Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by [Moira Weigel]
by Moira Weigel (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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“Does anyone date anymore?” Today, the authorities tell us that courtship is in crisis. But when Moira Weigel dives into the history of sex and romance in modern America, she discovers that authorities have always said this. Ever since young men and women started to go out together, older generations have scolded them: That’s not the way to find true love. The first women who made dates with strangers were often arrested for prostitution; long before “hookup culture,” there were “petting parties”; before parents worried about cell phone apps, they fretted about joyrides and “parking.” Dating is always dying. But this does not mean that love is dead. It simply changes with the economy. Dating is, and always has been, tied to work.
Lines like “I’ll pick you up at six” made sense at a time when people had jobs that started and ended at fixed hours. But in an age of contract work and flextime, many of us have become sexual freelancers, more likely to text a partner “u still up?” Weaving together over one hundred years of history with scenes from the contemporary landscape, Labor of Love offers a fresh feminist perspective on how we came to date the ways we do. This isn't a guide to “getting the guy.” There are no ridiculous “rules” to follow. Instead, Weigel helps us understand how looking for love shapes who we are—and hopefully leads us closer to the happy ending that dating promises.
Lines like “I’ll pick you up at six” made sense at a time when people had jobs that started and ended at fixed hours. But in an age of contract work and flextime, many of us have become sexual freelancers, more likely to text a partner “u still up?” Weaving together over one hundred years of history with scenes from the contemporary landscape, Labor of Love offers a fresh feminist perspective on how we came to date the ways we do. This isn't a guide to “getting the guy.” There are no ridiculous “rules” to follow. Instead, Weigel helps us understand how looking for love shapes who we are—and hopefully leads us closer to the happy ending that dating promises.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"An addictive and accessible read." ―Amy Finnerty, The New York Times
"Weigel is best when dismantling pop theories through the ages. She brilliantly eviscerates the self-help industry for stoking 'mutual mystification' between the sexes, and unearths intriguing continuities like the way technological advances (including the invention of the automobile) have always led to hand-wringing over the moral bankruptcy of youth . . . Fascinating." ―Jenna Wortham,The New York Times Book Review
"[A] perceptive and wide-ranging investigation into the history of dating in America." ―Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
"The lack of serious conversation about dating has left Weigel with rich territory to explore, and she makes excellent use of it . . . [and her] deliciously incisive observations run throughout the book, making it a thoroughly enjoyable read . . . Weigel presents an insightful analysis of a topic that has largely been left to hucksters and scolds. By commodifying our deepest emotions, Weigel shows how the 'experts' turned dating into a job requiring calculation and deception, but not much love. Maybe it’s time to give notice." ―Sara Eckel, The Washington Post
"[Moira Weigel] makes an entirely convincing case that there never was and never will be one static way of dating." ―Willa Paskin, The Guardian
"[A] sprightly, gently feminist history . . . offer[ing] useful perspectives on dating as both an art and a historical construct." ―Julia M. Kline, The Chicago Tribune
"An occasionally amusing and often provocative look at the work of wooing . . . [A] lively tour of changing romantic mores." ―The Economist
"Much juicier than your average history book . . . [it] reads like a documentary about something you never knew could be so interesting." ―BUST
"[A] smart, refreshing take on the history of dating." ―Publishers Weekly
"Labor of Love makes its case as cheerfully as it does compellingly. Weigel’s book is both intense and lighthearted, by turns easy and surprising, offering momentary delights as well as subtle hints about the future. It’s everything, really, that a good date should be." ―The Atlantic
"A radical Marxist feminist tract disguised as a salmon-pink self-help book." ―Laurie Penny, The New Statesman
"[Moira Weigel's] fresh and often amusing feminist perspective is delightfully interrogative ― and endlessly fascinating." ―Refinery 29
"[A] riveting chronicle of courtship in modern America." ―Entertainment Weekly
"Weigel successfully crafts a theorization of the 'date' as a longstanding site of morphing relations of reproductive labor. . . always show[ing] compellingly that the slippage between romantic and pecuniary matters is altogether nothing new." ―Sophie Lewis, Blindfield Journal
"Labor of Love is remarkable at many levels: Formally, with its interweaving of theory, personal anecdote and social history. Politically, the way it deftly manages to say hugely important things about power and money that so often get left out of the discourse on love. And most of all, it's elegantly written, fun and plain hugely readable." ―Alain de Botton, author of The Course of Love
“Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love rescues the subject of dating from its Trojan horse of triviality. It illuminates the social stakes of feelings too often misunderstood as private or peripheral: romantic desire, romantic frustration, and the shame of caring too much about either one. Witty, lively, and deftly―refreshingly―attentive to largely untold histories, Labor of Love has constructed a dazzling tour of the public infrastructure of our private lives. You will never swipe right the same way again.” ―Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“Labor of Love is a work of essential social history. This is by far the best treatment of courtship, romance, and that awkward squirmy ritual we call a ‘date’ I’ve ever read.” ―Christian Rudder, author of Datacylsm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) and founder of OkCupid
“As compulsively readable as any self-help dating book, Moira Weigel's Labor of Love is an original, exhaustive study of courtship in the United States across two centuries. As Weigel finds, advances in technology don't necessarily equate with mores: women still serve as the assigned arbiters and police of all things sexual, from holding hands to giving birth. But more than polemic, Labor of Love is a heartfelt work, written from and speaking to the need for intimate connection that animates our willingness to navigate these complex and contradictory codes.” ―Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
“Labor of Love is a brilliant history of courtship, love, and sex that is also a brilliant investigation into profound changes in the nature of American work, leisure, consumer society, education, and city life over the twentieth-century and into the new millennium. Elegantly written, gratifyingly clear-eyed, and sharply funny, it restores the essential strangeness of dating, while expertly navigating the fraught contemporary debates over its meaning.” ―Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace
“Instead of going out tonight, do yourself a favor: stay in and read this book. Moira Weigel and her genre-bending history of dating are excellent, illuminating company.” ―Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform and director of Examined Life and Zizek!
