Emotional Labor - Rose Hackman

Last updated Apr 6, 2024

• Author: Rose Hackman
• Full Title: Emotional Labor
• Category: #books

One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. —Martin Luther King Jr. (Location 28)

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. —bell hooks (Location 32)

We had grown close over the three years we had become sudden one-on-one roommates— after my father had died and my two older sisters had gone off to college. (Location 47)

What was important— I had known immediately upon picking up the phone— was conveying that the situation was under control to him, even if it wasn’t yet. (Location 73)

women across the world are taught from a very young age to regulate, modulate, and manipulate their feelings in order to have a positive effect on the feelings of others. Women, endlessly told to smile but also tasked with making other people smile, are held accountable not only for the expression of their own feelings but also for the feelings of others. (Location 91)

This is emotional labor: the primordial training that, before anything else, women and girls should edit the expression of their emotions to accommodate and elevate the emotions of others. (Location 102)

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild first coined the term four decades ago to describe the skill American workers were required to perform in the service sector as it was exploding and slowly replacing the manufacturing one. (Location 103)

With these ongoing emotion-geared performances, our position as women in both professional and personal settings is firmly established in the world: the caregiver, the appeaser, the listener, the empath, the subordinate. (Location 114)

As of 2019, women represented half of the college-educated workforce. (Location 124)

We are in fact still living in the midst of a thriving patriarchy. (Location 131)

Men are still considered heads of households. When men are absent from households, the household becomes regarded as an incomplete, defective unit. 6 (Location 141)

During the worst years of the COVID-19 epidemic, economists reported that women were quitting their jobs at twice the rate men were. (Location 157)

Humans need to be fed, dressed, housed, educated, tended to, and cared for, and they need to feel meaning, belonging, and connection to be able to function in an economy. (Location 176)

In the words of radical feminist Heidi Hartmann, “the material base upon which patriarchy rests lies most fundamentally in men’s control over women’s labor power.” (Location 178)

One of the cleverest tricks of patriarchy is that it transforms all work deemed feminine into fixed, subliminal expressions of femininity— however much that work involves active time, effort, and skill. (Location 180)

Emotional labor as a more gendered burden has been depicted explicitly many times in fictional works by women— whether in the novel Sula by Toni Morrison, or The Wife by Meg Wolitzer, (Location 201)

This is a form of work that is imposed on those who lack power, obscured, and then used to keep them in place. (Location 212)

Emotional Labor is the product of seven years of inquiry, five of which were spent in intense reading, research, reflection, and confrontation, including through hundreds of interviews in person, over the phone, and via email. (Location 218)

Emotional labor is a global phenomenon, but its iteration in the United States has roots in a brand of patriarchy and white supremacy brought to the country by its former colonizer. (Location 234)

and love in action as forces that can lead us forward and call all of us into the best of our humanity. (Location 240)

Mother’s Day, a day that ended up being about everything except putting her feet up and being celebrated, (Location 246)

Jennifer had noticed that her husband of ten years, Shawn, who was generally closed off with his feelings, was acting more distant and down. Jennifer slowly, skillfully convinced him to share what was in his heart. “If you don’t open up, you’re going to be like a bottle of pop that you shake and shake and shake and eventually you explode,” (Location 257)

Every now and then, as she goes into the layers of uncompensated work she does, her tone starts to sound more pleading and her descriptions sound like questions, like she is clear that what she is doing is there but she needs someone, anyone, to hear her, to see her, to mark what she is doing as real. (Location 305)

Performing emotional labor— identifying or anticipating other people’s emotions, adapting yours in consequence, and then managing to positively affect other people’s emotions (Location 310)

emotional labor— just like physical labor, intellectual labor, and creative labor— is a form of work that does require time, effort, and skill. (Location 322)

Or whether it is someone else, and we are proclaiming our own innocence and ignorance, while engaging in subtle arm-twisting to get them to get a task done, followed by restrained gratitude when it is done (Location 337)

Her life’s work having a term was deeply validating, and also relieving. It hadn’t all been in her head; her exhaustion did not mean she was morally deficient. (Location 352)

Men and women are perfectly able to perform emotional labor, but the expectations placed on women are far greater than those placed on men, resulting in a notable penalty-versus-credit gulf. (Location 363)

Psychological essentialism still reigns supreme for many people (Location 375)

our persistent cultural stereotypes that maintain that women and men have impeccably opposing personality traits. Under this dogma, women are cast as empathetic, emotional, insightful, warm, expressive, other-directed, interpersonally adept, and more aware of the feelings of others, while men are cast as more dominant, rational, active, decisive, performance- and status-driven, hierarchy-aware, self-directed, selfish, and less aware of the feelings of others. (Location 377)

Cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, (Location 382)

today’s science shows that brains are prodigiously affected by social cues and stereotypes and react to them, not the opposite. (Location 384)

Human brains have the ability to constantly evolve and be taught new tricks or skill sets. But their permeability means they are also heavily affected by context and environment. (Location 390)

Men’s and women’s brains are not the cause for the status quo then; they are the product of it. (Location 394)

Social scientists and psychologists have found that there is a “backlash” effect toward people who veer from cultural, gendered stereotypes. Openly sensitive men risk being branded as weak, incompetent, suspicious, or even dishonorable, and openly ambitious women risk being branded strident, untrustworthy, malicious, unbalanced, and even dangerous. (Location 400)

studies that found that women and men exhibited similar degrees of empathic ability, finding a difference favoring women only when participants knew they were being tested on a trait deemed feminine, (Location 412)

suggesting that greater empathic accuracy can be achieved by virtually anyone who is given proper motivation. (Location 421)

If you think of what emotional labor is— putting other people and their feelings above yourself and your own— it is remarkably similar to the idea of serving. (Location 433)

those designated as “subordinate”— whether male or female— were consistently more attentive and perceptive to the feelings of leaders, (Location 439)

“The prevailing power imbalance between males and females within a culture might actually be sustained and facilitated if the more powerful members of the culture require the less powerful members to ‘read their minds,’ (Location 443)

that we mirror one another as humans and that emotions are infectious. (Location 463)

because emotional labor is the act of putting other people’s feelings before one’s own, it can also provoke the taking on of essential tasks other people may be able to do but find undesirable or unrewarding, (Location 481)

For the last couple of decades, time-use surveys capturing the population’s paid and unpaid work have been undertaken in the United States following years of campaigning caused by international feminist economics thinking. (Location 494)

This system of experiential inequality and unequal emotional labor distribution is propped up in private by absurd double standards we have become all too well acquainted with, even as we let them slide. (Location 521)

Emotional labor is the ultimate enabler of work. A loved, educated, well-fed, healthy, and socialized young adult goes into the world a capable worker thanks to years of labor put into their shaping— and years more dedicated to their maintenance and uplifting. (Location 538)

white managers, who often police her tone and appearance— leaving her with no choice but to filter the expression of her emotions to please her surroundings and keep her position. (Location 548)

After some boys started bullying her for her looks, Ashley noticed her young daughter internalizing more and more negative messages about herself. Her grades started to fall, and Bri began to believe she was dumb. (Location 558)

she is bent on breaking hers. She does it day in and day out “by speaking up, standing for what’s right, going above and beyond,” (Location 582)

That first COVID-19-pandemic shift, there was little reassurance outside of her own to be found. No one had a plan; (Location 602)

As a patient care technician, a job also referred to as a nursing assistant, she was expected to take patients’ vitals every four hours, (Location 605)

Registered nurses, nursing assistants like Lucy, personal care aides, and home health aides, each position overwhelmingly occupied by women at rates of eight to nine out of every ten, are all on the list of the Bureau of Labor Statistics top twenty occupations with the most projected job growth over the next decade. (Location 618)

Lower in the hierarchy of the hospital compared to doctors or nurses, she felt thrown in the deep end, expected to be the caregiver in a context that was blatantly not caring for her. (Location 635)

the prestige didn’t translate into much beyond pot banging. In the United States, for all the buzz of federal hazard pay that had initially proposed increasing essential workers’ salaries by an extra $ 13 per hour, which would have almost doubled Lucy’s income, proposals never concretized. (Location 649)

