Happy Monday,
There are two reasons why the ‘Mental Load’ conversation doesn’t resonate with men. I summarize the first one here. The second reason is that this conversation treats men and women like interchangeable humanoid cyborgs, which I don’t think any of us want to be, but women seem more convinced.
Mary Harrington wrote this wonderful piece where she describes Ivan Illich’s 1982 book, ‘Gender,’ where he claims that the pre-condition for modernity to work was to re-order everything about men and women to create the belief in a genderless human.
Before industrialization, we experienced what he calls 'vernacular gender’ which is defined as a social polarity where tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, perceptions, needs, desires, and thinking was gender specific. This relationship between man and woman was not hierarchal, but harmonious. Imagine the sun and the moon, Illich describes your left and right hand.
We can feel the difference between our right and left hands, but (and this is important) a machine cannot. A machine cannot tell which finger on which hand pressed the button, just that the button was pressed. And because the pressing of the button became top priority, the rally cry of equality took hold (imagine Rosie the Riveter here) with feminism as its spokesperson.
By this time women were lacking the meaning and fulfillment they had pre-industrialization (ex: weaving was always women’s work until it went into industry) so it was pretty easy to convince them they would find it joining the men at work. Did they find it? I’m not sure. Enter the ‘mental load’ conversation. The ‘invisible labor’ causing ‘mental load’ is described as school bake sales, school supplies shopping, kid’s social life organizing, responding to teacher’s emails, things like that. Call me crazy but all of those things sound to me like mothering. A woman that wants to make sure her kid’s birthday cake artwork is just right isn’t mental load, it’s a womb and a heart that’s biologically driven towards care. And that’s a beautiful thing.
The problem comes in when we start blaming men because we don’t have the time to do the mothering we really want to do deep down. Ah but equality, but feminism, and so we blame. The truth is I don’t think there is such a thing as invisible and visible labor, I think that’s the wrong framework. There is loving labor and there is provisioning labor and women are drawn to the former and men to the latter - because biology. We haven’t evolved in about 10,000 years and modernity couldn’t care less, so we have to.
Mental load isn’t a thing. There’s mothering and fathering. There’s loving labor and provisional labor. If it came down to it, men could present their very own ‘invisible tasks’ list women have never considered, but they wouldn’t do that -something about respect (see part one).
On the Pod This Week: A solo episode diving into part two of the mental load conversation - industrialization and modernity. Enjoy (Spotify).
(Watch the episode on YouTube here)
Have a great week everyone,
-Anya
I can’t speak for “men”, but I personally don’t have a gunny sack of “invisible labor” that I do. I don’t need one, because I spend my day visibly doing that which is mandatory. If I’m keeping score, I’m not doing it based off some vague, unquantifiable “mental load” but off time doing the mandatory (which perfectly hand-decorated cakes aren’t).
That’s why it’s much better, if possible, not to keep score at all.
Mental load is very much a thing for people who live in the real, non-woo woo world. The fact that you think it's not tells us you lead a very customized, curated and comfy life.