--This text refers to the paperback edition.
About the Author
Moira Weigel was born in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, and The New Inquiry, among other publications, and she is currently completing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University. After years of first-person research on dating, she is off the market. Labor of Love is her first book. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
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Product details
ASIN : B0176YG0L0
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 17, 2016)
Publication date : May 17, 2016
Print length : 322 pages
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Customer Reviews: 4.2 out of 5 stars 67 ratings
Moira Weigel
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Biography
Moira Weigel is a writer, translator, and scholar currently at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2017, she received her PhD from Yale University. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Republic.
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Customer reviews
4.2 out of 5 stars
Top reviews from the United States
snowflake
5.0 out of 5 stars Blown away
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2016
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This book is absolutely incredible and you must read it. I've been binge-reading it for the past 24 hours, almost done at this point, and have already emailed or texted 5 people that they must get it ASAP. It has upended some of my long-held convictions of what's "traditional". It has touched upon and tied together all the recent trends - from "Marry Him" to "Rules" to online dating and many others. It added fascinating, often funny and sometimes painful (e.g. AIDS epidemic) historical narratives. It has put words to feelings I've long tried to express myself - the despair of having to play a certain role in dating and suppressing my desires in every step. Most importantly, it has framed what I have long thought of as my personal issues as societal changes or problems at large. I know I will keep thinking about this book for a while, will keep recommending it to others, and will undoubtedly reread it. Many thanks to the author for all the work (and heart) that has gone into researching and writing this book.
11 people found this helpful
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bizallyson
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating look at "the search"
Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2016
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Anyone who is single and finds him or herself on a Friday night apathetically "swiping" and wondering, "how did I get here" should read this book. The answer for how to do something different is not necessarily in its pages but you can take comfort that being single isn't necessarily as bad or as personally a fault as one may think. It's also a fascinating sociological study about culture constructing how we search for love and what we think we are searching for.
4 people found this helpful
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Larry G. Brandt
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2016
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A good overview of the modern invention of dating and how the institution escaped the early charges of prostitution. In this current time where people are voting because one man-one woman is their belief of history it should be more popular.
4 people found this helpful
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copperlustre
2.0 out of 5 stars Not worth your time
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2019
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Very marginal read. Starts off fairly well but flounders quickly. Don’t bother to get this.
3 people found this helpful
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Mark
5.0 out of 5 stars Well researched and thought-provoking
Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2016
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Thoughtful, well researched, articulate and thought-provoking. This is the best overview of dating and the history of dating that I've ever read. I highly recommend this book.
3 people found this helpful
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Nicole1
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling and engaging!
Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2016
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Five stars! This was a compelling read - Weigel really digs deep into our culture and will make you think about how you think about love (or how you haven't thought about it!). Well-written and well researched with some new information. On a personal level, I have experienced a great deal of growth in my years of dating - this book sheds a great deal of light on where some of my frustrations have originated. As long as there are others who are ready to work and change the social norms, I think we are on the right track!
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Kate Siegel
5.0 out of 5 stars What a wonderful read! Labor of Love is a fanscinating exploration ...
Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2016
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What a wonderful read! Labor of Love is a fanscinating exploration of how dating has evolved in response to economic, social, and cultural shifts over the last 100 years. While the book is well researched and certainly a serious intellectual exploration of the subject matter, drawing on over 100 years of material, it's hilarious and entirely accessible. I honestly couldn't put it down. Would give it 100 stars if I could!
