You know, what I think I’m doing with my divergent theories and my “book,” by complaining about spanking and police, by trying to tell people we are drowning in the toxic byproducts of these behaviours, what I fancy I’m doing is the emotional labour for the whole goddam world.
From my very first formulations, from when I heard someone say, “I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them,” and I would simply argue – it does! Maybe it doesn’t kill them, but it hurts them. Don’t you know that’s what hitting is for? If it doesn’t hurt them, why hit them? – and that is the definition of emotional labour, explaining to someone that they’re hurting someone, figuring out for them that the hurt they cause is what is coming back to bother them now, in this case perhaps explaining to a parent why their adult child doesn’t speak to them anymore.
Emotional labour is doing someone’s thinking for them in the realm of feelings, right?
But everyone says that, “it doesn’t hurt them,” stuff, at least almost everyone in my white, North American, formerly so also European life – so I’m trying to do it for everyone: it does, you fools. Something is wrong with you, it’s obvious, or it ought to be. It’s what’s coming back to bother you now, in terms of angry fascists the world over melting down into another world war.
You owe me ten million dollars for that judgement, it’s the labour of a lifetime. Labour isn’t free.
That’s real, you aren’t dealing with the bad feelings you ignore with that rather obvious fallacy of consensus lie. You can gaslight your kid, you can all pretend to one another that it’s true – but you can’t gaslight an entire world of repressed childhood righteous rage – that little gem is the product of the emotional labour I have done for you. That’s why I ought to get the big bucks.
Because like in a movie, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” I can see the monsters. That’s a great metaphor for emotional labour, isn’t it, you can’t see it and it will destroy you, you need me.
That’s a trade-off, when you’re the “strong,” one, you farm your emotional work out, like the social sexual dimorphism we have now, Dad is “strong,” so Mom is “loving,” right? Except Mom is often enough “strong,” enough to beat your ass too, and the kids maybe try, but basically no-one is doing humankind’s emotional labour anymore.
I mean, no-one but me of course, but I don’t imagine I’m the last of God’s Fools quite yet.
But y’all are not letting me do it, y’all are not talking the advice or the lessons. I searched for a definition online to give you, but I saw half of them were the very opposite, “workplace emotional labour,” means suppressing and ignoring your feelings, not planning for them – normal people get a lot of things backwards like that – so half of y’all have worse than no concept of what it is, a backwards one, with your salary in the balance of which you choose.
A lot of things – but my goodness, that’s a bad one, redefining the cure as the disease and vice versa.
And here we are again, at the end of another film, “Legend,” with me begging your sort to let me help you, you know, instead of killing everybody.
Jeff
Sept. 17th., 2024
Abuse with an Excuse 