Loudly stating the value of feminized work places another veil in front of the fact that we chronically refuse to pay for the work of people meeting our most essential needs. (Location 663)

as humans, our existence is primarily reliant on our emotional needs being met. Love, a sense of connection, and belonging could not be more valuable to humans thriving— more so than the food that we eat or the roof over our heads. (Location 666)

the rules of our economy are not evenly applied depending on who is doing the work and what kind of work is being done. This is a rigged system that relies on social beliefs that are far more brutal and retrograde than we would care to admit. (Location 675)

a core dynamic of care as a human activity: coercion. Physical, economic, social, and moral pressures are all used to induce people into performances based on what she called “status obligations,” which are often tied to gender and also compounded by race and class. (Location 677)

Starting in the nineteenth century, most forms of work became based in an understanding of exchange rather than an expression of status. (Location 683)

Care, however, unlike other kinds of work, has remained what Glenn calls “pre-modern” from a labor perspective. This means that care, including its core performance of emotional labor, has retained the attributes of being a “forced gift,” holding barely any requirement or expectation for compensation, recognition, or exchange. (Location 687)

In the restaurant industry, itself the employer of 10 percent of Americans, most establishment owners do not pay servers and bartenders a full wage. They pay them a tipped subminimum wage, which stands at $ 2.13 an hour federally to this day. (Location 694)

Servers are making a living almost entirely off emotional labor. But it is seen as totally acceptable for that emotional labor to not be paid for by employers. (Location 706)

Being given weekend and dinner shifts instead of early week and lunch shifts can double, even triple what you take home at the end of the week— less than $ 200 for a week’s work versus upward of $ 600. (Location 717)

Economists call “feminization of labor” the refusal to recognize and fully compensate feminine fields of work— such as care, service, and attention work— that are becoming the bulk of the economy. (Location 722)

Dianne Avery, a professor emerita at the University of Buffalo School of Law, described tipping practices as gendered, feudal throwbacks. “What tipped workers represent for the moment of that exchange is an intimate master– servant relation,” (Location 728)

it’s their dependency on a customer’s uncertain magnanimity— because their emotional labor is not seen as necessarily worthy of exchange— that puts them in a spot that feels compromising to the core. (Location 739)

old-fashioned, classist, and racist views dating back to the nineteenth century still expect respectable women— in other words white middle- or upper-class women— to stay home, and women working in drinking establishments to be sex workers. (Location 750)

Women may now occupy close to half of the formal workforce, but public spaces are still seen as male, so when women enter them, it is still assumed to be according to men’s rules, for the male gaze, or for male entertainment. (Location 753)

Sandberg’s message was clear and empowering: with the right kind of individual attitude, personal life choices, and toning down of apologetic feminine behaviors, women could finally move forward, and up. (Location 788)

“They told me the only way you are going to get ahead in the corporate world is to boost the male egos around you”— a form of emotional labor, making male colleagues and superiors feel good, specifically tied to affirming their power. (Location 811)

For men, being perceived as competent and confident were the two ingredients that led them to gain influence, opening the doors to rise up. Do well and act like you know what you are doing: a simple recipe. (Location 835)

If women wanted to gain influence in the same way as their male counterparts did, they needed to also possess and display what is known in organizational psychology as “prosocial orientation.” (Location 837)

In order to modulate the backlash, and not be seen as too hungry for power or too eager to get ahead, women have to play a game of compensation. As they assert themselves as competent and confident, they must also dole out doses of reassuring emotional labor. (Location 857)

because deference and filtering of emotions go with power, in traditional work environments, the higher up you go, the less emotional labor you absolutely have to do. (Location 886)

Failing to treat emotional intelligence in action as a form of work that requires time, effort, and skill the same way other forms of work do meant that only some select workers were lauded for its performance. (Location 902)

Anna is twenty-five and has been a nanny for six years. When I ask her what her job involves exactly, she tells me it “entails everything” tied to Mia: being in charge of her scheduling, clothes, food, schooling, her general well-being, and her emotional, intellectual, and physical development. (Location 933)

Anna’s emotional labor to the child in her care also involves providing her with an environment for emotional development, emotional exploration, and emotional literacy as she processes the world around her with prodigious sensitivity, ability, and speed. Sensory feelings must be given explanations and translated into emotions that must be given words. (Location 943)

Children do not simply need food, clothing, and rest; they need affection and attention that expands to the expression and containment of moods, the fielding of questions, and the managing of the constant deciphering of internal and external universes. They need the shepherding and secure attachment that will help ground them in those essential human emotions of belonging, connection, and love. (Location 951)

emotional literacy— their ability to identify and express emotions (Location 955)

Genuine affection is a part of how she can perform her deep emotional labor duties well, but that doesn’t mean it makes the tasks any less wearying. (Location 964)

Treating the topic as exclusively elitist helps ingrain the sexist idea that women’s concerns are just so very silly, dismissible as irrelevant, trivial. (Location 999)

As long as people performing feminized tasks, including women of different backgrounds, do not see one another as fellow workers, there can be no colossal change. (Location 1004)

When seen, when valued or appreciated, or when part of an exchange, a mutuality, an ecosystem where love is power— then it needn’t be exploitative. Quite the contrary: doing emotional labor for people who are doing it for you is the goal, not the problem. (Location 1011)

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, (Location 1020)

before the abolition of slavery wealthy white women, who often could not inherit land, were instead left wealth from their fathers through the bequeathal of enslaved people. (Location 1021)

white women would seek out enslaved Black women who had newly given birth and force them to abandon their own infants for the benefit of the white ones. Worse, historical accounts show that newly pregnant white women would sometimes orchestrate for enslaved Black women to be raped— a sanctioned assault ensuring that white woman and Black woman would give birth within similar periods. (Location 1026)

Under slavery, mammies were portrayed as large, dark-skinned, smiling, asexual, comforting figures who worked inside white enslavers’ homes and took care of the home while playing a nanny-type role with white children. (Location 1041)

contrary to popular renderings, scholars have found that only the wealthiest enslavers could afford to have enslaved women inside their homes, and when they did, light-skinned women tended to be invited in, not dark-skinned women. (Location 1047)

The willing and comforting mammy narrative served the purpose of preserving white innocence and the social, political, and economic interests of white America as white people entered into a far more common exploitative domestic dynamic than was the case during slavery. (Location 1053)

Called “Mammy,” she noted how usual it was for Black domestic workers to be called by a reductive diminutive, a first name, or the task they were employed to execute (e.g., Cook, Nurse, Mammy, Mary Lou)— instead of being called with reverence Mr./ Mrs./ Miss followed by their last name. (Location 1072)

“What we need is present help, present sympathy, better wages, better hours, more protections, and a chance to breathe for once while alive as free women. If none others will help us, it would seem that the Southern white women themselves might do so in their own defense, because we are rearing their children (Location 1077)

When her husband would come to pick her up from work, they humiliatingly greeted Edward Phillips by calling him “Mr. Keeten,” the name of his wife’s abuser. Nobody corrected them, though. The Phillipses could not risk any penalties— job loss among others— that could have come with a correction. (Location 1106)

the use of images of Black people as part of brands to sell products, like Aunt Jemima syrup or Uncle Ben’s rice. Such placements and amalgamations do not just reduce Black humanity to something that can be bought and sold, they help disseminate nostalgic, racial stereotypes. (Location 1119)

Her economic family may have felt genuine affection toward Mrs. Phillips, but that affection was used as a veneer to gloss over the reality of her unprotected employment status they were all implicated in maintaining over decades. (Location 1126)

“It was never really said explicitly to me, truthfully. But I always felt like if they [the younger cousins] were in the room, somebody should be paying attention to them. And so I always felt like I had to take on that role.” The situation certainly didn’t leave her feeling like she had any choice (Location 1164)

Domestic workers, including home caregivers and house cleaners, are a largely unregulated workforce, where wage theft, exploitation akin to indentured servitude, sexual harassment, and general toxic working conditions are able to flourish with little to no path for intervention. (Location 1179)