14 people found this helpful
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Zoe Nesin
5.0 out of 5 stars I totally recommend it.
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2016
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This book is fascinating and informative. I'm about 1/3 of the way through and I'm learning a lot of historical information across races, classes, and ethnicities that I was previously unaware of regarding courtship and the institution of dating. If you're a history nerd, especially a women's/people's history nerd, I totally recommend it.
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sarah
5.0 out of 5 stars 'Labor of Love' is absolutely brilliant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2019
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In the current age of "Hook-Up Culture," it is often said that daters eschew emotional attachments romantic entanglements. Romance is dead; folks simply "hit it and quit it," to use a blunt phrase. Such a statement, Moira Weigel argues, makes many erroneous assumptions about the "traditional" practices of dating in the U.S. Using the tools of diverse fields like cultural studies, cultural history, literary criticism, sociology, and film studies, Weigel provides readers with a wonderfully complex history of dating in the U.S.
Dating as Americans currently know it is a 20th-century invention, a product of industrialization, urbanization, economic shifts, and women entering the U.S. workforce en masse. Weigel asserts that both dating and love are social constructs (as opposed to "naturally" occurring phenomena) subject to the ebbs and flows of the market. Economic regimes, more specifically capitalism, and, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, neoliberalism, influence dating patterns and habits. Furthermore, dating also spurs a consumer culture that thrives of our (dysfunctional) dating patterns and ceaseless quest for love. What I found most compelling was Weigel's argument that dating itself is also work, a form of labor. The labor of dating, the labor of loving, is, in a deeply unequal society, deeply unequally distributed. The ramifications of this distribution are reified in our social, political, economic, and personal lives.
As Weigel supports her argument by describing dating across the decades of the 20th century, she shares historical facts that upend what we readers think we knew about dating. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, many first daters were criminalized, especially Black women; the singles bars widespread across the nation today evolved out of the public social spaces created for queer dating; the free love movement of the 1960s was not unique for there was a free love movement in the 1870s after the end of the U.S. Civil War; rent parties, which constituted a way for Black Americans in New York to pay drastically high rents for segregated housing, provided a locale for many Black daters (and later served as the site in which disco music and culture emerged).
'Labor of Love' is absolutely brilliant; it brings a feminist theory, visual culture, history, and critiques of power together in a clever way. My only critique is that I wanted Weigel's argument to be bolder. There wasn't always a clear throughline from each of the chapters to the text's central thesis, and Weigel never makes explicit what precisely is at stake. For instance, while discussing the myth of the biological clock, Weigel is clear that solutions such as egg freezing and IVF (two procedures originally pioneered to aid individuals who had trouble conceiving as opposed to aiding "healthy" women whose work lives would not permit them to conceive prior to their late 30s) does not actually address the problem: notions and practices of work are at odds with the biological constraints that some individuals face with respect to reproduction. I wanted Weigel to parse that statement--explain to her reader how and why that poses an issue for an ostensibly democratic society committed to equity, justice, and reproductive freedom.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed 'Labor of Love' immensely, and would definitely recommend it.
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VTO
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting and easily written book!
Reviewed in Germany on November 2, 2016
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I can recommend this book to readers, who are interested in historical-economic perspectives that bring up class, race and gender issues (intersectionality).
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“The Best Revenge is Your Paper”: Notes on Women’s Work
By Alice Bolin
JUNE 19, 2016
IN HER NEW BOOK Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel traces the beginnings of American dating to the turn of the 20th century, when a new class of young, single women entered the workforce. These women were the servants, factory workers, and saleswomen in the United States’s industrializing cities. For the first time, single men and women could meet unsupervised, supporting the United States’s growing consumer sector by participating in leisure activities together. “Shopgirls,” department store clerks whose primary skills were good looks, poise, and charm, used the same techniques to get a date as they did to make a sale. It was understood that many women were in this line of work to meet men from a different social class from their own. But, Weigel argues, it was less that this kind of work prepared women for romance than that the innovation of dating trained women to be good workers.
Women dated because it was how they could take part in leisure activities that they could not afford with their meager paychecks. In order to gain access to restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks, and the many other new consumer services proliferating around them, they had to attract and please men, who enjoyed higher earning power. They thus provided a service that men, in turn, paid for. Women’s love lives became work in a way that was, from the beginning, ambiguous.
