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I love working 10+ hours a day to pay for 100% of me and my fiancé's expenses, coming home, cooking dinner, and cleaning up everything while she studies for med

I love working 10+ hours a day to pay for 100% of me and my fiancé's expenses, coming home, cooking dinner, and cleaning up everything while she studies for med school; going to bed early so I can do some shopping before work; and then being told I'm a useless man by some nobody with a shitty marriage on a website that's supposed to be about technology.

dleslie 9y ago
> on a website that's supposed to be about technology This is what irks me most. I come to Hacker News for the tech, and yet... This is here? What is this article doing on HN?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "What is this article doing on HN?" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." This article is in line with "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago
This article never specified you, or your relationship. It used their relationship to discuss a topic that can often happen. You are feeling attacked, and I'm sure you have good reasons in your personal life to be upset, but your reaction is unreasonable here.
- seattle_spring 9y ago
  > Emotional labor is the unpaid job men still don't understand. That's the subtitle of the article. It doesn't say "some men." If I wrote an article that was titled, "software: the paid job women still don't understand," please do tell me how you would interpret that.
  - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
    It's also outright wrong. Every single man has to handle all of his emotional labor himself. While not every single man is in a great place, I know many who live happy fulfilling lives, so that means they know fully well how to manage their emotional labor.
dang 9y ago
I can understand why you'd feel that way. Venting like this is usually really bad for the kind of discussion we're hoping for here (the thoughtful kind!) but your comment interestingly makes up for it by being grounded in personal experience. That makes the feeling easier to relate to. It seems more genuine. I think you might be under a mis-impression of what Hacker News is. It's for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and definitely not just about technology. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Face stickers of the 18th century French aristocracy, to mention just one recent submission, are quite on topic. Does this story do that? Well it's complicated but yes I think it does in part. The thread is surprisingly non-horrible (edit: or was when I saw it, anyhow) and the concept of emotional labor is intellectually interesting, even if the article does hit some bruised areas and is trollishly packaged. That makes it an exception to the rule, which is also interesting in a meta sort of way.
- adrienne 9y ago
  The fact that you think this thread is non-horrible is a shining example of why this site is appalling to so many people.
sudosteph 9y ago
Nobody is calling you useless. Clearly, you've done your share (quite possibly, more than your share) of emotional labor / domestic work in your relationship. But surely you know that you are defying norms here? Statistically speaking, those burdens do fall on women far more often than on men: http://blogs.reuters.com/equals/2014/03/12/more-work-and-less-play-for-women-around-the-world/ http://blogs.reuters.com/equals/2014/03/12/more-work-and-les... It's not the greatest article in the world, but the main message, that women are expected to perform unacknowledged emotional labor to a higher degree than men, is largely valid, even if the author's examples were not the greatest. Even from a young age women are pushed into emotional labor. For example, the only "odd jobs" I was ever offered as a pre-teen were for babysitting, which is a very emotionally demanding job (kids are jerks) that I hated. I wasn't even paid at minimum wage because I just didn't know any better at that age, and despite asking around, I couldn't get any gigs for different work. Meanwhile my male peers got neighbors asking them to mow lawns and clean cars, which I would have greatly preferred to chasing little jerks around and making them happy enough to not complain to their parents about everything. From a software dev perspective, I usually see this come through in the form of unequal expectations placed on male vs female PMs. I remember overhearing a colleague describe a highly professional PM to a new dev candidate as as the "Team Mom". Now, I've never ever heard anyone call a male PM call "Team Dad". But because this PM happened to be female, a parent, and not emotionally idiotic, they would always make her take the burden for working out inter-personal conflict, even for teams she wasn't responsible for. She had tons of other work, and there were male PMs and managers who could have assisted, but none of them would. They would just wait for things to get terrible and then throw a meeting at her about "conflict resolution". She hated it, but was afraid that she wouldn't be seen as a team-player if she didn't go along with it, so she just did it. So that's another example of why emotional labor stinks and does disproportionately impact women, even in tech. Fortunately, the easiest way to fix this is just to pay attention and notice when it happens, in other words, perform emotional labor to notice when emotional labor is not equal. If you're doing that, great, this article wasn't about you. Doesn't mean that the author was wrong for calling out a pattern of inequality that can be identified, or that HN readers are wrong for taking interest and engaging with her arguments. I suggest you perform some emotional labor on yourself right now, because this article is really not about you or your feelings at all. It's about a widespread pattern of inequality that impacts women disproportionately.

