Transcription
Choices have consequences, and treating your marriage like a chore and your husband like a child is a choice. So, in our decadent society, outside the world of AI, it may seem like there isn't a lot of innovation going on, but that's not entirely true. Um, some people in our society are still innovating. And for example, every 3 or 4 months, feminists in the media come up with a new term to denigrate men. And it's been about four months since the last one, which means that this New York Times article that we'll talk about today is arriving right on cue.
Here's the uh, the headline: "Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of Mankeeping." As male social circles shrink, female partners say they have to meet more social and emotional needs. Yes, mankeeping. Now, to be fair, I don't think the New York Times actually invented the term. They're helping to popularize it. There was a headline back in The Guardian back in June that said, "Mankeeping: Why Single Women Are Giving Up Dating." As the male social circle continues to shrink, their partners have to take on much more emotional labor, and many are opting to spend their lives alone instead. Another headline a few months before that tells us, "Mankeeping is on the Rise and It's Exhausting Women."
So, um, what is mankeeping? Well, if you type the term into Google, here's the definition it provides: "Mankeeping refers to the unpaid emotional labor that women often perform in relationships where they are expected to manage and support the emotional well-being of their partners, often without reciprocation. This includes tasks like anticipating needs, managing conflicts, and providing emotional support, which can lead to exhaustion and resentment."
So, mankeeping is when a wife is expected to, you know, be a wife. It's when she's saddled with the horrific burden of having to provide emotional support to her husband. Worst of all, she has to do this unpaid. Imagine that. Women are being asked to form emotional connections with their spouses without any form of financial compensation. Obviously, this is unfair. Husbands should pay their wives an hourly wage for every hour that their wives spend caring about them. So, if you want your wife to care about you for, say, eight hours a day, a full-time job, then uh, you should pay her, I'd say $2,400, about $300 an hour. You might think that's kind of steep, but hey, do you want your wife to care about you or not? And if you want her to do some overtime and say, care about you for 10 or 11 hours, maybe maybe you say, "Well, I get home from work and I still want her to care about me for a couple of hours at least. We're going to sit down for dinner. I'd like her to still care about me when we're having dinner. I don't know." Well, that's another 3 or 4 hours, and you know that'll cost overtime. It costs you time and a half. This is all very healthy. Of course, acting as an emotional prostitute, demanding that your husband or boyfriend leave cash on the side table as compensation for your emotional intimacy. That's very normal, right? That's all very good. Or is it? I have to confess, I'm a little bit skeptical. Uh, so, let's read through a little bit of this um, New York Times article to find out more.
Quote: "Justin Leoi is a licensed clinical social worker in Brooklyn who specializes in therapy for men. When he sees a new client, one of the first things he asks is, 'Who can you talk to about what's going on in your life?' Much of the time, Mr. Leo, he says, 'His straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists.' He said, doing all the emotional labor. That particular role now has a name, mankeeping. The term, coined by Angelica Puzzio Ferrara, a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil to encouraging them to meet up with their friends. 'What I've been seeing in my research is how women have been asked to or expected to take on more work to be a central, if not the central piece of a man's social support system,' Dr. Ferrara said, taking care to note that the dynamic isn't experienced by all couples."
Yes, women are expected to be the central piece of a man's social support system. Now, you might think, well, yeah, isn't that what it means to be in a relationship? Isn't that what marriage is? Shouldn't you want to be your man's primary source of emotional support? Shouldn't you want to have a level of emotional intimacy with him that he doesn't have with anyone else in his life? Isn't that the whole point? Why the hell are you in a relationship with you if you consider emotional intimacy to be some huge, slave-like burden? Well, these are all good questions, and the New York Times will not answer any of them. Let's read on anyway.
Quote: "Dr. Ferrara, who researches male friendship at Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Dylan VGA, a research assistant, published a paper on mankeeping in 2024 after investigating why some men struggle to form close bonds, a growing and well-documented issue. In a 2021 survey, 15% of men said they didn't have any close friends, up from 3% in 1990. In 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue. Three decades later, just over 20% said the same. Dr. Ferrara found that women tended to have all of these nodes of support they were going for, uh, they were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely to be going to just them. She sees mankeeping as an important extension of the concept of kinkeeping, the work of keeping families together that researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women."
