The term “manchild” conjures up a vivid image: a lazy, self-centred bloke who relies on women to wash his socks, listen to his problems, remind him to go to the doctor and make sure he maintains his relationships.

It’s a generalisation, to be sure, but one that resonates with many women for important reasons.

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The manchild was front and centre in my mind while reading Jess Zimmerman’s Where’s My Cut?, a brilliant and accessible exploration of women’s “emotional labour” in interpersonal relationships:



[Women] should get paid for all the work they typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single day.

Zimmerman’s conception of emotional labour is a subset of what feminists call “women’s work”, which also includes things like housework, reproductive and caring labour.

These are services that have historically been rendered by women on an unpaid basis. Now they’re being recognised, albeit using different terminology, by decidedly non-radical institutions like Australian bank ANZ, which recently released a discussion paper on the gender pay gap stating:

Unfortunately, Australian women are more likely to retire in poverty than men. This is largely because they are paid less for the same work and they often revert to part-time jobs to assume child rearing or family responsibilities at some point in their lives.

The manchild is the imagined beneficiary of all this so-called women’s work: freed from the burdens of looking after himself and his children, and able to go out and earn a higher income, he also wins the luxury of acting like a child.

The extent to which this is reflected in individual lives varies enormously, but the outcomes don’t lie: women earn less because we spend a lot of time taking care of people, especially men, and men make more because they don’t.

This arrangement has historically been beneficial to men, and a range of beliefs about women’s innate caring capacities have emerged to prove it’s natural; women are said to be better listeners, nurturers.

After all, if we like looking after the manchild so much, why do we need to be paid?

Femininity itself is supplied as a justification for why women enjoy emotional labour, and that supposed enjoyment, that affective satisfaction, is why the work is unpaid. After all, if we like looking after the manchild so much, why do we need to be paid?

Both Zimmerman and the ANZ bank are here expressing an interest in doing away with the manchild. Zimmerman’s wry suggestion is that women should charge men directly for unequal interactions, transforming the manchild into a consumer and emotional labour into a product for purchase:

Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150.

What women would do with this increase in money and free time is left unanswered, and Zimmerman says this suggestion is at least partially tongue in cheek.

It’s useful to contrast this with ANZ’s approach to the issue. Their premise here involves an acknowledgement, in economic terms, of the material disadvantages that accrue to women from performing forms of labour that have never before been considered valuable.

This is as close as banks will ever get to saying “yes, the manchild is real”.

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But the difference is stark: where Zimmerman desires freedom from the manchild as an end in itself, what ANZ clearly wants is for women to be relieved of unpaid emotional, reproductive and caring duties specifically so they can commit themselves to the paid workforce.

Rather than equalising the emotional load, the bank seeks to ensure women spend more time taking care of business and less time taking care of men, family and community.

This represents a sneaky move to hijack feminist arguments in service of the aims of capital, which does not inherently care about women, men or anyone else.

Zimmerman’s droll suggestion that men should pay for emotional labour sparked fury among many men and some women, despite the unlikelihood of it ever happening. But corporate efforts to wring as much work out of everyone as possible using the language of feminism are an unwelcome extension of the demands that have been placed on men for centuries.

Looking at it this way, we can see how gender justice and economic justice are inextricably linked. Taking all forms of labour seriously, whether they’re currently paid or unpaid, and compensating them adequately will benefit everybody – even the manchildren.