“Ever since the invention of dating,” Weigel writes, “the line between sex work and ‘legitimate’ dating has remained difficult to draw and impossible to police.” Many early female daters were arrested because “[i]n the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.” Weigel notes that there is still debate about “what exactly makes sleeping with someone because he bought you dinner different from sleeping with someone because he paid you what that dinner cost.” On websites like SeekingArrangement.com, a rich “Sugar Daddy” can seek a “Sugar Baby,” an attractive young woman he will support in exchange for sex and companionship. Despite the evidently transactional nature of such a relationship, many men seeking this arrangement like to imagine that they are not hiring a prostitute, as Alana Massey has observed in The New Inquiry, specifying on their online profiles that “no pros” need apply. Women’s work must not look like work.
¤
Shopgirls, Sugar Babies, and sex workers all perform what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor.” Weigel defines it as “work that required workers to manage their feelings in order to display particular emotions.” “We speak of ‘service with a smile,’” she writes, “but in many jobs, the smile is the service.” Sex work is the ultimate in emotional labor, an industry in which workers have to simulate intense emotions of affection and sexual attraction. But almost all of what we term “women’s work” is emotional labor, and not just because so many women work as salespeople, food service workers, educators, and caregivers. Rather, women are so represented in these sectors because of our expectations of their emotions.
Weigel writes about how a false division between public and private at the time of industrialization devalued the work that women were expected to do: “The idea arose that work was what someone else paid you money to do. Not-work was what you were not paid to do. Work was what men did out in public. Not-work was what women did at home.” The notion of being paid for one’s emotional labor was crass and embarrassing, even when a woman was being compensated in her public or private life for displaying certain feelings. Women came to believe that raising children and taking care of a husband were instinctual, as if “it was simply in their natures to do anything for love.” Labor of Love interrogates these beliefs and “instincts.” Emotions, the book argues, are as socially determined as they are personal, as “[t]he possibilities of how we feel arise from those we feel among.” Weigel’s book is more than a history of dating; it is a history of feelings.
¤
In a 2015 essay for Jezebel, Colette Shade wrote about the strange proliferation of the hip-hop slang word “hustle” in twee, feminine products on Etsy. “Hustling” once connoted selling drugs or sex or making money by other illegal means, trying to survive on the streets. In cutesy slogans like “dream big, hustle hard” and “good things come to those who hustle,” this appropriation now depicts the realities of jobless recovery and the freelance economy. As Shade writes, in the 2008 recession “scant resources, stagnant wages and structural unemployment spread to people who had never before experienced it. In the new economy, everyone became a hustler.” These Etsy products, presumably made by women who are themselves hustling, “exist to soothe workers — specifically, female workers — into accepting this new reality as cute, fun, and, most of all, a self-empowering personal choice.”
The rise of emotional labor came in the wake of the greatest economic recession the United States had ever seen, in the 1890s, creating a class of workers who were doing more work than could even be accounted for, much less compensated. During the second tech boom work has become more personal, more emotional, and more invasive than ever. Social networking, too, is a form of emotional labor, and it is now a 24-7 activity for the creative class, especially women and people of color, for whom barriers to entry are greater. Men are relatively terrible at social media because it rewards attributes that have been socialized in women: to be cute, to be friendly, to be enthusiastic, to be diplomatic, to show interest in things and people they have no interest in, to be always available. Men who join Twitter in order to network are obvious: they have their job, like “writer,” in their screen name. They use hashtags. They retweet a lot, not posts they found amusing, but posts from official outlets in their fields. They tweet infrequently. Looking at these men’s accounts, I always wonder how people can be so bad at social media. How can they afford it?
Men can opt out of this kind of networking because they are allowed to compartmentalize their identities in ways that women cannot. They can sell their work, not themselves. Weigel explains how the idea of “personality” came about around the same time that dating did, to describe the factors in attraction that were hard to define. Although it was often seen as charisma, unselfconsciousness, or animal magnetism, personality has always been a performance. “A Shopgirl knew that the personality she expressed […] was not something she was born with,” Weigel writes. “Personality consisted of myriad effects that she had to work hard to produce.”
Personality is the currency on social media, and some women have made empires from it. The epitome of this new kind of emotional labor, the care and keeping of one’s personal brand, is Kim Kardashian West, who shares herself, body and mind, with her fans through reality TV, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and her exclusive smartphone app. Her high-profile celebrity relationships have formed a large part of her work, so much so that on her video game, dating other celebrities is one way that a player can “level up.” It’s hard to picture Kardashian tweeting, as her husband Kanye West did, “You have distracted from my creative process.” For her, Twitter is the creative process; there is no separation between creation and marketing. “If I wasn’t Bey would you still feel me?” Beyoncé asks on her most recent album Lemonade: an impossible question. A woman in our culture cannot separate her personality from her process: the roles of mother, wife, lover, and victim are ever-present and haunting.
