Out Of The Blue: Stories From Metafilter

On July 13th, the writer Jess Zimmerman posted "Where's My Cut?": On Unpaid Emotional Labor on The Toast, an essay about how and why emotional work is often undervalued and treated as "women's work". Or, more to the point, not even work: just something women are inherently supposed to do. It's a good piece, and what it spawned was even more interesting: a huge, revelatory MetaFilter thread in which site members, women in particular, talked about all the ways this asymmetry and devaluation of emotional labor has affected their lives and their relationships.The resulting thread was immense, with surprising momentum: while many discussion threads tail off after a day or two, this one kept going for the entire month it was open (MetaFilter threads close after 30 days) and collected upward of 2100 comments by the end, from hundreds of different people. New folks signed up by the dozens to join in; members shared personal revelations, talked about the new vocabulary the discussion was giving them, posted both ho