A Letter to Post Contributor Rose Hackman About Her Recent Op-Ed About "Emotional Labor"
Another Wacko Feminist Idea That Ignores the Downside of Being Male
Dear Ms. Hackman,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent article in The Washington Post, Emotional labor at work is work. It should be compensated that way, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
As a brief introduction, I’ve been a proud lifelong reader of the Post who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence1 and its 2018 publication of the op-ed Why can't we hate men? Since then, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate this bias.
Your article is yet another example of the Post’s gender bias.
Ms. Hackman, you’re roughly the age of my three children, young enough to have lived your entire life under feminism, so I can understand how, with little original thought you have simply regurgitated a feminist perspective, not recognizing that “emotional labor” is just one more feminist rationalization about how women are constant victims of sex discrimination.
As one reddit commenter aptly summarized it,
“When you have to make up new concepts to describe the way that you're actually a victim, you're pretty much making it clear that your life isn't all that bad.”
Like feminism itself, your article only considers how women are negatively impacted by the female gender role without, even for a moment, considering how much worse off men are due to the male gender role.
For example, your article provides an Alice-in-Wonderland rationalization of why emotional labor – that mostly impacts women, according to your analysis – should be compensated, but completely fails to consider the male equivalent of this labor, what can be called “death labor”: the highly disproportionate number of male occupational deaths resulting from the male gender role.
The starkest example is that more than 99% of American war dead are male.2
Or that men suffer more than 94% of workplace deaths, and far more often than women work in the “death professions”, where men are ten times more likely than women to be killed. The following chart illustrates this vast over-representation of men in these jobs.
Do you think it might be fair if we had an “Equal Occupational Fatality Day”, similar to the “Equal Pay Day” marked by feminists? This Fatality Day would bring attention to the huge gender disparity in work-related deaths every year in the United States.
This feminist ignorance of male deaths is just a very small part of what’s known as the “gender empathy gap.” You, like most Americans, have likely never heard of it. This empathy gap is “… the striking and disturbing indifference of our culture to the suffering of men and boys in stark contrast to our evident concern for the suffering of girls and women.”3
The late men’s rights activist Marc Angelucci perfectly described this empathy gap when he wrote:
“We simply don’t care much about men. In fact, the devaluation of male lives is so entrenched in our psyches and endemic to our system that we refuse to see it — even when it’s smack in our face.”4
The empathy gap is why feminists, who have for decades complained about the downside of the female sex role, have remained blissfully unaware — and completely silent — to the even worse downside of men performing the male sex role. And it’s a huge downside:
Males:
· live six years less than women
· are 80% of the homeless
· are 80% of deaths by suicide
· are 76% of homicide victims
· are more likely than women to be charged with crimes, receive 63% longer sentences on average, while women are twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted5
· form the only group who, via the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, is still subject to a type of slavery (aka “military conscription” — the law exempts “able-bodied males between ages 18 and 45 from the ban on slavery and forced labor”)
· finally, males are at least 50% of the victims of domestic violence.
So, Ms. Hackman, to answer your opening question, “Should we pay for emotional labor?”, my answer would be “Only after we pay appropriately for male death labor.”
Would that be fair?
My observation was confirmed by a February 2023 report by The Coalition to End Domestic Violence that described a 10-Year Suppression of the Truth on Domestic Violence by the Washington Post.
If you’re tempted to use the feminist rationalization that “men are mostly victims of war because men cause wars”, then should we also ignore the murders of women by other women, or disregard female genital mutilation because it is mostly practiced by women?
From video clip of “anti-feminist” Janice Fiamengo talking about the empathy gap
Gender Bias Toward Males Frequently Gets Overlooked Daily Bruin Online, 2/20/01