¤
In Labor of Love, Weigel writes about the Real Housewives TV franchise, which has turned a league of women with rich husbands into moguls. They are trading on their feelings twice over: first, by “marrying up,” and second, by parlaying their privileged marital status into TV notoriety, which turns into more money. “We live in an era that tells people to do what they love and let their passion take care of their profession,” Weigel writes. “[The Real Housewife] is a heroine for an age that believes in getting rich by turning your feelings into assets.”
If dating and marriage are work for women, in today’s economy they have found many ways to monetize them. Of course reality stars like Kardashian and the Real Housewives have especially powerful platforms from which to exploit their emotions, but everyday women can do it too. A significant sector of online publishing belongs to women’s interest sites, which often promote a genre that Laura Bennett at Slate termed “the harrowing personal essay.” Many of the headlines that Bennett cites are about relationships: “I Was Cheating on My Boyfriend When He Died,” “I’m Living With My Abuser,” “Why Do I Keep Writing About the Time I Got My Heart Broken?” Women can sell their feelings on the open market, although the question, with this new wave of confessional writing, is whether it’s a fair trade. When sites like xoJane only pay around 50 dollars a story, is dredging up one’s worst experiences worth it?
Bennett criticizes this trend in first-person writing as “knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure, the hot take’s more intimate sibling.” Since xoJane published an essay where a woman claimed her mentally ill friend’s suicide was a blessing, was roundly criticized, and removed the author’s byline and then the piece altogether, there has been discussion about whether publishing a piece “for clicks,” when it is destined to become a hate-read, is ethical, especially when the piece is personal. Bennett writes that many of these pieces are “solo acts of sensational disclosure that bubble up and just as quickly vaporize,” as editors make it clear they are selling experiences, not writing.
Everyone knows female grief is marketable. Since Lemonade came out in April, Beyoncé has been widely praised for her honesty and ingenuity in weaving a story about marital infidelity, rage, sorrow, and forgiveness. Her only two notable critics have been the feminist scholar bell hooks and New Yorker critic Hilton Als. Als, in his ambivalent review of Beyoncé’s Formation tour, worries that, belying her promotion of black women and the idea that girls run the world, “None of [her success] has been separable from men.” Similarly, hooks is concerned with the depiction of relationships in Lemonade, which “glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction,” clinging too tightly to a survivor narrative common to stories about black women. Both Als and hooks seem dissatisfied with the way the story of Lemonade ends: with Beyoncé and Jay Z back together, and Beyoncé giving “her success to Tidal, her husband’s music-streaming service, bringing the fledgling company more than a million new subscribers” — just another internet start-up feeding on a woman’s pain.
I find it strange that hooks, in her critique of the album as “the business of capitalist money making at its best,” ignores the parts of Lemonade that are explicitly about capitalist moneymaking. “6 Inch” is about an ambiguous sort of women’s work, a glamorous woman who “grinds from Monday to Friday / Works from Friday to Sunday,” and “works for the money, she work for the money / From the start to the finish / And she worth every dollar, she worth every dollar / And she worth every minute.” This boasting feels a bit weird in the middle of such an extended act of vulnerability, but all of Beyoncé’s closest relationships have also been business relationships. She hints on “Daddy Lessons” at the way that her father and former manager, Mathew Knowles, pushed her into show business when she was a child. And her husband, Jay Z, has always been a creative and business collaborator.
Obviously, when Beyoncé made Lemonade, she was in charge of the decision to sell her pain, knowing that, in the world we live in, art is business just as relationships are work. And she was not only selling her own pain but also her unfaithful husband’s, too, showing his ass as an act of vengeance. In this, she and the generation of young female writers now coming of age on the internet may have similar aims. In her essay “The Monetized Man,” Alana Massey writes about her initiation into writing: “The first stories I put on the internet were about dating and sex and body image issues and I placed them where I could […] Some people call these women’s sites ‘the pink ghetto’ but I consider them more like the girls’ side of the lake at summer camp.” She learned to deploy the internet’s demand for first-person writing like a Valkyrie, profiting off of men who wronged her. “When several men’s rights activists devoted a few days to picking apart photographs of me and diagnosing me as unfuckable, I had some shrill girlish feelings about the whole ordeal,” she writes. “Then I took two hours to type […] these feelings out in order to publish them for hundreds of dollars.” There are pragmatics at work here that will obviously frustrate ideologues: men have always had monetary power over women, so women turning men’s bad behavior into money takes back some of that control, but it does not seek to change the system. As Beyoncé’s last words on Lemonade instruct, with only a little irony, the “best revenge is your paper.”
¤
In Labor of Love, Weigel juxtaposes two legendary figures of the sexual revolution: Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Brown, in her books Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the Office, promoted a vision of a new empowered woman who, in addition to a full schedule of dates and a rigorous beauty routine, was as powerful at the office as any man. And Hefner offered a new ideal to men: he “presented a vision of the life of Playboy as a life of leisure,” always appearing, as he still does, in a pair of pajamas. The two media icons were collaborating on a new model for society, one in which women did 100 percent of the work.