Eve Tilly Coulson, 37, was relieved to stumble upon the concept of mankeeping on social media. Miss Tilly Coulson, who lives in Los Angeles, is happy in a relationship with her boyfriend of nearly 7 months. She describes him as emotionally mature, funny, and caring. They make a good team. But Miss Tilly Coulson finds herself offering him a fair amount of social and emotional scaffolding. She said, "We'll stop right there."
Um, I think we all get the point. And the point is that, as you probably already suspected, mankeeping is yet another term feminists have coined as an elaborate and roundabout way of justifying their own monstrous, hideous narcissism. They are selfish. These are selfish women, and they want to continue being selfish. And anything that distracts, uh, from them focusing 100% of their energies on themselves and their own desires is emotional labor. That's what they really mean by the term. And that's why, as usual, the struggles of men are being reframed as problems for women. You know, this is the familiar framing of "Men are lonely, women most affected." A woman is a victim because of her own emotional struggles, and a woman is also a victim because of a man's emotional struggles. No matter who's struggling, it's always the woman who's struggling more. That's the way the game is played.
Now, all that said, there is, there is a morsel of truth in this idea. Um, in fact, I'm not really disputing the, the, the underlying premise, which is that women tend to be more social. They tend to be the primary ones in the relationship who create and maintain, as the article says, the social and emotional scaffolding. You know, I'll fully admit, if I ever find myself at a social event of any kind, it's almost always because my wife coordinated it, planned it, scheduled it, and convinced me to attend and reminded me like 20 times that we're doing this thing on Saturday. Um, and, you know, over the summer, we had various visits from family and friends, and I had no hand in organizing any of it. If left up to me, none of it would have happened. If I was entirely abandoned to my own devices, I would probably be just a hermit out in the woods somewhere. I mean, that's my default setting, as it is for many men.
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So, when it comes to organizing social events, does my wife carry a disproportionate amount of the burden? Absolutely. No question about it. Does that mean she's an oppressed slave? Does that mean I owe her financial compensation like she's my employee? Am I saddling her with an unfair amount of emotional labor? No. You know what it means, feminists? It means that my wife is my wife. It means she's not my business partner or my associate. It means she's my wife, and she's wired differently than me. She brings different things to the table. There are different kinds of burdens that have to be assumed and carried in order for a family to function. My wife and I do not go exactly 50/50 on any of those burdens. She, she carries a hugely disproportionate amount of the social burdens, for sure.
Now, on the other hand, for example, I carry 100% of the burden to provide for the family and ensure that we always have a roof over our heads and food on our plates. Like making sure that we're not homeless and starving, that job is 100% mine. That, that is an enormous pressure that I carry every single day of my life. And, um, that's the case for most men. In, in most marriages, even in our enlightened age, the man is still the primary breadwinner. And even in marriages where the split is 50/50, the man is still the default breadwinner. If anyone's going to stop working, it's almost always going to be the woman. So, even in marriages where there's a 50-50 split, or even if the, the woman makes 60% of the income, still there's the option for the woman to stay home with the kids. The man, it's assumed, must always work. In the vast majority of families, the man is either the sole breadwinner, the primary breadwinner, or the default breadwinner. That's the case in most families.
And as we've discussed before, there's a substantial emotional and mental burden that comes with this responsibility. And it's one that is never talked about. You'll never see that. They don't, we don't come up with, with any fancy trendy new terms for it. Um, we don't, we still discuss it. And instead, the assumption is that there's no, that the, the task of providing for your family, keeping the roof over the head, keeping food on the plate, making sure people aren't starving or ending up homeless, making sure the kids have money to go to college if that's what you decide to do, making sure you're able to go on a vacation, making sure that, you know, all that stuff. The assumption is that there is no psychological or emotional burden associated with that at all. Like we're just walking around on cloud nine all the time, just, just, just wandering around our heads totally empty, which is not the case. Because in reality, men who have this responsibility, uh, they walk around every moment of their lives very aware of it, and almost everything they do is, is in some way directed towards that objective and that responsibility. They're never not aware of it. There's never a time when they're not feeling it. And, uh, and this is a burden that in many families, the wife will never feel, at least not to the extent that the man feels it.
