If Everything Is Labor, Nothing is Labor, but Some Things Are Labor
Source: If Everything Is Labor, Nothing is Labor, but Some Things Are Labor Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 29, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026
Last week, one of my all-time favorite Substack writers, Stephanie H. Murray, wrote about emotional labor skeptics such as myself, and why she disagrees with our “slippery slope” argument that the term emotional labor should begin and end with service workers and other forms of paid labor that involve personal interface. Even though we politely disagree on this topic, her piece was really good. Plus, it’s not every day that a fragile narcissist like myself can burst out laughing at joke about me: she argues that unknowingly, I wrote about the “emotional labor of mangetting” when I wrote about how hard it is to find a spouse on a conservative-coded timeline without actually being conservative.
This is where I point out that such an exchange of ideas is emblematic of the feminization of Substack (and that’s good, actually.) Murray and I, who I believe are at least friendly Internet acquaintances if not Internet friends, repeatedly go out of our way to tell the other one we aren’t mad or offended. Don’t put in the papers that we’re mad or offended! Meanwhile, male writers will just call each other pedophiles because they disagree about GDP growth. In this sense, I think Substack could use a woman’s touch.
Murray 100% correctly characterized my argument re: emotional labor, specifically the fact that I have said it needs a clear boundary around paid service work. Part of this disconnect comes from the fact that she is extremely well-informed about the academic origins of the term, whereas I am a little dirty piggie living in the slop trough and mainlining slop from my slop-hogging snout all day.
*me irl*
As a result, when I see non-academics talking about emotional labor, they are never *neutrally* pointing out that energy is expended on things like playing with your children, going to your daughter’s ballet recital, or having [sex with your husband](http://cartoonshateher.substack.com/p/sex-with-your-husband-isnt-labor). It’s true—going on date night with my husband expends more energy than scrolling TikTok for earwax extraction videos, but I don’t know if that makes it “labor,” at least the way I see it. Within the non-academic spheres where emotional labor is assigned to *every* unpaid task in one’s life, these tasks are very clearly presented as oppressive, unpleasant, exhausting ordeals unfairly foisted upon women, as if women had no say in whether or not they wanted to get married or have kids (my article about the “emotional labor of mangetting,” as Murray hilariously calls it, kind of makes the point that getting married isn’t something that happens by accident, and a woman who finds the very institution of marriage oppressive in 2026 USA can simply not get married.)
While Murray rejects the idea that emotional labor is an inherently negative term because people can have all sorts of positive and negative feelings about their tasks, both paid and unpaid (true!) the reality is that 99% of the time that this term is used in the public sphere, it *is* in the form of complaining, and this is how most everyday, non-academic people encounter it.
What likely happened here is that emotional labor became a very easy buzzword to use for people whose social media presence relies on fomenting husband-oriented resentment, which is sometimes justified, but either way, kind of one-note and contagious. In fact, when I watched just *one* of these videos, I began receiving an onslaught of “terrible husband” content, which has branched into “cheating husband” content and now, officially “gay husband” content. I have become addicted to watching AMAs between a woman and her gay husband who are openly in a lavender marriage. Clearly, I’m too far gone. A friend of mine, who doesn’t even have children, found herself in the same bottomless pit when she accidentally watched a singular Paige Connell video and has since been plunged into the depth of what she calls “invisible labor tok.”
If you get wrapped up into these videos, you will resent your husband. Yes, even if he’s a helpful liberal dude who makes matcha and goes down on you more often than birthdays and anniversaries. Yes, even if he has the same amount of cards as you in [Fair Play.](https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/bad-husband-lady-and-neurotic-wife) That’s not to say some women don’t have very legitimate reasons to resent their husbands, but there is an addictive, algorithmic nature to videos that enable you to channel all the stress and frustration of domestic life into an easy target who likely *does* piss you off sometimes, because living with someone invariably leads to some pet peeves and conflicts. When I started watching this content, I had moments where I felt angry at my husband for all the childcare imbalances in our daily life—even though not only did I want to be a SAHM, I actually *begged* him to let me do it and repeatedly rebuff his suggestions to send our toddler to preschool.
This phenomenon is not unlike the “adult children of narcissistic/emotionally immature parents,” another [buzzword](https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-therapy-buzzwords-that-confirm) that has become extremely hot in the TherapyTok space. This is obviously a real phenomenon, perhaps a fairly common one. For that matter, plenty of people have parents who were physically abusive, so my objection to this trend has nothing to do with me thinking the entire concept is bullshit. But we are now at the point where adult women are assigning themselves the label of “anxiously attached” because they like a guy more than he likes them, and then turning around and blaming their toxic mothers for using the Ferber method when they were eight months old. Meanwhile, the man is “avoidant attached” and that explains why he isn’t texting them back. And whose fault is that? His mom, probably, because she had an office job in 1994 like some kind of narcissist. Like many TherapyTok skeptics, I think this trend has gotten out of hand, and is reinforcing maladaptive, dare I say, *narcissistic* victim narratives in people who could probably stand to have a couple people tell them to grow the fuck up. But that’s “gaslighting,” and they have a chorus of people telling them that any dissent is abusive, so their strained connection to reality is only going to get weaker.