This is the real problem with women dreaming big and hustling hard, with Beyoncé grinding from Monday to Friday and working Friday to Sunday: it’s not fair. Weigel encourages us to abandon sentimentality, and to acknowledge that emotions are labor, relationships have always been work, and love and money are intertwined. But the burden of emotional labor must not all fall on women. Massey reminds us that many stories about “women’s experience” are not really about women’s emotional lives but men’s, and “how the unrestrained, unaccountable emotional lives of men wreak havoc on women […] Women’s issues, I dutifully called the results of their juvenile tantrums masquerading as acceptable adult behavior.” So the girls’ side of the lake is invaded by men, another arena where, as Weigel writes, “[t]his gendered division of labor makes women emotionally overworked and makes men emotionally incompetent.” “No matter how hard women in relationships with patriarchal men work for change, forgive, and reconcile, men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end,” bell hooks says of Lemonade, and she’s right — but then why is her criticism of Beyoncé, and not the patriarchal men who have taken over her story? It is sad to think of women holding up the world, constantly selling the only things they have: their emotions, their personalities, their bodies. But we must, at least, not condemn women’s stories for the reality of men’s behavior, asking them to tell something other than the truth, blaming the lemonade for its lemons.
¤
Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls, an essay collection forthcoming from Morrow/HarperCollins. She is the nonfiction editor for Electric Literature’s weekly literary magazine of short things, Okey-Panky.
“The Best Revenge is Your Paper”: Notes on Women’s Work
By Alice Bolin
JUNE 19, 2016
IN HER NEW BOOK Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel traces the beginnings of American dating to the turn of the 20th century, when a new class of young, single women entered the workforce. These women were the servants, factory workers, and saleswomen in the United States’s industrializing cities. For the first time, single men and women could meet unsupervised, supporting the United States’s growing consumer sector by participating in leisure activities together. “Shopgirls,” department store clerks whose primary skills were good looks, poise, and charm, used the same techniques to get a date as they did to make a sale. It was understood that many women were in this line of work to meet men from a different social class from their own. But, Weigel argues, it was less that this kind of work prepared women for romance than that the innovation of dating trained women to be good workers.
Women dated because it was how they could take part in leisure activities that they could not afford with their meager paychecks. In order to gain access to restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks, and the many other new consumer services proliferating around them, they had to attract and please men, who enjoyed higher earning power. They thus provided a service that men, in turn, paid for. Women’s love lives became work in a way that was, from the beginning, ambiguous.
“Ever since the invention of dating,” Weigel writes, “the line between sex work and ‘legitimate’ dating has remained difficult to draw and impossible to police.” Many early female daters were arrested because “[i]n the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.” Weigel notes that there is still debate about “what exactly makes sleeping with someone because he bought you dinner different from sleeping with someone because he paid you what that dinner cost.” On websites like SeekingArrangement.com, a rich “Sugar Daddy” can seek a “Sugar Baby,” an attractive young woman he will support in exchange for sex and companionship. Despite the evidently transactional nature of such a relationship, many men seeking this arrangement like to imagine that they are not hiring a prostitute, as Alana Massey has observed in The New Inquiry, specifying on their online profiles that “no pros” need apply. Women’s work must not look like work.
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Shopgirls, Sugar Babies, and sex workers all perform what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor.” Weigel defines it as “work that required workers to manage their feelings in order to display particular emotions.” “We speak of ‘service with a smile,’” she writes, “but in many jobs, the smile is the service.” Sex work is the ultimate in emotional labor, an industry in which workers have to simulate intense emotions of affection and sexual attraction. But almost all of what we term “women’s work” is emotional labor, and not just because so many women work as salespeople, food service workers, educators, and caregivers. Rather, women are so represented in these sectors because of our expectations of their emotions.
Weigel writes about how a false division between public and private at the time of industrialization devalued the work that women were expected to do: “The idea arose that work was what someone else paid you money to do. Not-work was what you were not paid to do. Work was what men did out in public. Not-work was what women did at home.” The notion of being paid for one’s emotional labor was crass and embarrassing, even when a woman was being compensated in her public or private life for displaying certain feelings. Women came to believe that raising children and taking care of a husband were instinctual, as if “it was simply in their natures to do anything for love.” Labor of Love interrogates these beliefs and “instincts.” Emotions, the book argues, are as socially determined as they are personal, as “[t]he possibilities of how we feel arise from those we feel among.” Weigel’s book is more than a history of dating; it is a history of feelings.