dleslie 9y ago

> on a website that's supposed to be about technology This is what irks me most. I come to Hacker News for the tech, and yet... This is here? What is this article doing on HN?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "What is this article doing on HN?" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." This article is in line with "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

d3ad1ysp0rk 9y ago

This article never specified you, or your relationship. It used their relationship to discuss a topic that can often happen. You are feeling attacked, and I'm sure you have good reasons in your personal life to be upset, but your reaction is unreasonable here.

seattle_spring 9y ago
> Emotional labor is the unpaid job men still don't understand. That's the subtitle of the article. It doesn't say "some men." If I wrote an article that was titled, "software: the paid job women still don't understand," please do tell me how you would interpret that.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  It's also outright wrong. Every single man has to handle all of his emotional labor himself. While not every single man is in a great place, I know many who live happy fulfilling lives, so that means they know fully well how to manage their emotional labor.

dang 9y ago

I can understand why you'd feel that way. Venting like this is usually really bad for the kind of discussion we're hoping for here (the thoughtful kind!) but your comment interestingly makes up for it by being grounded in personal experience. That makes the feeling easier to relate to. It seems more genuine. I think you might be under a mis-impression of what Hacker News is. It's for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, and definitely not just about technology. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Face stickers of the 18th century French aristocracy, to mention just one recent submission, are quite on topic. Does this story do that? Well it's complicated but yes I think it does in part. The thread is surprisingly non-horrible (edit: or was when I saw it, anyhow) and the concept of emotional labor is intellectually interesting, even if the article does hit some bruised areas and is trollishly packaged. That makes it an exception to the rule, which is also interesting in a meta sort of way.

adrienne 9y ago
The fact that you think this thread is non-horrible is a shining example of why this site is appalling to so many people.

sudosteph 9y ago

Nobody is calling you useless. Clearly, you've done your share (quite possibly, more than your share) of emotional labor / domestic work in your relationship. But surely you know that you are defying norms here? Statistically speaking, those burdens do fall on women far more often than on men: http://blogs.reuters.com/equals/2014/03/12/more-work-and-less-play-for-women-around-the-world/ http://blogs.reuters.com/equals/2014/03/12/more-work-and-les... It's not the greatest article in the world, but the main message, that women are expected to perform unacknowledged emotional labor to a higher degree than men, is largely valid, even if the author's examples were not the greatest. Even from a young age women are pushed into emotional labor. For example, the only "odd jobs" I was ever offered as a pre-teen were for babysitting, which is a very emotionally demanding job (kids are jerks) that I hated. I wasn't even paid at minimum wage because I just didn't know any better at that age, and despite asking around, I couldn't get any gigs for different work. Meanwhile my male peers got neighbors asking them to mow lawns and clean cars, which I would have greatly preferred to chasing little jerks around and making them happy enough to not complain to their parents about everything. From a software dev perspective, I usually see this come through in the form of unequal expectations placed on male vs female PMs. I remember overhearing a colleague describe a highly professional PM to a new dev candidate as as the "Team Mom". Now, I've never ever heard anyone call a male PM call "Team Dad". But because this PM happened to be female, a parent, and not emotionally idiotic, they would always make her take the burden for working out inter-personal conflict, even for teams she wasn't responsible for. She had tons of other work, and there were male PMs and managers who could have assisted, but none of them would. They would just wait for things to get terrible and then throw a meeting at her about "conflict resolution". She hated it, but was afraid that she wouldn't be seen as a team-player if she didn't go along with it, so she just did it. So that's another example of why emotional labor stinks and does disproportionately impact women, even in tech. Fortunately, the easiest way to fix this is just to pay attention and notice when it happens, in other words, perform emotional labor to notice when emotional labor is not equal. If you're doing that, great, this article wasn't about you. Doesn't mean that the author was wrong for calling out a pattern of inequality that can be identified, or that HN readers are wrong for taking interest and engaging with her arguments. I suggest you perform some emotional labor on yourself right now, because this article is really not about you or your feelings at all. It's about a widespread pattern of inequality that impacts women disproportionately.