Mental Load: A Feminist Excuse for Misandry

It goes by many names: mental load, emotional load, emotional labor. Yet they all represent one of the latest ways for feminists to claim victimizaiton.

The principle of mental load is simple. The same task can involve different amounts of mental effort. For example, doing the laundry may be the same physically, but if one member of the household simply does the laundry when asked while another keeps track of what uniforms need to be washed when, what can be machine dried, whether there will be time to fold the clothing, etc., the latter partner has a higher “mental load.” As I’m sure you can guess, feminists claim this partner is always the woman.

This is convenient for feminists because it’s something immeasurable and an easy way to make women the victims and men the villains. However, a small amount of intellectual analysis reveals that complaints about mental load don’t hold much weight. In many cases, they conflict with other feminist claims and narratives. All around, it’s a transparent excuse for misandry.

The Dynamics of Mental Load

What’s ironic about mental load is that it basically means control and power. Who has more mental load, the machinist or the foreman, the private or the captain? Any feminist talking about “mental load” to highlight some sort of systemic issue is simultaneously admitting that women systemically hold the power in most households.

In fact, if a woman is carrying the “mental load” of her household, then she is dominating her husband and creating an unequal relationship. After all, single men survive and manage their households every day, and at increasing rates. They feed themselves, clean their clothes and organize their lives. If a woman finds herself with all the mental load in a two-gender household, then it’s likely she’s taken it upon herself by demanding the household be managed her way and dismissing the man’s way.

Economic Insight Into Domestic Labor

If you come across “mental load” discussed in a feminist forum, it’s likely that they treat household tasks as binaries. In other words, they talk about doing the laundry, vacuuming, cooking, etc. as things that “must be done.” Yet this is an economic fallacy. Household labor, like any labor, indeed, like any economic good, is valued at the margins, that is ordinarily.

Just about every human being on Earth would like a cleaner house, a more deliciously cooked dinner, a more organized life, just like every human being would like a nicer house, more leisure time, a more comfortable bed, etc. However, we can’t have everything we want all the time. We make decisions at the margins to economize our time and resources to maximize personal satisfaction.

It is not an issue of whether or not the laundry needs to be done. It is in issue of how much of a priority the laundry is relative to other tasks, when it should be done, etc. What feminists aren’t recognizing is that when women take on the “mental load” of organizing domestic chores, it means they’re economizing the household as they see fit. It’s not that the man wouldn’t do the laundry without his wife’s organization, it’s just that he would prioritize it differently.

This is all to prove that “mental load” really means household control. It’s hard to construe this as victimhood.

What About Physical Load?

Another interesting thing is that feminists specifically bring up “mental load” as an unseen aspect of relationship and household dynamics. (The “unseen” bit is convenient for them.) But then they seem to ignore the actual visible dynamic: the physical load.

I hope I don’t need to go into much detail. Even in the most “progressive” or “egalitarian” household, the physical labor is always the man’s job. When it comes to lifting and moving heavy furniture, fixing or constructing household features, and doing outdoor work with more exposure to the environment, even the most feminist wife has no problem leaving all this physical load to her husband.

The effects are clear: men suffer far more injury-related deaths at home than women, and men have a lower life expectancy. You can’t quanitify mental load, physical load or the amount of either by task, but when we look at these results, it seems silly to act like women are suffering because they have more of any kind of “load” in their households.

The Conflicting Feminist Narrative

Like most of the feminist narrative, complaints about “mental load” not only fail when exposed to analysis, they also conflict with other feminist talking points. I’ve already shown how it conflicts with the idea of “male power” since mental load actually represents power on the woman’s part, but it also conflicts with the narrative of the “wage gap.”

The idea that women get paid less for the same job has long been disproven, but it is true that women get paid less overall, about 82 cents on the dollar in the US. However, that is because women tend to choose jobs with less mental and physical load. They take jobs that are less stressful and less dangerous. I’ve never seen feminist complain about this. Instead, they insist that this too, completely contradictorily, represents male oppression of women and patriarchy.

As always, the complaints of feminism are transparently mere excuses to play the victim and hate men.