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In a 2015 essay for Jezebel, Colette Shade wrote about the strange proliferation of the hip-hop slang word “hustle” in twee, feminine products on Etsy. “Hustling” once connoted selling drugs or sex or making money by other illegal means, trying to survive on the streets. In cutesy slogans like “dream big, hustle hard” and “good things come to those who hustle,” this appropriation now depicts the realities of jobless recovery and the freelance economy. As Shade writes, in the 2008 recession “scant resources, stagnant wages and structural unemployment spread to people who had never before experienced it. In the new economy, everyone became a hustler.” These Etsy products, presumably made by women who are themselves hustling, “exist to soothe workers — specifically, female workers — into accepting this new reality as cute, fun, and, most of all, a self-empowering personal choice.”
The rise of emotional labor came in the wake of the greatest economic recession the United States had ever seen, in the 1890s, creating a class of workers who were doing more work than could even be accounted for, much less compensated. During the second tech boom work has become more personal, more emotional, and more invasive than ever. Social networking, too, is a form of emotional labor, and it is now a 24-7 activity for the creative class, especially women and people of color, for whom barriers to entry are greater. Men are relatively terrible at social media because it rewards attributes that have been socialized in women: to be cute, to be friendly, to be enthusiastic, to be diplomatic, to show interest in things and people they have no interest in, to be always available. Men who join Twitter in order to network are obvious: they have their job, like “writer,” in their screen name. They use hashtags. They retweet a lot, not posts they found amusing, but posts from official outlets in their fields. They tweet infrequently. Looking at these men’s accounts, I always wonder how people can be so bad at social media. How can they afford it?
Men can opt out of this kind of networking because they are allowed to compartmentalize their identities in ways that women cannot. They can sell their work, not themselves. Weigel explains how the idea of “personality” came about around the same time that dating did, to describe the factors in attraction that were hard to define. Although it was often seen as charisma, unselfconsciousness, or animal magnetism, personality has always been a performance. “A Shopgirl knew that the personality she expressed […] was not something she was born with,” Weigel writes. “Personality consisted of myriad effects that she had to work hard to produce.”
Personality is the currency on social media, and some women have made empires from it. The epitome of this new kind of emotional labor, the care and keeping of one’s personal brand, is Kim Kardashian West, who shares herself, body and mind, with her fans through reality TV, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and her exclusive smartphone app. Her high-profile celebrity relationships have formed a large part of her work, so much so that on her video game, dating other celebrities is one way that a player can “level up.” It’s hard to picture Kardashian tweeting, as her husband Kanye West did, “You have distracted from my creative process.” For her, Twitter is the creative process; there is no separation between creation and marketing. “If I wasn’t Bey would you still feel me?” Beyoncé asks on her most recent album Lemonade: an impossible question. A woman in our culture cannot separate her personality from her process: the roles of mother, wife, lover, and victim are ever-present and haunting.
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In Labor of Love, Weigel writes about the Real Housewives TV franchise, which has turned a league of women with rich husbands into moguls. They are trading on their feelings twice over: first, by “marrying up,” and second, by parlaying their privileged marital status into TV notoriety, which turns into more money. “We live in an era that tells people to do what they love and let their passion take care of their profession,” Weigel writes. “[The Real Housewife] is a heroine for an age that believes in getting rich by turning your feelings into assets.”
If dating and marriage are work for women, in today’s economy they have found many ways to monetize them. Of course reality stars like Kardashian and the Real Housewives have especially powerful platforms from which to exploit their emotions, but everyday women can do it too. A significant sector of online publishing belongs to women’s interest sites, which often promote a genre that Laura Bennett at Slate termed “the harrowing personal essay.” Many of the headlines that Bennett cites are about relationships: “I Was Cheating on My Boyfriend When He Died,” “I’m Living With My Abuser,” “Why Do I Keep Writing About the Time I Got My Heart Broken?” Women can sell their feelings on the open market, although the question, with this new wave of confessional writing, is whether it’s a fair trade. When sites like xoJane only pay around 50 dollars a story, is dredging up one’s worst experiences worth it?
Bennett criticizes this trend in first-person writing as “knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure, the hot take’s more intimate sibling.” Since xoJane published an essay where a woman claimed her mentally ill friend’s suicide was a blessing, was roundly criticized, and removed the author’s byline and then the piece altogether, there has been discussion about whether publishing a piece “for clicks,” when it is destined to become a hate-read, is ethical, especially when the piece is personal. Bennett writes that many of these pieces are “solo acts of sensational disclosure that bubble up and just as quickly vaporize,” as editors make it clear they are selling experiences, not writing.
