Trend pieces rarely identify something brand new because there is nothing new in the lives of men and women.
Likewise, when the New York Times explains the latest cultural developments to its readers, the features often tell them more about the cultural milieux of highly educated, white, feminist, 30- to 40-something-year-old, city-dwelling women — that is, the outlet’s writers and their friends — than they tell them about any larger slice of society.
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“Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’” is the outlet’s latest explication of the zeitgeist.
On one level, the theme rehashes the feelings Tammy Wynette expressed 55 years ago: “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman/Giving all your love to just one man.”
Nor is it clear that “mankeeping” is a new term. The word was far more popular during debates over slavery than it is today, Google data suggests.
The trend piece wrestles with real phenomena that are not the inventions of too-online feminists: Men having fewer male friends than in years past, and, implicitly, adult life becoming oriented toward women rather than men. But also, it’s just another essay about how much men stink, and it can be a bit confusing to follow all the arguments against men.
Abolishing “guy time” was, after all, a feminist, egalitarian project, all in the name of including women in formerly all-male settings. This inclusion was needed “because the presence of women may help disrupt conventional masculinity norms and promote more communal interactions,” as academics put it.
So the Boy Scouts, all-male golf clubs, and guys’ pickup games had to be abolished — sorry, made inclusive.
Also, a poisonous ingredient in toxic masculinity, we have been told for more than a decade, is that men don’t share their feelings enough. Now, the problem is that they share their feelings too much?
But the most interesting detail in the story is the headline phrase “emotional labor.”
This strained phrase tells us what really bugs the folks who write these essays: the expectation that you, an autonomous individual, should ever suffer, cry, rejoice, be happy, or get angry on behalf of anyone but yourself.
The New York Times article defines “mankeeping” as “the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives.” It laments that some women have become “a central — if not the central — piece of a man’s social support system.”
Imagine being the most important person in someone’s life!
The supposed problem here is basically marriage and family.
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The article links to a Vice article, which says “mankeeping is driving women to celibacy.” That Vice piece complains about “the emotional labor women end up doing in heterosexual relationships. It goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress. Interpreting his moods. Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.”
There you go. Unpaid emotional labor is intolerable for the modern feminist. It’s also known as loving one another, which sounds a little too much like the stuff Jesus used to talk about. Jesus, marriage, commitment? That’s the patriarchy, after all.