Why is it that employers and parents are so astonished to hear that a nanny has an education from a world-class institution like NYU? It may be because they fail to see a nanny as a full human being with a brain and ambitions, and as existing outside of the home she works in. (Location 1221)

To lose patience with a kid would be so unfair. They are learning and growing and testing boundaries and figuring things out. (Location 1238)

To this emotional labor she adds one form that mostly mothers have talked about in interviews— that of keeping endless tabs open in her brain, while staying emotionally present for the people around. “I think that multitasking is something I have got a lot better at over time. You have to when working with kids. (Location 1240)

It is obvious that we cannot conceive of building a society that is anti-racist and anti-sexist without transforming it into one that truly values and sees the work of love and the work of care as paramount, central to its existence. (Location 1263)

“Female swim coaches who don’t add enough upspeak in their voice when they are yelling ‘kick’ across the pool deck are often seen as mean, while their male coworkers can yell all they want,” (Location 1279)

Tweaking and altering your authentic self to adhere to what is expected of you as a woman, either to please others or for fear of serious repercussion— in the form of social penalties like angry parents, economic penalties like job loss, or physical penalties like violence— is emotional labor. (Location 1288)

Over the last ten years, the field of neuroscience has moved away from understanding emotions as innate and universal— stamped on the brain from birth. Instead, it now sees emotions as creations of the brain, influenced by the constant, active absorption of the world around us through our five senses, mixed with predictions based on experience. (Location 1295)

In sociology, tweaking your internal feelings to match the situation is referred to as deep acting, and tweaking the display of them is surface acting. Both are emotional labor. (Location 1307)

Kavanaugh was not only being the opposite of deferential, he was flauntingly disrespectful and belittling of the senator. (Location 1333)

Emotional labor, taking cues from cultural display rules, becomes the way in which women are forced to express their place in the hierarchy: serving others as a priority. That is the only way women will be given space. (Location 1343)

Danielle has found that the limits of consensual emotional labor are being pushed, often violated, by the same students whose compassion she is trying to build. (Location 1374)

he wanted to feel better about himself, without doing any work, and he thought she could— or should— give that to him. He wanted absolution. (Location 1379)

In a 2020 Hulu documentary named Hillary, Clinton explains how, unlike her male opponents, she felt she had no choice but to spend one hour a day on hair and makeup. (Location 1395)

Jordan Peele’s 2017 movie Get Out, (Location 1400)

These audiences’ belief that they have blanket entitlement to women’s emotional labor creates a feedback loop that transforms any moment a woman is watched into an opportunity for disciplining. Watching and commenting as a woman tiptoes her way along, awaiting a fall or a stumble, has become a public spectacle in which humiliation is both a tool and an objective. (Location 1406)

differentiating between two forms of sexism— hostile and benevolent— that, respectively, threaten women with the stick of hatred and lure them into submission with the carrot of adoration. (Location 1463)

Hostile sexism is sexism we tend to be familiar with; it is overt, tied to prejudice, negative stereotyping, and discrimination. This includes saying women are manipulative, conniving, stupid, claiming women are bad leaders, calling women who veer from conservative sexual norms bitches and whores, and claiming women are unethical and untrustworthy. (Location 1465)

Benevolent sexism, the less well-known of the sexisms, relates to actions and words directed at women that seek to compliment, infantilize, and cajole them into accepting a subjugated position with gender-stereotypical roles and attributes. It is more covert. This includes describing women as pure, caring, and virtuous beings in need of gallant protection. It includes calling adult women “baby” or “girl.” They are the selfless mothers, the innocent daughters, the sex to be venerated, cherished— in a way that might initially seem doting to women rather than restricting. Benevolent sexism showers women who behave correctly with the momentary gratification of validation and acceptance, but sanctions are only ever one misstep away. (Location 1471)

women being forced into the two vastly oversimplified categories of virgins or whores face an impossible choice. Virgins, or good girls, are considered full humans but lack power, while sex objects gain some power but face a reduction in their full humanity— with their full humanity never again recoverable. (Location 1497)

Progressive circles, still deep in the mud of unquestioned misogyny, seem to have come up with their own virgin-whore complex that casts good women as using their brains for money and influence and bad women as using their bodies, especially sexually, for money and influence. (Location 1502)

to deny ascendance or power by denying women full self-determination, specifically here economic self-determination. These moments of rewarding versus shaming penalize all women as we get swept up into a mirage of fake morals and ignore the bottom line. (Location 1522)

in practice, under the guise of what was officially a “volunteer position,” she was entering into an opaque, unregulated work arrangement, which required her— if she wanted to keep her title— to put studies and formal jobs on hold for a year. (Location 1535)

beauty is still seen as a private project, not work in our society. This functions in a similar way to other forms of devalued feminized labor that hit the marketplace— like care, service, sex, or domestic work. (Location 1558)

Instead of understanding the role they are playing in an economy, we continue to be sidetracked into absurd conversations that viciously police the perceived exchange of money for sex, money for femininity. (Location 1570)

Requiring this false high road of women, at the same time as we require them to perform constant rituals of femininity, is hypocritical beyond belief and the opposite of progress. (Location 1579)

patriarchal capitalism that pretends that withholding money from women using their bodies for profit is a moral act, not an act of market exploitation. (Location 1580)

we cannot deny the value of women who want to step into their power with the instrumental use of their body. The point is to destroy the virgin-whore binary, not to pick one side of it. (Location 1583)

Ari tells me she strategized and decided to suppress her initial feelings of hurt and humiliation, put on a brave face, and redirect the inordinate amount of attention she was getting in the best way she thought she could. (Location 1594)

As women, we are taught to swallow. We are put up on a pedestal so that we can be torn down, and as we are, we swallow and smile graciously, expressing, of all things, gratitude. (Location 1613)

As I read, my adrenaline levels shot up. A deafening, sharp buzz started humming in my ear. I was suddenly hyperaware of my environment: (Location 1640)

Marital rape became illegal across all American states only in 1993. (Location 1647)

There was the woman who left her abusive husband after being a supporting wife for decades and who found herself shamed for “abandoning” him by her lifetime community. (Location 1658)

This emotional labor imposed on them was as much about maintaining the power status quo and protecting men’s position and interests as it was about a blanket social refusal to face up to the real, deeply disturbing effects of what is hiding behind the thin veils of civilized pretense: a gendered hierarchy that violates with sadism and impunity. (Location 1668)

In America, one out every five women will be raped in her lifetime (one out of every seventy-one men will be). Often, the men women have to be most afraid of are not strangers but the very men they are sharing their lives with. (Location 1684)

the threat of rape and assault, especially on girls and women and perpetrated by men, is not only everywhere, we all shift to accommodate it. People know. (Location 1704)

those trips we do take outside, and even— as it turns out— when we stay inside, all of these situations still require us to be on the lookout: assessing situations and people, scrutinizing the possibility of danger, the proximity of a man, the friendliness level of a new acquaintance, of an uncle, of a family friend. The anger of a husband. (Location 1723)

This constant lookout is a form of emotional labor that conditions us to double, triple think, to be hesitant and impose limits on ourselves and on our lives. (Location 1726)

Carrying the effects of other people’s sexual desires on our bodies is taught to us before we get to define our sexuality for ourselves. (Location 1749)

Living with the knowledge that there is a significant possibility we will be sexually assaulted leaves women living on the defensive. It forces us into behaving like prey, (Location 1751)

In science, the term “ecology of fear” describes the behavioral, physiological, and neurobiological costs borne by animals avoiding predation. This framework takes into account the dissuading effects of predators on prey’s lives and livelihoods (Location 1755)

Emotional labor as survival— in its limiting of women’s speech, lives, and freedoms— becomes its own violent way of upkeeping the system. (Location 1765)

Ongoing female homicide numbers show three women are killed every day in the United States by boyfriends, husbands, or ex-husbands, and five every day by men they know. (Location 1787)

the judicial system was ill-equipped to deal with the broad problem of domestic abuse before it turned deadly. This was in large part because of a punitive focus on convicting abusers that rarely bore results, and a lack of meaningful attention and resources afforded to victims— like access to housing, money, jobs, and solutions-oriented counseling. (Location 1806)

