Absolutely - maybe she has been lucky enough to not have a friend who sucks the life force out of you with their need.  You learn as you grow, for sure. 

I’ve noticed a weird version of this in some online forums I'm in. Someone will post a question, and people will respond with "I don't have to do the emotional labor of answering this for you!" which is like... yeah, you can just not answer? You could completely ignore the post, but you did this instead??

I get the impression that she’s young, and this is an area where having only young writers really hurts a perspective. I, too, believed that establishing boundaries and coming up with scripts made me a “bad friend” or “bad girlfriend” when I was younger. Took a few years of being taken advantage of to finally knock…

I’ve seen folks on Twitter insist on “emotional work”, but the difference between “work” and “labor” is so academically wonky that it’s pretty useless in colloquial, every day use. Also, when I’ve tried to explain the experience to more clueless/entitled individuals, “work” is somehow easier to brush off than “labor.”

“ In the past few years, the concept of emotional labor has gone mainstream on social media and in articles that revive and expand the idea, with the term moving out of the workplace and insidiously into our homes.”

Yes, that sometimes happens with words in a language. A word that started with a particular definition…

I agree! If you’re going to read capitalism in these terms, more precise definitions of labor are needed, and the differentiating between the system and the worker parsed. I get what the original use of the term “emotional labor” meant, but vocab drift might mean going back and redefining the original term to stress…

Thank you! Hazel suggests that making boundaries with people who might be emotionally a LOT is being a shitty friend.  It’s not.  All friends are different, and some take more from you than you can give.  It’s just reality. 

That’s not the point at all. It’s that all of us are already carrying a certain amount of emotional burden on any given day. There is nothing narcissistic to recognize their are moments in which we don’t have the bandwidth to safely carry other people’s.

Relationships are work, though. Not all work is paid, nor does it necessarily make sense to change that. But they are work, and they do involve labor. Being there for someone to rant to, providing them emotional support and/or advise, scheduling future get-togethers, figuring out how to communicate with different…

hot take

I don’t disagree that the term emotional labour is somewhat overused, but I wholly disagree with the idea that it’s antithetical to friendship to suggest that it involves a form of work. Friendships do take work, and in turn bestow value (in the form of personal fulfillment, not money). I love supporting my friends,…

It sounds like the original term might have been more precise if it were “emotional capitalism,” because that makes it clear that it refers to the emotional labor that is performed for money. The terminology wasn’t right from the beginning and it makes a lot more sense in its broad application now. The idea that you…

Ehh, I find the term useful in exactly the texting scenario you describe, in consciously using it to decide if I’m genuinely friends with a person or not. If my reaction to a given person is, like yours, “YES!!!!!” then it means I do want to be friends with that person and it’s probably a case of equal footing and…

Agreed, I was shocked by how gleefully people piled on. All in the name of FEMINISM and lifting up the FEMALE author. Who was a jerk to a student who didn’t like her books (or, actually, preferred others over hers, which she has every right to do). I didn’t weigh in, just left the thread but I regret that I didn’t…

The comments on the original Jez article were a shameful cesspool of white feminism. SO many Jezzies were defending these white female authors piling on a grad student for suggesting that Dessen’s milquetoast YA novels may not have been the best choice for collegiate readers and that a book about discrimination in the…

asdkfjdk my GOD woman, get your head out of your ass. Sarah, you write shitty teen romance YA, you’re not out here writing the next Booker Prize novel. Of course a college junior, who is presumably in her twenties and you know, at university to challenge herself academically, wants to read something with more…

How would Dessen even find this criticism?

WOW. I’m shocked by all this in part because I am a huge fan of Sarah Dessen... so I know that statement is absolutely true.

Agree that body shaming is problematic, but describing her as “naturally petite” or “traditionally attractive” helps perpetuate the myth that women in entertainment are just naturally thin, and that is the definition of traditional attractiveness.

She obviously thought the hecklers were those pesky college liberal millenials. I’m surprised she didn’t make an avocado toast reference. She was probably surprised when she found out it was far-right hooligans. “But...they’re our base!?”