With all that said, I somewhat agree with Murray that emotional labor (or invisible labor, which is related but different) are too quickly dismissed as bogus, self-pitying TherapyTok terms when they actually do hold some meaning. And here’s where I turn my back on my fellow skeptics: if you have “traditional values” and believe that being a homemaker/SAHM is the most important thing a woman can do, it’s dishonest to reject any framing of this work as labor because you see it as feminist academic dipshittery. If taking care of children all day is important, valuable work—work that, in its paid form, has created a massive, expensive industry—(and it obviously is!) surely it can be framed as unpaid labor, as opposed to, say, pure recreation. I don’t know about the term “emotional labor” specifically, but certainly it’s a form of labor.
I understand the prickling at calling it “labor” to care for your own children, because it’s certainly not as thankless and impersonal as caring for *someone else’s children*, or for that matter, working at an oil rig, but it’s still labor nonetheless! As someone who has worked a relatively traditional full-time job, and taken care of children all day (while also being a paid Substack writer, so not exactly a *pure* SAHM, but still) I can attest to the fact that the latter, even if I find it more rewarding and enjoyable, is a lot more work! Suffering through hour-long all-hands meetings is tiresome and boring, but attempting to stop a five-year-old and a two-year-old from killing themselves and/or each other all day genuinely just expends more energy. The other day I joked with my husband that most of my day-to-day work is really just physical labor, which really betrays my elitist sociology degree. As Murray would argue (and I agree with her on this) framing this work as labor doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy it.
This isn’t just a bunch of psychobabble frou-frou nonsense either. You can probably put real dollars and data on the invisible work of unpaid caregivers, and that’s worth discussing, especially as it relates to what should happen to a SAHM after her husband leaves her. Arguably, alimony is one of the only ways that this labor is identified and calculated. I’m not saying that we necessarily need basic income for all SAHMs, but it’s not silly Tumblr radfem nonsense to identify that married men make [significantly more money](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/u-s-married-men-earn-much-more-than-others-demographics-trends) than everyone else, in part because the women taking care of most of their domestic duties enables them to focus more on work. (To be fair, high-income men and women are also *more likely to get married* in the first place, so that isn’t the whole story.)
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When you think about how much it costs to hire a nanny and house cleaner, and then establish that a SAHM does all that for free, it seems foolish not to acknowledge that they are performing labor, even if they chose it, and even if they enjoy it. Also, let’s be honest about what the duties of a SAHM really entail. Cuddling my daughter while listening to the Frozen soundtrack isn’t really labor by my account, but despite what trad propaganda would have you believe, the life of a SAHM involves a lot more annoying stuff than cuddling babies all day. Some of it is, frankly, not enjoyable at all, even if I still prefer it to full-time tech work. You can’t frame the role of a SAHM as a sacred, all-important one, and then also insist that every moment of SAHM life is pure recreation (or must be enjoyed, lest you seem like an ungrateful feminist harpy.)
It’s also worth mentioning that most mothers work. Although the invisible labor topic has gotten attached to SAHMs, a lot of the reason that systems like Fair Play are popular is because many mothers are working similar hours as their husbands, and are then also being expected to handle almost all the domestic duties because even relatively progressive people view woman-coded tasks as less important. It’s pretty hard to slice that as “reasonable” no matter your political or ideological alignment, especially when many of these men want their wives to work anyway. It’s very easy to shut these concerns down by saying “taking care of your own kids isn’t really labor,” but there’s a reason so many fathers find it difficult to do for even one hour.
Not to be a broken record with the whole boring-centrist reputation I’ve somehow gotten, but to me, the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes of believing everything is labor (including things that you don’t really need to do at all, like the influencer I saw who bemoaned the invisible labor of “planning coordinating outfits for vacation photos” or things that are mostly done for pleasure, like sex) and believing that wives and mothers must hum happily along with every domestic task like Snow White being encircled by bluebirds because to see their duties as anything other than recreation is ungrateful. While I’m sure a lot of insufferable would-be martyrs have attached themselves to this narrative (just like the concept of a narcissistic parent) that doesn’t make it completely null and void.
I think we can all establish some degree of common sense: not everything is labor. Getting your kids Christmas presents from Santa is a fun, low-stakes thing that doesn’t require being given adequate “credit” the way a presentation at work might, and no, Santa is not a “white straight man stealing credit for my labor.” Planning your family’s vacation photos and outfits is literally just a hobby for you. But some things really are labor, even if they’re also enjoyable at times and unpaid. And if homemaking and motherhood are so important, it’s best not to sell them short. I also think everyone would align with this centrist view far more if the complainopshere wasn’t so loud.
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