The vicious acts were caught up in power and control and a notion of ownership of women, but also in an ingrained view that women were responsible— liable even— for men’s well-being. (Location 1816)

Such an unequal gendered distribution of emotional labor consolidates women as creatures worthy of life only to the extent that they hold an ability to enhance the lives of men. Cut off from men, their humanity wanes. (Location 1837)

These femicides are not exceptions. This is the system expressing itself at its clearest. (Location 1839)

As a trans woman who had sex with cis men, she said she had little choice but to find prospective romantic partners in niche corners of the internet, marginalized from most other spaces. But as she engaged with men she met in this way, she found that lovers often cried and expressed intense emotions like shame after intimacy, expecting her to step in as a de facto therapist. (Location 1848)

She did not seek out this emotional labor, but containing the men in these moments was necessary. If the men spiraled, she knew it could be dangerous to her personal safety. (Location 1851)

people think we are just becoming progressive because of time, however we are becoming progressive because of labor. (Location 1860)

Nonconsensual emotional labor emanating from entitlements based on power hierarchies is not the root of change; reversing the trend and shifting the emotional labor onus is. (Location 1879)

Black women are used to having to do a very specific form of emotional labor, which Johnson calls donning a “cape”: acting as a bulletproof superhero who as a priority holds together the community. (Location 1889)

Her center fosters the exchange of a classic form of emotional labor, provided in a group setting, in a way that uplifts and pays attention to broader community. (Location 1895)

healing can be found among peers, but also sometimes by requiring perpetrators to take part in the process. (Location 1898)

Restorative justice requires all parties involved in wrongdoing to heal, “holding people accountable and making people pay in ways that are less traditional and less criminalized,” in Johnson’s words. (Location 1917)

Under the current system of experiential hierarchy, beneficiaries of privilege and power are able to endlessly demand emotional labor from those at the margins. Not only does reversing this demand for emotional labor create a path for accountability and redress, it also stops one of the causes for violence— which is the demand, sometimes deadly, of emotional labor itself. (Location 1921)

When she works with male perpetrators, she tells me, she has an acronym, ARRA, which stands for accountability, remorse, root cause, and action. “You have to take accountability for what you did, express some kind of remorse, you can’t express remorse without addressing root cause— What was the root cause? What fueled [the] behavior?— and then: What action are you going to do after this? How are you going to get better? How are you going to get back? That’s all restorative justice for me. I really believe that’s how we get better. (Location 1926)

being prey in one situation does not mean you are not predator in another. (Location 1945)

I would like to free her of that emotional labor and have her put that energy, that constant buzzing in the back of her mind— Am I safe? What does he mean? Was that a sound? Is he following me? Does he seem upset?— to better use. (Location 1961)

I want to fight for a world where mutuality and consent rule, and people are brave enough to free her of that kind of survival emotional labor. I want her to think of emotional labor not as something she deploys out of desperation to conserve herself at a low, almost undetectable frequency, but instead as a valuable tool that all should be performing to improve and protect the community. (Location 1965)

I want her to operate at her highest possible frequency, in symphony with those around her, receiving and giving the most radical kind of love— the kind of love bell hooks refers to as an action, not a feeling that just sits; the kind of love that demands responsibility and accountability— and is always accompanied by growth. (Location 1969)

I want others, especially boys and men, to understand that she is everything except the simple vehicle of their own emotions and experiences when they relate to her. That is the key to restituting freedom to women and girls, and it is also not so incidentally the key to resolving the worst kind of gendered violence. That is the key, also, for freedom in men. (Location 1974)

2017 documentary The Problem with Apu, (Location 1982)

This doesn’t just have the effect of giving these behaviors a free pass based on a cultural understanding of what is “normal”; it also has the effect of directing boys and men toward what performing their gender should look like. (Location 1992)

In a 2018 documentary on the subject called Roll Red Roll, director Nancy Schwartzman drew attention to the culture in this football town that was putting its daughters at risk to protect its sons (Location 2017)

by isolating emotional labor to women, we invalidate men as caring, compassionate, gentle, nurturing, or any other attribute stereotyped as feminine. (Location 2033)

if you understand emotional labor as not simply a burden but a healing tool, an essential way of connecting and thriving as a human, you see how men being cut off from this kind of performance stands to make them losers on a deeper level. (Location 2036)

While emotional labor may be the tool that has enabled women to survive and adapt to oppression, it is also a transformative, restorative force when distributed across power differentials. (Location 2039)

“Man box,” a term increasingly used by psychologists and advocates, refers to a very rigid set of behavior and personality rules men are expected to adhere to if they are to be safe from being challenged on their status as “real men.” (Location 2062)

Gender performance and oppression, at its most harmful, is a tight, two-way street. Penalties for those who deviate are severe, and in some ways harsher for men than for women. (Location 2075)

In a misogynistic world, anything at all feminine is tarnishing. (Location 2077)

The one form of emotional labor men are actively socially trained to perform is emotion suppression, followed by displays of strength or aggression. (Location 2080)

the separation between what we have thought of as rational and emotional is totally fake. (Location 2102)

Based on how our body is reacting to these five senses, our brain processes the answer to simple questions: Am I feeling good or bad? Am I feeling stimulated or unstimulated? Neuroscience calls the answer to these simple questions “affect,” or base feelings. (Location 2104)

Combining affect with past experiences and environment, the brain then forms what is referred to as “emotion concepts,” more complex emotions (Location 2107)

It operates like a scientific experiment that constantly makes predictions and corrections, using affect transformed into emotions to produce conscious thoughts on the world. (Location 2110)

our brains’ mechanics do not separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. “The human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception or affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves,” (Location 2116)

“Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.” (Location 2119)

One thing all humans are born with, Barrett writes, is “a fundamental ability to learn from regularities and probabilities around you.” (Location 2121)

Darwin’s observations seek to justify the white supremacist, patriarchal state of the world as inherently natural with no proof except the arrogance of his own belief systems. (Location 2138)

This selective kind of thinking has made Peterson extremely popular, especially among groups desperate to justify long-standing systems of oppression that are starting to unravel. (Location 2151)

Collaborative societies that share rather than compete for resources— like trees in plant communities that operate through complex subterranean networks to heal one another— thrive rather than self-destruct. (Location 2155)

bonobos, unlike chimpanzees, live in communal, matriarchal structures, where cooperation is key and aggressive male bonobos are often shunned from the group. Meanwhile, more collaborative male bonobos who are able to live side by side with female bonobos with little conflict and under the matriarchal order end up fathering the most children. (Location 2162)

gender difference in mathematics performance was not tied to natural ability or factors that were “innate” and “immutable” but rather to changeable sociocultural factors. (Location 2182)

Thinking that accepts the status quo and justifies it as evidence of its own validity risks limiting this kind of exciting catch-up. (Location 2185)

From an evolution standpoint, thriving men would be those who were able to practice self-care, live connected, empathetic lives, be in happy relationships, and center and understand their emotions as well as the emotions of others. (Location 2199)

“My male programming wouldn’t allow me to look in the mirror and see I was in distress: I was in emotional and psychic distress.” (Location 2218)

I think the crisis comes in not being supported or encouraged or being recognized as men when that fuller range of emotions is expressed.” (Location 2226)

Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania, (Location 2228)

men stopping themselves from identifying, expressing, or sharing feelings beyond anger came as no surprise in our current climate. (Location 2229)

boys are just as relational as girls, meaning their brains need just as much connection and community to develop and thrive. (Location 2233)

we live in a world that still believes close relationships are bad for boys, especially when it comes to their mothers. This is in part because of disproven, homophobic convictions that a boy who is close to his mother and is emotionally literate is not performing straightness (Location 2234)

We not only need to be encouraging dads to be doing more emotional labor in the family, including with their kids, we have got to stop denying young boys their full humanity. (Location 2239)

We are emotional creatures. We experience our emotions and express them in relationships. If we do not provide relationships where they can be true in their hearts, the upset tensions and stresses are going to leak into and impact their behavior.” (Location 2241)

