Tag: labor

I Don’t Believe In Markets, I Don’t Believe In Exchange

One of the reasons I distrust systems where people doing “valuable” work get paid more (even under a supposedly socialist system) is that there are so many types of unpaid, unacknowledged forms of labor done by oppressed people that are vital to the functioning of society but are rarely if ever really acknowledged as valuable and like some of these are forms of labor some or many of us are cool with providing, but we just want them to be acknowledged as valuable skills that not everyone has, and like I just don’t trust society to start acknowledging them because we have a “socialist” system.

Like emotional labor, domestic labor, aesthetic and logistical labor to just make things “nice”, being the ones who think of shit like “oh people will want the stiffer paper plates for the sloppy joes” or whatever, like it doesn’t seem that necessary until you try to run anything without someone thinking about that shit and then your event and space is a mess and no one wants to be there or be involved.
The nice little touches, feminized stuff, aesthetic stuff, supposedly impractical shit about making spaces and experiences just a little more pleasant actually makes a world of difference.

Feminized labor is like the User Experience department of the entire world and you better fucking respect the UE department, but also like I think there are so many tiny little things we’ve never thought of as “real labor” that I don’t trust anyone to catch every little act that needs to be compensated and so you’ll still have the valorized fields getting paid extra and those of us who are just quietly expected to get the coffee dealing with everyone’s shit.

And again Dworkin is ahistorical.

“

Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of
herself. ” The male response to the woman who is madeup
and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions.
One need only refer to the male idealization of
the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating
here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority
based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced
inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women
and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these
oppressive grooming imperatives.
The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos
surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation
(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom
of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the
relationship between women and their bodies. The
body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint
and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop
mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps
the notion of beauty which will then organically
emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a
respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable,
variety
“ – Andrea Dworkin

For most of human history in most societies, men did as much beauty labor as women and often more.  Girdles and makeup were for both men and women.  Look at most of fucking history, everybody fucking wore fucking makeup and did their fucking hair.  Modern dudes are a weird lazy shitty exception.

Not to mention the CONSTANT criticism of women who look “unnatural” or who are “deceptive”.  Plastic surgery, makeup, all these things are things men want made invisible, a perfection that does not show the labor involved (yet another case of men insisting on women’s labor not being labor) and appears to have occurred naturally, so men don’t have to think about the work involved, in fact many men believe makeup is deceptive and should be abolished so that we can be graded like livestock.

Refusing to regard it as productive labor (and part of humanity, because we ALL FUCKING ADORN OURSELVES) obscures the fact that as with emotional labor women are performing a socially necessary function that men do not do their fair share of, while men insist that women hide the fact that his labor exists/is laboe

Like Completely Refusing To Consider Women’s Emotional And Domestic And Homemaking and/or Second Shift Work As Labor Because Familial Relations Are Involved

Means missing perspectives on things that are actually important.  Like it’s not the only thing, it’s not the be all end all, it’s not meant as an attack on any individual person’s choices. I’m just saying that as a culture we need to examine the fact that women end up doing significantly more work overall, and having significantly less leisure time overall, than men.  Like a het couple can be in love and have a relationship and one person does more work than the other and if they’re cool with it that’s fine, but I’m just saying that in society as it stands the one doing more work is the woman 9 times out of 10.  If in a het couple one partner wants to support the other while the other one keeps house, that’s fine, I just want to examine the fact that the partner doing the supporting is usually the dude and the one being supported is usually the lady, and like for an individual couple, that’s fine, but the fact that there’s this huge gender imbalance suggests that overall, something weird is going on.

Like if you chose to be a housewife, that’s awesome, I’m happy for you.  If you’re happy, and you like how things are for you, that’s awesome.  There are plenty of people who are great housespouses, and housespouses are incredibly valuable and important, but like can we please question why women end up doing more domestic labor then men overall?  Like you are not the problem, I’m not saying your relationship dynamic which is your business is the problem, if that’s the one that works for you, then that works for you, and I’d expect 50% of het couples in an ideal society where one partner does more domestic labor than the other one to have the lady doing more of the domestic labor than the dude, 50% is still a pretty big percent, I’m just questioning why it’s 90%?  

Also why are women so much more likely to feel obligated to have sex?

I just feel like our unwillingness to discuss their labor as labor is very indicative of our attitudes about feminized labor and women in general

Here are my feelings on this: 

Why are we always harkening back to the administrations that ended up purging all the commies and anarchists (who were the ones that actually made the thing go) and defanged unions leading to the bullshit of today? Like “Ah the good old days when we were just removing the internal structure that supported labor movements, but it hadn’t completely collapsed yet”

SWEFs (I refuse to call them radical) are complicit in maintaining the vulnerability of sex workers.

By refusing to analyze our labor as labor, and proposing false causes for and false and harmful solutions to the common misery of working conditions in the sex industry they are complicit in maintaining a system that invalidates the value of our labor, denies us the true labor theory based solutions to these conditions, and keeps us vulnerable and afraid, on the defensive, on the back foot, unable to gather together to fight back.

They collaborate with capitalist-patriarchy in removing agency from sex workers, and maintaining the availability of cheap and easily exploited sexual labor

They label us whore, they label us victim, they label us “friend”, they label us help, they label us invisible, they label us object, they label us wife, but they never label us worker.

Me on the similarity between domestic and sexual labor