'Mankeeping', Transactional Love and Why Media Needs a Moral Micropanic
Please Don't Tell My Husband That I'm a Sunk Cost Man
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I considered titling this column ‘My husband does my laundry’. It felt a bit sensationalised, however, in an ever expanding media landscape of vaguely — and sometimes overtly — sexist think pieces and social media posts about how men and women dislike and resent one another, actually. If you went by headlines and viral social media content alone, it would be easy to believe that we’re locked in some sort of absurd gender conflict for epistemic and moral dominance.
As someone who grew up ironing my brother’s trousers on my mother’s instruction, I understand simmering resentment toward the opposite sex. Irish mammies are traditionally the ultimate misandrists. They consider men too inherently, embarrassingly incompetent even to look after themselves. Irish mammies are also the ultimate misogynists, considering women so primordially indebted that they owe the men around them domestic service. This is the tension within gender narratives — that place where the personal, cultural and political meet.
Cartoons Hate Her, a Substack that is an excellent read for anyone interested in the connections and disparities between the online world and the one we pretend is in any way disconnected from it, has written about the strange gender hostility characterising the present moment. She’s done it with precisely the sort of mildly weary but curious good sense the topic deserves. Her article focuses specifically on the grievance term of the summer — ‘Mankeeping’.
Like brat summer and Barbiecore and gaslighting before it, the word keeps appearing in articles insisting that it is an organic and sweeping phenomenon. Specifically articles about gender disparity in relationships, and how women are burdened with the emotional labour of caring about and for their male partners in the way that you’d hope anyone (gender irrelevant) in a romantic relationship would care for and about their partner — listening to the other person’s feelings and concerns, being a part of their social life and connection to community.
The big question about Mankeeping is not whether it refers to a real dynamic — it surely does. Some relationships are bad, and some men (just as some women) are overly reliant in the long term on partners for things that they could and should manage themselves. There are cultural contexts in which women are presumed —by both men and women— to owe men domestic service. I grew up in one of them.
The issue is whether this dynamic is a large scale social evil impacting the sorts of people who read publications like The New York Times, or whether it is terminology being used to elevate the mundane reality of a particular category of bad relationship to social contagion. A descriptor of dynamics between men and women in general — a sociopolitical scourge — rather than a scenario of one partner demanding much from the other and offering little. This is not just a lack of parity. It is a wholesale lack of care on one side, and it makes sense that engaging in loving behaviours toward a person who does not reciprocate would feel less like love and more like work.
According to people who write about concepts like Mankeeping, an action is labour because a woman undertaking it is expending energy. The issue with this word — labour — is that in these contexts it takes elements of being a decent person or fulfilling commitments you yourself have made and considers them through a transactional lens. Labour is a word that implies exchange — input for output. The expectation of recompense. With partners, we have a right to expect reciprocity, though not necessarily parity.
This generalised representation of men as burdensome, reliant upon their female partners to scaffold their social lives, listen to their banal problems and needy feelings, and provide the emotional support of an entire network may be bothering me for selfish reasons. These men are depicted as in some sense parasitic, infantile and ultimately as a form of disproportionate, low output work for the women miserably bound to keep them. Entities that take more than they give and in the grimly transactional world of modern love, are a ‘sunk cost’.
I am one of these men. I am a sunk cost man.
The ‘love is labour’ discourse generally goes in one direction. When my husband J. declared a couple of years back, in a fit of barely controlled frustration so intense he had the look of repressed horror a person might adopt when held at knifepoint, that he was doing all the laundry from now on and could I just leave him to it, I didn’t spiral into a polemic on gender politics or consider whether his maleness and my femaleness made this situation exploitative. I didn’t think about being expected to iron my brother’s trousers as a teenager and wonder whether those dynamics were being reproduced in reverse within my marriage. I just let J. take over the laundry we’d previously split responsibility for when he said he wanted to.