Interacting with her, interviewing her, having talks with her, kind of broke open— cracked that thick shell that I was keeping up in terms of inuring myself to what I was seeing, experiencing, in terms of what I was dealing with. (Location 2251)

a nonprofit named Man Up, centering the role men can play toward a more gender-equitable world. (Location 2254)

The system relies on the inherent myth of male aggression and dominance to maintain its legitimacy. (Location 2267)

“The idea that a boy may be empowered to define himself as a man on his own terms is too threatening to the predictable reproductive process,” Reichert said, referring to reproduction in an academic sense— as the social organization that reproduces itself from generation to generation. (Location 2272)

women have been narrowing the gap when it comes to embracing more masculine-type behaviors including being competitive and individualistic. But there has been very little narrowing on the other end. (Location 2275)

our gender revolution may have succeeded in helping some groups of women access opportunities their mothers couldn’t, but it has failed abysmally in changing cultural norms around what is valued. (Location 2282)

in a society where men still tend to support their partners more financially and women tend to support their partners more emotionally, the more important of the exchanges for survival is emotional labor, not money. (Location 2321)

Emotional labor should be viewed as highly valuable, which is what evidence continues to suggest, and afford high community status to those doing it— whether inside or outside of the marketplace. (Location 2333)

Should value really be seen as simply measured in dollars, or should we not now insist that value also be seen as time, not only hours of the day spent on specific activities but years of one’s life, lived fully, happily, free of unnecessary burdens of mental and physical ailments? Should that not be the measure of true value? (Location 2337)

For journalist Jimmie Briggs, the only solution for a transformative future lies in championing a form of emotional labor as empathy. (Location 2340)

“Without empathy, it is extraordinarily difficult to see the inherent dignity and value and power in others. (Location 2351)

Hugging as an expression of affection performed regardless of it genuinely feeling good for the hugger and for the benefit of a huggee (Location 2364)

But why was something as innocuous as hugging for a fee newsworthy anyway? For all of our advancement on gender norms, including in progressive circles, we remain uncomfortable with anything resembling love and care, represented here in the form of a hug, being exchanged for money. (Location 2370)

That line of argument often goes one step further and holds that putting a dollar number on anything approaching love and care would tarnish the act— rendering it fake, or even dirty. But fees are everywhere. One of the lies of this version of capitalism is that women’s work is either worth little to nothing or so valuable that it is incalculable, making it sacrilegious for it to be paid. (Location 2374)

emotional labor was not an add-on for her work on top of physical acts, it was the crux of it. Lilith worked as a self-employed dominatrix for years (Location 2381)

The initial meeting, to which she always turned up dressed “vanilla” to avoid raising eyebrows, took the form of an interview, serving as a way for her to scope out the men, do a detailed background session on their medical and personal history, and draw what she calls a “map of their desire landscape.” (Location 2389)

This involved adopting a neutral, nonjudgmental tone. “Some want to wear a diaper and for me to treat them like a baby, some want specific humiliation, some want to get flogged.” The briefing background interview occasionally bordered on a therapy session. This was fine, she reassured me: she was getting paid. “These men, they can’t be open with others, they don’t feel like they can. What I am doing is listening and practicing compassion, understanding, identification, and recognition. My role is to address the symptoms of what very often is their shame.” (Location 2398)

in those moments, her clients were reckoning with their place and positioning in society— turning to her for visibility, acceptance, and unmasked truth. “They struggled with being able to face themselves. Some of them went into very confessional modes and asked me why I thought they were that way.” (Location 2403)

Lilith found she could provoke the best emotional reactions in her clients— reactions her clients were paying for— by being as quiet and suggestive as possible. “I believe the best power involves doing things rather than saying things. I am not a screamer. Few people want to be screamed at, (Location 2410)

“Some clients get roping anxiety. It truly restrains men. Sometimes you need to get them out very fast to avoid them having a panic attack.” (Location 2413)

She found the sessions interesting intellectually, she told me—“ a window on humanity I couldn’t see any other way”— and she noticed the requirements of the job had the effect of increasing her ability for compassion. But she was also clear that the sessions gave her no real pleasure. At the end of the day, she was doing them to get paid. (Location 2418)

Emotional labor as a forceful yet erased form of work was a core part of an impromptu online campaign that started in the spring of 2015, with the hashtag #GiveYourMoneyToWomen. (Location 2422)

With #PayPalMe, women, initially Black women, tasked to explain their oppression to fellow users on venues like Twitter, would only be drawn into debates if their intellectual labor was first compensated for through their PayPal accounts. (Location 2424)

Handing over money was a condition for entry for men into an interaction rather than something that marked the end of one or the receipt of a service. This effective lack of guarantee as to what the money would get them constituted a radical reversal in traditional power dynamics. (Location 2435)

“This isn’t about us needing to be paid more in the patriarchal-dominated wage system, or ‘wanting cash for nothing,’ it’s about not being paid for what is wanted and desired from us, and now monetizing that,” explained hashtag creator Lauren Chief Elk in an interview published in Model View Culture in 2015. (Location 2446)

the vast array of female labor from sex work to emotional labor that was derided and all too often provided in coercive situations, at a discount, or for free. (Location 2451)

an emotional labor menu, with price tags attached. “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.” (Location 2462)

The framing of the sex worker– led movement ended up provocatively shattering the boundary of public and private— by demanding we acknowledge the existence and vitality of emotional labor and insisting that we see its nonpaid iteration not only as work but as something worthy of pay. (Location 2465)

The piece in question, called “Poor Little Rich Women,” published in spring 2015 in The New York Times and written by anthropologist Wednesday Martin, depicted the gender-retrograde arrangements of Manhattan’s elite. Martin, who wrote a book on this topic after living among this population, (Location 2472)

What was wrong with the bonus system was not that it existed but that it depended on unregulated metrics, including for sex, that took advantage of the taboo aspect of these exchanges to remain opaque. (Location 2492)

We need the bonus housewife mentality to spread and even out— even if it takes on different formats— not for fake outrage to make it go back underground. (Location 2497)

As long as we keep seeing exchanges for feminine labor as distasteful or even outlawed and buried below the surface, the line between consent and coercion will remain blurred, and the atmosphere prone to abuse. (Location 2501)

In a system where dollars and feminine labor remain in opposition, it is easy for the person bringing in more money to claim infinite, unregulated access to feminine labor, including coercive or near-coercive sex. (Location 2519)

Unstated boundaries around feminine labor, and the emotional labor expectation that one party should put the experiences of the other party first, can make it seem bottomless and beyond consent. (Location 2520)

In a new social and economic contract that valued emotional labor, among other forms of feminine labor, the work of women and other performers of feminine tasks would be legal, open, and acknowledged. It would also be far more clearly defined and far fairer to its workers. (Location 2522)

watching the same old dynamics unfold online makes it easier to observe what, and who, is actually creating value. (Location 2533)

Money for attention, for kindness, or even for care, love, and a sexual experience might seem cynical to some. (Location 2543)

This state of economic affairs that elevates profit-making as a form of social governance is sometimes referred to as neoliberalism. (Location 2546)

in modern memory, money and matters of the heart have always been intertwined. (Location 2549)

historian Stephanie Coontz explains the idea that one should marry for love only began to take hold in the nineteenth century when the private, “emotional” sphere started being defined as separate from the public, moneymaking sphere. (Location 2552)

The evil in this system is not that we dared think of love and women in relation to money or value; it is that in this system, women were first treated like a dehumanized good, and then— as they gained in partial humanity— the worth they created was totally obscured. (Location 2556)

The point is to illuminate the worth they create through their work. And the point is then in turn to restore the self-governance women have long been denied. (Location 2561)

Social psychologist and sociologist Rebecca Erickson put it this way to me: “Family has never been outside of power. I mean, what’s a dowry? Families were arranged because they’re meetings of power. We cover that up with issues of love and choice and all these romantic notions, but that’s just a story we like to tell ourselves so we can sleep well at night. (Location 2568)

emotions are already being recognized as profitable in the marketplace. This is often happening in ways we find totally normal and not morally objectionable at all. It’s just that the emotional laborers are mostly not the ones making the profits. (Location 2573)

emotions have entered previously masculine corporate cultures, in ways celebrated as innovative and forward-looking. (Location 2582)

