My understanding is that the “male tears” thing originated as a response to a perceived case of a demand for the kind of asymmetric sympathy many of the examples in the post are about, for instance:
Girls are told “snapping your bra means he likes you” and then expected to no longer be mad about it.
Bullied kids are told to forgive and forget because their bully “is trying to say they’re sorry”, even after repeated cycles of faux-apologies and bullying.
Fundamentalist husband expects his wife to know his emotions and correct for them while he actively hides the emotion from himself.
A paraphrased quote from Mothers of Invention: A woman’s house slave has run away, greatly increasing the amount of work she has to do herself. She writes in her diary “Oh, if only she could think of things from my point of view, she never would let me suffer so.”
Poor people are more empathetic than rich people.
I think it’s important to distinguish asymmetric demands for interpretive labor, from complaints about such demands (although it’s not always clear what’s going on without a lot of context, and sometimes the latter transforms into the former in a game of telephone).
How this phrase originated is much less important than how it often functions in effect which is: “I have no duty to make any effort to understand you, in fact, I’m allowed to intentionally or recklessly misinterpret what you say”. I guess the point is that circumventing this requires extra labour, ie. “I’m not saying men have it worse, but..”
I think overtly politicized contexts in which people are responding to a long history of asymmetric demands for interpretive labor are not the right place to start. We’d be better off focusing on mundane examples where people spend most of their time, like school or work or talking with their friends.
My understanding is that the “male tears” thing originated as a response to a perceived case of a demand for the kind of asymmetric sympathy many of the examples in the post are about, for instance:
I think it’s important to distinguish asymmetric demands for interpretive labor, from complaints about such demands (although it’s not always clear what’s going on without a lot of context, and sometimes the latter transforms into the former in a game of telephone).
How this phrase originated is much less important than how it often functions in effect which is: “I have no duty to make any effort to understand you, in fact, I’m allowed to intentionally or recklessly misinterpret what you say”. I guess the point is that circumventing this requires extra labour, ie. “I’m not saying men have it worse, but..”
I think overtly politicized contexts in which people are responding to a long history of asymmetric demands for interpretive labor are not the right place to start. We’d be better off focusing on mundane examples where people spend most of their time, like school or work or talking with their friends.