Now, am I saying that wives should step up and carry more of this weight in order to make things equal? No. I'm saying that nothing is equal in a healthy marriage. The husband and wife are different people and will carry different burdens to different degrees. They can either choose to whine and complain about this and make themselves into perpetually aggrieved martyrs, or they can delight in the opportunity to serve and love their family in a way that the other cannot. This is entirely a question of the attitude or perspective that you choose to adopt. And any woman running around whining about mankeeping, obviously has chosen to adopt the wrong attitude and the wrong perspective. You have chosen to make yourself the martyr. You want to be the martyr. That's what this is about. You've chosen to see it that way. When, if you were a selfless, good person, right? Frankly, you would look at it as this: "I am blessed. I am so happy that I can do this for my husband. Yeah, my husband, if not for me, would be much more isolated, but I love him, and I know that him keeping social connections is important, and I know that this is not his MO. This is not what he's good at. I am good at it, and I am blessed to be able to do that for him and serve him in that way because I love him and I'm married to him." You could see it that way if you were a good, decent person and a good wife. But you're a bad wife. So instead, you sit around complaining and whining and and feeling aggrieved and and put upon and persecuted because you're expected to do anything in the marriage at all.
Mankeeping is just another way for some women in modern society to complain about the basic wifely duties that they signed up for when they got married. What we find is that some women, not all, but some, become wives but have no interest in actually being wives. They, they don't want to offer emotional intimacy. They don't want to offer physical intimacy. They don't want to be affectionate. They don't want to be caring. They don't want to take care of the house. They don't want to tend to the children. They don't want to cook meals. They don't want to clean. Being a wife is a role, but as it turns out, they don't want to fill that role at all. They took the part, but they don't want to play it. And then when the marriage falls apart, when the husband becomes detached and resentful, when he perhaps finds intimacy with somebody else because his wife has refused to offer it, we're still supposed to see the wife as the clear-cut victim in the case.
When the wife says, we hear the story, "My husband cheated on me." Well, he shouldn't have. I mean, adultery is never justified. It's a mortal sin. It's a terrible evil. Can't be justified. Um, however, often times it doesn't happen in a vacuum. It just happens out of nowhere. And I, and I'm not, I'm not telling you what should happen. I'm telling you what what likely will happen. And when you withhold affection from your husband, emotional affection, 'cause you don't want to, I'm not the mankeeper. It shouldn't be my job to do this for you. When you do that, and then usually you're withholding physical, uh, affection as well. Those two things go together. You withhold that for long enough, you know, it's not going to take that long. That's it's like eventually he's at work, and there's some woman at work, and you know, there's a woman who takes him seriously and respects him and shows him some affection and seems to actually be interested in him and kind of like likes being around him. Uh, and, and then all of a sudden he's, you, what he gets at home is just cold and detached and awful. And what he finds with this woman is, is this warmth that he's so deeply, uh, lacking and desires. And the moment that happens, you're in trouble. You're in trouble. Your marriage is in trouble. You are in the danger zone. You are, you, this is, this is, uh, you know, the asteroid's about to hit moment. And when it happens, again, it's not justified. It's a mortal sin. But, um, you don't get to pretend to be the, the clear-cut victim. You, you can't, you can't sit back and say that, well, it's, I, this is, I, how did this happen? I didn't do it. You know, these, these are choices that you made as well.
So, choices have consequences. And treating your marriage like a chore and your husband like a child is a choice. The consequences will be dire for your marriage one way or another. And that is why any woman complaining about mankeeping or using the term unironically at all is today canceled. If you'd like to see what else I have to say, you can access my full show by going to dailywire.com or by going to the Matt Walsh Show Twitter page. Hope to see you there. God speed.