Evelyn was central to the functioning of pretty much everything in the coworking space. In seen and unseen ways, as well as in paid and unpaid ways, Evelyn was the emotional laborer in chief. There’s another term for this, of course. “I’ve always been the mother in a group,” Evelyn told me when I interviewed her. (Location 2605)

Millennials came of age in a world that invited them to listen to their inner voices and transform their passion into a job to unlock money, fulfillment, and even liberation. (Location 2612)

on a much deeper level it felt like the currency. It was not only the glue that kept us all together, it was a form of exchange, of connection, of energy distribution and redistribution that led us to act— and grounded us in being. Emotional labor at times began to feel like value itself— just not necessarily of the kind that could be divided into units. (Location 2635)

while our mainstream economics teachings tell us one very basic story about how money came about— as an evolution out of barter— widespread historical and anthropological research begs to differ. (Location 2641)

Barter has been noted historically, but it has only been observed in instances when people who are already used to money are suddenly extensively deprived of it— like during wartime or in situations of incarceration. (Location 2653)

What historians and anthropologists have instead found to predate money are systems of symbolic gift giving tying complex webs of exchange and reciprocity between individuals and groups. What predates money are markers of relationships. (Location 2655)

This symbolic form of gift exchange has survived in our society to this day. (Location 2669)

In primitive societies, exchange was not about wealth accumulation, or extraction, but about reproducing society by constantly strengthening the ties of reciprocity and redistribution. The precursor to money then was the exchange marking and re-marking human ties and relationships. (Location 2673)

The key difference between a bygone era and today is not that emotional labor ceased to be valuable; it is that emotional labor ceased to be treated as valuable, even as it was extracted. (Location 2684)

We need to stop seeing the marketplace either as a solution or as a source of tarnish. All it is is a reflector of subjective value systems— hierarchies and morals— in place. It is a reflector of social structures, even as it is more often seen as the shaper of social structures. (Location 2698)

we need to move past being horrified at love and money interacting. Once we have done that, we need to go one step further and look closely at the ways in which they do. We need to reckon with what they reveal about our different treatment of different groups of people. (Location 2700)

we live in a state of emotional capitalism. Women’s labor— feminine labor— has always been a part of our society and economy, now more than ever. (Location 2705)

we must go deeper and tackle women’s dehumanization that in this patriarchal economy has long gone hand in hand with women’s labor exploitation to maintain dominance. (Location 2713)

Our lower view of femininity is what prepares women to be marketable or market adjacent through their physicality and heavily discounted emotional and feminine labors, but little else. (Location 2714)

it is not so much that women are denied access to the marketplace but rather it is that being a vehicle for others’ profits at the center of the marketplace is where women have been placed all along. (Location 2717)

all people’s existences are worth the same. (Location 2721)

if serving is a core, needed part of humanity, we should all be serving one another. (Location 2722)

Power, threatened, has a way of asserting itself. (Location 2743)

The first step is insisting that emotional labor, together with other private, unremunerated feminized forms of work, be rendered visible. (Location 2748)

Instead of people treating emotional labor as an extension of being sexed or gendered as female, emotional labor should be seen as a form of work demanding time, effort, and skill. (Location 2749)

What we see as the expression of emotional intelligence is emotional labor in action, and we should acknowledge it and reward it as such. (Location 2751)

The next step is marking the emotional labor provided and relied on as valuable, and sometimes even vital. (Location 2752)

she often reminds people who have been in relationships for decades that it is never too late to renegotiate labor divisions or dynamics. Communication lines need to be open. (Location 2761)

better dynamics when it came to emotional labor also involved women letting go of what she called “compulsive caretaking at one’s own expense.” This was something the psychotherapist had observed in all people who at one point had been socialized as women, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, or religion. (Location 2765)

Erica’s emotional labor lies in the details of the tasks she performs— injecting thoughtfulness into pretty sandwich cutting and doing what needs to be done to get her husband to be healthy and avoid hereditary heart disease. Some of it she sees as superfluous, and some of it is necessary, even if she ends up caring more for her adult loved one than they are caring for themselves. (Location 2776)

“often the person doing that labor is scared of handing over that labor because their identity is baked into that labor.” (Location 2780)

a two-pronged approach to address compulsive caretaking. First, women, or people socialized in feminine roles, needed to learn “to tolerate a bigger array of emotions” and accept that not everyone was going to be happy all the time. Accepting this would lead to the withholding of the labor to other members of the family or the group, who— through the absence of the labor— would be forced into acknowledging it was there. The second component involved each person taking responsibility for their needs, identifying what they were, and seeking to fulfill them, including through communicating them to their partner. (Location 2786)

“The more each person is caring for their needs, self-caring, the stronger the relationship is,” (Location 2790)

Doing an inventory of needs and sharing that with a partner was key not only because it helped fulfill that need but also because it decreased a key component of emotional labor: constant preemptive thoughtfulness. (Location 2791)

I am frustrated but I prefer being frustrated quietly and have a nice evening rather than bring something up. (Location 2809)

There is a widespread mafia-like omertà, or vow of silence, around this kind of deeply intimate disparity, especially when it comes to talking about a loved one— because it is seen as a betrayal of private life but also because of the power dynamics at play. (Location 2812)

We need to bring these questions to light so that there can be a reckoning with experiential privilege. (Location 2816)

Part of her omertà may not be about compulsive caregiving but rather about fear of a temper, fear of emotional or physical violence from her partner— reactions that often happen after a loss of sense of control. (Location 2821)

We are still far too comfortable living in a world totally geared toward men, and many structures, including romantic heterosexual relationships, are built on this principle. (Location 2825)

Canada-based public speaking coach Erin Rodgers (Location 2829)

“I want the term ‘gold digger’ to include dudes who look for a woman who will do tons of emotional labour for them.” (Location 2830)

women putting “work” into their male partners, often in relation to their emotional development: helping them mature, figuring out internal struggles or childhood traumas, or giving them the tools to identify and communicate their feelings. (Location 2833)

It’s hard to see clearly when you are blinded by hate. (Location 2842)

there was a significant difference in the rate of “abandonment” depending on the gender of the patient. When the patient was male, and the supporting spouse female, divorce happened in 2.9 percent of cases. When the patient was female and the supporting spouse was male, divorce happened in 20.8 percent of cases (Location 2848)

Surface acting, the kind of emotional labor that involves changing the appearance of emotions rather than the actual emotions internally felt, is consistently found to cause burnout, increased stress, and even insomnia. (Location 2860)

women were 40 percent more likely to report having a great deal of stress. Married women were, in turn, far more likely to report high levels of stress than single women (Location 2867)

Six times as many women as men said that increased help with household chores would help them feel able to care for their own stress. (Location 2870)

When there is that imbalance, one person starts to get resentful. Whether they realize it or not, they start to withhold sex, or their libido drops.” (Location 2875)

Studies from the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century have started showing that egalitarian couples have marginally more active and more satisfying sex lives than couples in more conventional gender dynamics, where women perform the majority of domestic work. (Location 2877)

sexual scripts in straight dynamics— portraying sex mainly as penetrative intercourse and an act a man does and a woman receives— have been remarkably slow to change. (Location 2888)

when she first started having sex as a teenager, her own pleasure barely factored into encounters in part because of a total lack of knowledge. (Location 2893)

Female pleasure has remained out of sight of much of mainstream culture. (Location 2897)

In recent years, the explosion, with the internet, of male-gaze-centric porn has only entrenched nineteenth-century belief systems. This, combined with a lack of comprehensive, centralized sex education, has produced a culture of opaqueness around female sexuality, maintaining a patriarchal belief that the main goal of hetero sex is men’s pleasure. (Location 2900)

Lesbian women experienced an orgasm far more routinely than their straight sisters, (Location 2912)

men tended to be more likely to measure sex as satisfying through the lens of their own pleasure, whereas women were more likely to measure sex as satisfying through the lens of the pleasure of the person they were having sex with. (Location 2917)