I’ll happily wear odd socks. He won’t - it makes him feel like he’s failing in life. He’s tidy, rigorous and purposeful around even minor tasks. I respect that enormously, have no interest in replicating it, and if I get clean socks out of the deal, what’s the problem? He wasn’t demanding I change, or do the laundry in a way that met his different (frankly higher) standard. It’s laundry, not a political demarcation line.
My lax standards around laundry rostering and my fastidious spouse do not of course disprove the idea that these dynamics are more common in heterosexual relationships where traditional gender roles are correlated with Mankeeping. Nor does this in any way challenge the idea that Mankeeping describes a dynamic that exists. However, there is a framing issue at play. A gender double standard which would be blatantly unacceptable were, for example, J. to talk about how laborious it is to listen to me express my worries about a work problem.
When you make broad statements about gender, as I’m doing here (in addressing broad statements about gender), you trip into stereotypes. Clearly, individuals vary. Not all women. Not all men. Not all socks. All that. Yet are men not the category of rudderless, suicide-prone, emotionally displaced individuals we’ve been encouraging to open up and talk about their feelings for quite a while now? Weren’t we chastising them for their emotionally stilted pretensions to a false conception of stoicism — one that any decent therapist would categorise as an avoidant or suppressive relationship to complex emotions, just a few news cycles ago? It seems a smidge ungenerous now to cast having to listen to men talk about their emotions as labour. More drab busywork in an overburdened life.
When one of these social trend labels seeps into brief media ubiquity, I’m skeptical. Not because emotional and labour asymmetry do not exist within relationships, but because I’ve worked in media — and women’s media — for a long time, and am very familiar with the pressure to find some dumb hook and write an article that inflates what is at best a flawed theory or an incomplete account into a moral panic. Or a micropanic, if that’s easier.
Middle class women like me are the demographic largely both reading and writing these sorts of articles, with the time and capacity to think about this sort of thing, and they are consequently more receptive to narratives which cast them as underappreciated, overburdened and in some way victimised. Working class women — like my single mother, who worked as a childminder or nanny, and went to her second job once she’d handed the kids she took care of back to their parents each day— generally have less money, less help and less free time. So while their lives are broadly more demanding of various kinds of labour, they may have less time to read a New York Times article about how the woman whose kids they look after several days a week is overstretched and taken for granted by her partner.
The problem with waves of articles claiming a purported social phenomenon to be ‘a thing’ is that we immediately begin to treat it like one. I’ve done it here. I hold out hope, though, that women and men have far less contempt for one another in general than these sorts of articles rely on to fuel their excoriating route through social media. Or at least no more contempt than they did back when I was ironing my brother’s trousers while muttering under my breath about Simone de Beauvoir.
I complained endlessly and in high dudgeon about the injustice, citing all sorts of feminist reasons to my mother about her backward thinking. She pointed out that my brother climbed into our wheelie bin to squash its malodorous contents when it got overly full before collection day. He cut the grass every weekend. He did just as much vacuuming, washing up, dusting and the like as I did. ‘You can cut the grass if you’d prefer’ she said, giving me a querying look, knowing as she did that it’s a job I loathe above all others. ‘But I should point out that you’re not just ironing your brother’s clothes. Yours are in the pile too. And mine — you know, the person who makes all your meals and bakes you a birthday cake every year and collects you from school when it’s raining. Do you think that maybe you’re not seeing the full picture here?’
I sighed. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve finished the ironing.’
My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By is out now!
Yes, "emotional labor" is having a relationship with someone.
I like how the story of the trousers was turned on its head at the end!
Coming from a very patriarchal culture, I have very mixed feelings about gender roles and mutual stereotyping that contributes to their maintenance (for example, my mum, who has always done all the chores around the house for her husband, would probably never accept that she was exploited, and would simultaneously admire men who can look after themselves and raise her grandson to be fully reliant on women doing stuff for him). It is refreshing to read your thoughtful piece on this subject, thank you.