Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman

Author:Rose Hackman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Darwin’s observations seek to justify the white supremacist, patriarchal state of the world as inherently natural with no proof except the arrogance of his own belief systems. He uses the fact that female bodies bear children to cast women as more tender and selfless, a set of attributes we can today understand as casting women into emotional labor–heavy roles. In a classic benevolent sexist way, he lauds women for positive attributes like being “intuitive” but in the same breath infantilizes them and marks them as inferior.13 Propping up his argument are racist beliefs about “lower state[s] of civilization” and “savages.”

This obsession with marking a “natural” inferiority in women rages on to this day. Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, branded the “custodian of the patriarchy” by The New York Times,14 insists that domination, selfishness, self-sufficiency, and competitiveness are all superiority signs of evolved masculinity. To back up his claim, in his bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life,15 he famously describes the highly hierarchical social functioning of lobsters. The crustaceans’ nervous systems reward aggressive lobsters with the release of serotonin into their bodies, reinforcing their future willingness to fight and win. Peterson insinuates that this finding shows that hierarchies are hardwired. We are therefore presumably to believe, based on lobsters, that striving for equality, or disrupting systems of domination, goes against nature.

This selective kind of thinking has made Peterson extremely popular, especially among groups desperate to justify long-standing systems of oppression that are starting to unravel. But for all the lobsters, Peterson does not mention the plethora of counterexamples, such as elephants, who live in matriarchal societies, where the oldest female elephant leads, using her long experience to remember the location of far-flung resources like water. She makes decisions for the benefit and survival of the herd based on wisdom, not aggression.16 Collaborative societies that share rather than compete for resources—like trees in plant communities that operate through complex subterranean networks to heal one another—thrive rather than self-destruct.17

Peterson loves to quote the aggressive patriarchal social structures of chimpanzees,18 which are evolutionarily close to us, as elucidating the validity of our human, male-dominant status quo, but omits to mention an equally close ape cousin we have that suggests the total opposite. Science journalist Angela Saini, in her book Inferior,19 writes that bonobos, unlike chimpanzees, live in communal, matriarchal structures, where cooperation is key and aggressive male bonobos are often shunned from the group. Meanwhile, more collaborative male bonobos who are able to live side by side with female bonobos with little conflict and under the matriarchal order end up fathering the most children.

These examples that focus on the greater world—from oceans and deserts to forests and beyond—may seem compelling and even mystically revealing (which is likely what authors seeking to normalize violent hierarchies are going for), but we needn’t go that far. There is simple evidence in the boring human world that exposes the premise of this kind of thinking—that current social orders are natural and should be accepted—as totally off the mark.

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