If she was honest with the men she was sleeping with, it didn’t result in curiosity or closeness. It usually backfired. (Location 2929)

Not only are women more often centering partners’ pleasure over their own, they are prepared to perform extra emotional labor under the form of faking it to protect men’s egos and not ruffle their psychological feathers. (Location 2932)

women reported most often reaching orgasm through self-manipulation of the clitoris, manipulation by a partner, or oral sex, and least often through penetrative sex. (Location 2937)

The reasons the respondents gave for these “copulatory vocalizations” during penetration in spite of the absence of orgasm? Speeding up the male partner’s orgasm was reported as a reason in 66 percent of cases, which was done “to relieve discomfort, pain, boredom and fatigue in equal proportion as well as because of time limitations.” (Location 2940)

women were faking it to cater to the emotions of the men they were in bed with. (Location 2945)

Pleasing his current female sexual partner took work, he said, but it was worth it, even if it was just to show that he had some form of concern for her needs. “Frankly, as long as I am making the effort honestly, then she seems to be very content about that.” (Location 2954)

A balancing out of emotional labor, in the form of either men finally matching women’s work with their own efforts or women asserting their own rules for engagement based on their needs as well as the needs of others, can do a lot toward redressing unfairness. (Location 2958)

he became more aware of his posture, more aware of the importance of how he made other people feel, how he spoke to them. In many situations, he changed the way he carried himself. With women and people who worked under him, he tried to be less imposing, to avoid raising his voice or standing too close to people, even as he switched to standing straight and remembering a firm handshake with men who held more authority. (Location 2985)

He may very well have come across the term “emotional labor” on Twitter and been wholly unmoved by it had it not been for three factors he identified as key to his ability to empathize. (Location 2995)

“Throughout my twenties, there was this sense of I had to be someone. I was highly motivated by a sense of economic insecurity. As a young man, there were a lot of impulses toward trying to dominate situations, trying to dominate male colleagues, trying to have a greater sense of control over the people around me that relaxed. (Location 3002)

empathy can be acquired with practice, motivation, and unflinching exposure. Empathy in action becomes emotional labor. (Location 3009)

Sometimes all visibility around emotional labor creates is a snapshot of privilege as it currently is— and individuals will not always see visibility as a lesson in independently stepping up and flattening the unequal distribution of emotional labor; quite the contrary. (Location 3029)

Luis’s job was in part to insist on a reversal of usual patterns of emotional labor: for people normally centered to hold space, give the stage to those people who were not normally afforded such privileges, and listen. But such an exercise obviously felt like a threat to some rather than an opportunity to ponder what it felt like to walk in other people’s shoes and reflect on the drastic experiential differences (Location 3079)

What would happen if we all stopped playing along with it? What would happen if we just told the emperor he was naked? (Location 3094)

as individuals we are all, inevitably but also mercifully, interconnected. (Location 3097)

lecture by the great American anthropologist Margaret Mead (Location 3104)

This story makes a case for care and emotional labor, or the willingness to vitally cater to the needs of someone beyond oneself, as not just a detail of our lives but the beginning and, in many ways, the center of our civilization. (Location 3112)

Are we still progressing? And if so, which direction are we heading in? (Location 3119)

Medical bills and hospital visits are still cited as catalyzing reasons in two-thirds of personal bankruptcy filings. (Location 3124)

Systemically, this simultaneous reliance and denigration means the emotional labor demands resulting from monumental, brutal policies go unnoticed, even if they define the lives of millions. (Location 3145)

The United States is both the biggest military spender in the world and the harshest incarcerator in the world. (Location 3146)

Gina Clayton-Johnson, the founder of Essie Justice Group, (Location 3152)

While nine out of ten incarcerated people are men, those bearing the brunt of such aggressive policies are often entire communities held together by women. One in four women in the United States, and every other Black woman, has a loved one who is incarcerated. (Location 3156)

That half a million people sit in American jails every day without a conviction because of not being able to make bail means women on the outside are forced into making impossible choices. (Location 3162)

Even through song in Black communities, we have been taught to reorient and manipulate our feelings to avoid death, trauma, and brutality,” (Location 3181)

The healing aspects, the ability to empathize, to create connection, meaning, and belonging. As the work is taken for granted, as we demean the work and the people doing it, we do not just forgo an appreciation for real value, we lose our ability to engage in it as a practice. (Location 3184)

Empathy is described as one of three capabilities— feeling vicariously what someone is going through (emotional empathy), thinking about their experiences (cognitive empathy), and wanting that person to feel better (empathic concern). (Location 3188)

As a society, misconceptions based in conjectures have mistakenly become absorbed as fact, one of the biggest and most damaging of which is the idea, driven by mainstream economics, that people are naturally, inherently selfish, and that selfish people get ahead. The “invisible hand” theory in economics posits that left to their own devices, and fueled by the self-interested, competitive nature of man, financial markets will regulate themselves and create great prosperity. (Location 3194)

empathy is not a fixed trait you have or you don’t have. Empathy can be learned. You can practice it and gradually get better at it. Empathy is a skill. (Location 3203)

Where there needs to be a rewrite is around our social organization, our social hierarchies, and our fundamental value systems. (Location 3208)

there is fundamental incompatibility between respect and authenticity.” (Location 3230)

do the emotional labor and think about how your words and actions impact those around you as a priority, including— or especially— if you are in a position of power. (Location 3239)

Chamorro-Premuzic’s public-facing research and writing in the last decade have challenged a collective understanding around what makes for the best kind of leadership. Great leaders are not those unrestrained, charismatic, competitive people we have tended to associate with dominant roles, he advances; great leaders are actually other-oriented people who are able to unite a team with a common vision, while displaying high levels of competence and integrity. Great leaders are not those who perform what we see as masculinity at the highest-octane levels but those who expertly perform traits associated with femininity— and emotional labor. (Location 3242)

We are over-rewarding selfishness and narcissism, disproportionately found in men. While supreme confidence is useful to inspire followers, it fails to deliver on the goods when it comes to making complicated and thoughtful decisions during moments of crisis. If feminine traits, like humility, sensitivity to others, and the ability to be considerate— traits disproportionately exhibited in women— were recognized for their objective power, more women would be getting to the top. Such a system would also incentivize all people, regardless of gender, to develop better prosocial skills. (Location 3258)

Clinical narcissism remains almost 40 percent more prevalent in men, a gender contrast that is the highest among any other psychological trait, but this gap is narrowing— not because men are becoming less narcissistic but because women are becoming more so. (Location 3264)

Authenticity as the consistent expression of one’s true self, personality, and sets of values, uninfluenced by outside pressures or expectations, holds undeniable value. (Location 3269)

for all the cries to bring your full, authentic self to your every day, the degree to which you can realistically do this heavily depends on what group you either belong to or are perceived as belonging to, and where that group sits in the social hierarchy. (Location 3283)

because of the social kudos now given to authenticity, when they do alter their behavior for the benefit of their surroundings, they have to make it believable too. (Location 3307)

People, forced into performing genuineness, become complicit by necessity. If their mask is exposed, a society that proclaims it loves authenticity but is in fact quite hateful has the choice to express intolerance toward what is behind the mask or decry the manipulation of the person who chose to wear it. (Location 3312)

After taking time to travel, learn, and organize, LaSaia returned to her hometown and founded her own trans-centered LGBT community center in Chicago in 2017, the Brave Space Alliance, (Location 3329)

When rights move forward to protect a broader array of people, the burden of emotional labor shifts from people deemed subordinate having to perform the emotional labor to people deemed dominant having to perform it. (Location 3334)

Free speech sounds great on its own. But the problem with free speech that you refuse to contextualize is that sometimes, when you protect the free speech of some, you muzzle the rights, freedoms, and dignity of others— including their free speech. (Location 3346)

The human rights agenda relies on an idea of complementarity in which rights are in conversation with one another. Rights may be limited in an individual to allow for the rights of others to exist. (Location 3351)