Everyone knows female grief is marketable. Since Lemonade came out in April, Beyoncé has been widely praised for her honesty and ingenuity in weaving a story about marital infidelity, rage, sorrow, and forgiveness. Her only two notable critics have been the feminist scholar bell hooks and New Yorker critic Hilton Als. Als, in his ambivalent review of Beyoncé’s Formation tour, worries that, belying her promotion of black women and the idea that girls run the world, “None of [her success] has been separable from men.” Similarly, hooks is concerned with the depiction of relationships in Lemonade, which “glamorizes a world of gendered cultural paradox and contradiction,” clinging too tightly to a survivor narrative common to stories about black women. Both Als and hooks seem dissatisfied with the way the story of Lemonade ends: with Beyoncé and Jay Z back together, and Beyoncé giving “her success to Tidal, her husband’s music-streaming service, bringing the fledgling company more than a million new subscribers” — just another internet start-up feeding on a woman’s pain.
I find it strange that hooks, in her critique of the album as “the business of capitalist money making at its best,” ignores the parts of Lemonade that are explicitly about capitalist moneymaking. “6 Inch” is about an ambiguous sort of women’s work, a glamorous woman who “grinds from Monday to Friday / Works from Friday to Sunday,” and “works for the money, she work for the money / From the start to the finish / And she worth every dollar, she worth every dollar / And she worth every minute.” This boasting feels a bit weird in the middle of such an extended act of vulnerability, but all of Beyoncé’s closest relationships have also been business relationships. She hints on “Daddy Lessons” at the way that her father and former manager, Mathew Knowles, pushed her into show business when she was a child. And her husband, Jay Z, has always been a creative and business collaborator.
Obviously, when Beyoncé made Lemonade, she was in charge of the decision to sell her pain, knowing that, in the world we live in, art is business just as relationships are work. And she was not only selling her own pain but also her unfaithful husband’s, too, showing his ass as an act of vengeance. In this, she and the generation of young female writers now coming of age on the internet may have similar aims. In her essay “The Monetized Man,” Alana Massey writes about her initiation into writing: “The first stories I put on the internet were about dating and sex and body image issues and I placed them where I could […] Some people call these women’s sites ‘the pink ghetto’ but I consider them more like the girls’ side of the lake at summer camp.” She learned to deploy the internet’s demand for first-person writing like a Valkyrie, profiting off of men who wronged her. “When several men’s rights activists devoted a few days to picking apart photographs of me and diagnosing me as unfuckable, I had some shrill girlish feelings about the whole ordeal,” she writes. “Then I took two hours to type […] these feelings out in order to publish them for hundreds of dollars.” There are pragmatics at work here that will obviously frustrate ideologues: men have always had monetary power over women, so women turning men’s bad behavior into money takes back some of that control, but it does not seek to change the system. As Beyoncé’s last words on Lemonade instruct, with only a little irony, the “best revenge is your paper.”
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In Labor of Love, Weigel juxtaposes two legendary figures of the sexual revolution: Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Brown, in her books Sex and the Single Girl and Sex and the Office, promoted a vision of a new empowered woman who, in addition to a full schedule of dates and a rigorous beauty routine, was as powerful at the office as any man. And Hefner offered a new ideal to men: he “presented a vision of the life of Playboy as a life of leisure,” always appearing, as he still does, in a pair of pajamas. The two media icons were collaborating on a new model for society, one in which women did 100 percent of the work.
This is the real problem with women dreaming big and hustling hard, with Beyoncé grinding from Monday to Friday and working Friday to Sunday: it’s not fair. Weigel encourages us to abandon sentimentality, and to acknowledge that emotions are labor, relationships have always been work, and love and money are intertwined. But the burden of emotional labor must not all fall on women. Massey reminds us that many stories about “women’s experience” are not really about women’s emotional lives but men’s, and “how the unrestrained, unaccountable emotional lives of men wreak havoc on women […] Women’s issues, I dutifully called the results of their juvenile tantrums masquerading as acceptable adult behavior.” So the girls’ side of the lake is invaded by men, another arena where, as Weigel writes, “[t]his gendered division of labor makes women emotionally overworked and makes men emotionally incompetent.” “No matter how hard women in relationships with patriarchal men work for change, forgive, and reconcile, men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end,” bell hooks says of Lemonade, and she’s right — but then why is her criticism of Beyoncé, and not the patriarchal men who have taken over her story? It is sad to think of women holding up the world, constantly selling the only things they have: their emotions, their personalities, their bodies. But we must, at least, not condemn women’s stories for the reality of men’s behavior, asking them to tell something other than the truth, blaming the lemonade for its lemons.
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Alice Bolin is the author of Dead Girls, an essay collection forthcoming from Morrow/HarperCollins. She is the nonfiction editor for Electric Literature’s weekly literary magazine of short things, Okey-Panky.
