist like myself can burst out laughing at joke about me: she argues that unknowingly, I wrote about the “emotional labor of mangetting” when I wrote about how hard it is to find a spouse on a conservative-coded timeline without actually being conservative.
This is where I point out that such an exchange of ideas is emblematic of the feminization of Substack (and that’s good, actually.) Murray and I, who I believe are at least friendly Internet acquaintances if not Internet friends, repeatedly go out of our way to tell the other one we aren’t mad or offended. Don’t put in the papers that we’re mad or offended! Meanwhile, male writers will just call each other pedophiles because they disagree about GDP growth. In this sense, I think Substack could use a woman’s touch.
Murray 100% correctly characterized my argument re: emotional labor, specifically the fact that I have said it needs a clear boundary around paid service work. Part of this disconnect comes from the fact that she is extremely well-informed about the academic origins of the term, whereas I am a little dirty piggie living in the slop trough and mainlining slop from my slop-hogging snout all day.
As a result, when I see non-academics talking about emotional labor, they are never neutrally pointing out that energy is expended on things like playing with your children, going to your daughter’s ballet recital, or having sex with your husband. It’s true—going on date night with my husband expends more energy than scrolling TikTok for earwax extraction videos, but I don’t know if that makes it “labor,” at least the way I see it. Within the non-academic spheres where emotional labor is assigned to every unpaid task in one’s life, these tasks are very clearly presented as oppressive, unpleasant, exhausting ordeals unfairly foisted upon women, as if women had no say in whether or not they wanted to get married or have kids (my article about the “emotional labor of mangetting,” as Murray hilariously calls it, kind of makes the point that getting married isn’t something that happens by accident, and a woman who finds the very institution of marriage oppressive in 2026 USA can simply not get married.)
While Murray rejects the idea that emotional labor is an inherently negative term because people can have all sorts of positive and negative feelings about their tasks, both paid and unpaid (true!) the reality is that 99% of the time that this term is used in the public sphere, it is in the form of complaining, and this is how most everyday, non-academic people encounter it.