Pure free speech doesn’t exist in a world where some forms of speech act to silence, marginalize, and therefore impede the free speech of others. Such debates are really about clasping on to a power hierarchy we are used to versus loosening up its seams. (Location 3356)

We do not live in an entirely rational society at all. It is a society of groups of selfish free riders propped up by many, many emotional laborers. (Location 3375)

In a truly altruistic society, emotional labor would be spread out and treated as a valuable act all should be performing and aspiring to be good at. The sharing of emotional labor across society may initially limit the authenticity of a few people who were not used to having it limited, but it would also have the effect of enhancing the ability of marginalized groups to exist authentically. (Location 3378)

Shifting our reward system is not only the key to creating more equity in the burden of emotional labor but also the key to building a happier, fairer, more functional, truthful, and transparent world for all. (Location 3387)

And I’ll keep doing that. Because I will never know what seeing my DNA reflected in another’s eyes could look like, but I know what gratitude in the eyes of a young person who finally feels seen looks like. (Location 3409)

A world where emotional labor is acknowledged and then valued is a revolutionary concept that would address some of the clearest, deepest causes for gender inequality and inequality of all types. But even further to the point, it is the key to a better, more fruitful, peaceful world for all. (Location 3417)

Over decades, Esther Armah, a Ghanaian British journalist and playwright, developed a theory of “emotional justice” after connecting the dots between her personal family journey and the national and international events she had become intertwined in. (Location 3426)

The awareness of what she contained within her, once her mother broke the silence of her own experience, led Armah to a cathartic realization. (Location 3434)

the silence we have to break is a gendered one. “Since all the initial stories are by men, the breaking of silence by women completely reimagines how you think about this history.” (Location 3437)

“There is a lot of talk about reconciliation, but I don’t know who is supposed to be reconciled with whom. Is it the families of the victims who are supposed to be reconciled with the perpetrators of these crimes, or is it the government which is supposed to be reconciled with the perpetrators? (Location 3453)

an emotional justice framework. The framework consists of confronting four well-defined pillars: racialized emotionality, emotional patriarchy, emotional currency, and the emotional economy. (Location 3464)

Once you understand the webs of connection and hierarchies forged by emotions and emotional labor, you understand that everyone is implicated and no one gets a pass. (Location 3478)

This time around, I got to be the narrator, but next time it should be you, and your fresh insight, your inclusion of new perspectives, and your narration will bring us closer to truth. (Location 3487)

It is precisely because of how inevitably interconnected it reveals us to be that emotional labor offers such compelling insight and such a promising path forward for change. (Location 3490)

Our emotional labor is rendered invisible and devalued. In performing a kind of work seen as lowly and demeaning, we reinforce our place as the powerless appeasing the powerful. (Location 3494)

We must question the way we have been taught to think of value. (Location 3499)

question how we think of worth, provoking a conversation around the importance of time, connection, belonging, and meaning instead of simply the dollar. (Location 3504)

Valuing emotional labor means valuing women as human beings who are as fully human as men, and whose experiences are to be as fully respected and protected as those of men. Valuing emotional labor means valuing ourselves; it means valuing each other. (Location 3509)

No one is born with the inherent right to have their feelings served. (Location 3514)

The only way forward, if we want to redress inequalities, and if we want to enact an ethos in which all humans are equal, is to fight for a system of visible and open-ended reciprocity and abolish status obligations. (Location 3515)

It is here that emotional labor as a framework is so promising. In forcing us to think of actions we have never in the mainstream considered work, it pushes us to rethink our very attitude toward work and compensation, casting people we have never thought of in such a manner as workers. (Location 3521)

Believing women owe society smiles is not only wrong, it is oppressive, it is economically exploitative, and it has proven deadly. (Location 3530)

This is a world in which power and love are far from polar opposites, but are instead recognized as one and the same. (Location 3533)

hearts have already been monetized, and not recognizing this only allows for further invisibility, an obscuring of exchanges, and therefore more fruitful exploitation. (Location 3542)

Admitting emotional labor’s transformative, earth-shaping role in remunerated settings will only help recognize its role in unremunerated ones, and vice versa. It needn’t be either-or. (Location 3543)

the incredible realization within emotional labor is that we all hold the keys to connection, healing, and humanity past, present, and future. (Location 3547)

It’s time to bring emotional labor into the light and to plant the seeds for reckoning and transformation, for a new kind of understanding of what it means to live together, in society. Our joint humanity depends on it. This is the magnitude of what is at stake. (Location 3550)

My agent, and what now feels like fellow combatant, Mackenzie Brady Watson, whose steely, unrelenting support shepherded me through more than one unforeseen obstacle. (Location 3561)

I am also grateful to my father, Robin Hackman, who left this earth too early, but not before teaching me essential lessons in equality and the necessity to question everything. (Location 3569)

Marianne A. Ferber, “A Feminist Critique of the Neoclassical Theory of the Family,” in Women, Family, and Work, ed. Karine S. Moe (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), (Location 3643)

This policing mechanism threatening a member of a perceived gender if they veer from expected traits is called “counterstereotypic backlash.” (Location 3671)

Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong— and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), (Location 3681)

emotional labor as a taxing performance imposed because of being on the losing end of a power differential need not be just a female experience. (Location 3696)

National Film Board of Canada, Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, dir. Terre Nash, 1995 documentary film, (Location 3705)

Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, (Location 3708)

Feminist economists and social scientists use the term “reproductive labor”— in opposition to “productive labor”— to describe the extensive kinds of work that serve to rear and maintain current and future generations of formal, paid workers. (Location 3720)

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). (Location 3785)

Kalindi Vora, “Labor,” in Matter: Macmillan Handbooks: Gender, ed. Stacy Alaimo (London: Routledge, 2017), (Location 3795)

Kerry Segrave, Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009). (Location 3798)

Take Off Your Mask So I Know How Much to Tip You: Service Workers’ Experience of Health & Harassment During COVID-19, One Fair Wage in partnership with UC Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center, November 2020, https:// onefairwage.site/ wp-content/ uploads/ 2020/ 11/ OFW_COVID_WorkerExp_Emb-1. pdf. (Location 3804)

Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (New York: Abrams Press, 2019). (Location 3807)

https://leanin.org/ (Location 3817)

Magali Figueroa-Sánchez, “Building Emotional Literacy: Groundwork to Early Learning,” Childhood Education 84, no. 5 (August 1, 2008): (Location 3830)

Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture, 1st University of Virginia Press ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). (Location 3841)

See Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). (Location 3886)

Beauty standards are famously time- and culture-specific, holding high rewards and penalties under patriarchy. (Location 3920)

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), (Location 3935)

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000), (Location 4007)

Brian Heilman, Gary Barker, and Alexander Harrison, The Man Box: A Study on Being a Young Man in the US, UK, and Mexico (Location 4026)

Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). (Location 4029)

Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong— and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), (Location 4052)

“ Where’s My Cut?: On Unpaid Emotional Labor,” MetaFilter.com, July 15, 2015, accessed July 8, 2019, http:// www.metafilter.com/ 151267/ Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor. (Location 4093)

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), (Location 4100)

Marsha Sinetar, Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood (New York: Dell, 1989). (Location 4115)

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007). (Location 4117)

Shankar Vedantam et al., “Emotional Currency: How Money Shapes Human Relationships,” NPR, January 13, 2020, https:// www.npr.org/ 2020/ 01/ 10/ 795246685/ emotional-currency-how-money-shapes-human-relationships. (Location 4119)

David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, updated and expanded ed. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2014); (Location 4122)

The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, by Marcel Mauss, (Location 4126)

The withholding of a real name in journalism, a field that has been under mounting attack in recent years as being so easily “fake,” makes it easier for a piece to be accused as invented or a distortion. As a result, most news organizations that pride themselves as reputable avoid anonymization as much as possible, except for extreme cases where, for instance, information cannot otherwise be attained. (Location 4132)

For more on journalistic practices, see “Anonymous Sources,” Associated Press, accessed April 26, 2021, https://www.ap.org/about/news-values-and-principles/telling-the-story/anonymous-sources (Location 4137)

Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1997; orig. 1980), (Location 4172)

Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019). (Location 4209)

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It) (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2019). (Location 4215)