Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. So I found out the other day that
there is a word called man keeping man keeping. It's
like housekeeping, but with a man. You're keeping a man
man keeping. It's apparently it falls under a category of
emotional labor, which I also did not know existed. There
is a term called emotional labor. Okay. This was a
piece at the New York Times, probably inspired by some
randoh TikTok or Instagram nutball, But here we are actually no,
these nutballs have degrees and they've actually done research on this.
For example, Justin leoi yallow lioiya some. Well, I mean,
how would you pronounce this one? L ioi liyah wah leoi. Well,
I'm gonna call him Justin. Justin is a licensed clinical
social worker in Brooklyn, and he specializes in therapy for dudes.
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? And much of the time,
Justin says that his straight male clients tell him that
they rarely open up to anyone except their girlfriends or wives,
and that's wrong. You are putting the woman under emotional labor.
You are forcing her to do emotional labor for you. Now,
before I know what you're gonna say, You're like, well,
but I like my wife talks to me about stuff too,
so do I. I'm doing emotional labor as well. No,
you're not. See, it's different. It's different because women they
talk to other women. I mean, they may talk to
you too, but that doesn't matter. Well, the only thing
that matters is that they talk to other women also
about all of these things. I think that's why they
all go to the bathroom at the same time. Either
that or they're like uploading data to the mothership in orbit.
I'm not sure. Much of the time, he says that
they say it's their girlfriends or wives and their partners.
These wives and girlfriends have become their unofficial therapists quote
doing all the emotional labor or doing the work. Yeah,
they're doing the work. Okay. I thought, weren't we supposed
to be opening up to the women. I wasn't that
a big thing. I remember that being a thing. I remember, yes, definitely,
because I read a book about it years ago. It
was called Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus.
And I will save you the trouble. I mean, you
should go read it if you want to read about
how men and women are different. Which wait a minute,
I thought they weren't anymore, that you could be either one.
What if I identify as a woman just for my
unofficial therapy sessions with Christy? Does that count? I will
save you the trouble here of going out finding the
book and reading it, although I'm not saying don't. But
here's the big takeaway. Men and women are different, very transphobic,
and that men and women because they are different, they
think things through differently, they work out problems in their
heads differently. This was groundbreaking stuff at the time, like
I remember reading it, and everybody was talking about this book.
Mena from Mars, Women are from Venus and So for example,
it's like one of the highest forms of flattery or
praise that a dude can offer another dude is to
ask him his advice on something, because I will tell
you as a dude, we generally don't appreciate dudes coming
up and telling us like, you know, this is what
you need to do. Your friends will be like, oh,
how are you doing this? Oh have you heard about
this other thing whatever? But it's like it's it's it's
generally considered I think bad form to just roll up
on someone as some other guy and be like, hey,
you're doing that wrong. Listen to me. I'll give you
this advice. This is the way you need to do
this thing. But if I come to you when I ask,
you should be honored because like, I can't figure this out.
So I go to you and you know like mm,
caveman burns hand and fire and you say, hm, cavemen
get longer stick and it's like, oh my gosh, Like
that's that's such a high form of praise. And so
guys think things through, or as the book said at
the time, that men retreat to their caves to think
things through. They have a problem, they have an issue,
they're trying to sort it out in their head and
that's an internal processing kind of an event. Right now,
women again being different, and this is not to say
one is better or worse. It's just that we are
different and women not all women hashtag not all women like,
not all of them, but generally speaking, the argument goes
that women process through external means. They talk with each
other about a problem or an issue and that sort
of thing, and oftentimes they do know what the solution
to a problem is, but that's not what they get
their satisfaction from or their catharsis from. It's the process
of talking that gives them the catharsis right, And this
actually causes a lot of problems between men and women
where a woman says, you know, I have this problem,
and the guy's like, oh, and he thinks she's asking
for a solution, not support. So Christy and I have
we have, you know, sometimes we'll be like, wait, are
you asking for a solution or support? Is this a
solution conversation or are you support conversation? Right? And most times
it's support because they just they want to talk about it.
And a guy hears I got this problem. He says
here's the solution. She's like, no, I have this problem,
and he's like, yes, here's the solution. He gets frustrated
that she's not listening to him offer the solution because
to him, solution check the box. Let's move on, right,
But that's not where she gets her catharsis, and so
then she feels like he's not listening to her, and
then they have this argument because she's seeking support, he's
offering solutions. Okay, that's the premise of the book. And
then they tell all these different stories in the book
about that premise. Okay, and then if I remember, they
were like, here's how you navigate this stuff. Whatever. So
women talk with their friends about their issues, about their problems,
and men go and retreat to a cave and think
it through themselves. But then they're like, no, you've got
to be more emotionally available. You have to you've got
to talk about your problems. I want to know how
you're feeling aboutthing, what are you thinking about? Like all
of this right, And so then men start behaving in
this way. This becomes encouraged, and now now we are
causing problems by sharing. We are now accused of forcing
our loved ones to do emotional labor, that being man keeping,
at least according to The New York Times. Well, it's
actually according to Angelica Puzzio Ferrara, who coined the term
man keeping. All right, if you're listening to this show,
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also supports ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. Thank you. By the way, this came from
and I have seen this before from John Galt, who
is John Gult anyway, this is from a guy named
Jason Headley, and this is from several years ago, but
it is hilarious. And just picture as a guy and
a girl sitting on a couch talking to each other,
and here it is.
Speaker 2: It's just there's all this pressure, you know, and sometimes
it feels like it's right up on me and I
can just feel it, like literally feel it in my head,
and it's relentless, and I don't know if it's going
to stop. I mean, that's the thing that scares me
the most, is that I don't know if it's ever
going to stop. Yeah, well, you do have a nail
in your head.
Speaker 1: She has a nail about the nail? Are you sure?
Speaker 2: And because I mean, I'll bet if we got that
out of there, stop trying to fix it.
Speaker 1: No, I'm not trying to fix it. I'm just pointing
out that maybe the nail is causing you always do this.
Speaker 2: You always try to fix things when what I really
need is for you.
Speaker 1: To just listen. See, I don't think that is what
you need. I think what you need is to get
the nail now. Okay, fine, I will listen. Fine.
Speaker 2: It's just sometimes it's like there's this achy I don't
know what it is, and I'm not sleeping very well
at all, and all my sweaters are snagged, I mean
all of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that sounds really hard. It is.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: There you go. Are you looking for solutions or support? Right?
And just as a tip, if you use this in
a conversation if it's feeling like things are getting tense
when you're having a discussion about some problem or whatever,
just take a pause and say is this is this?
Do you need support or a solution? And don't say
it like you're mad about it. Just we need to know,
like what it is that you need, what is your
emotional need? But now I'm starting to wonder if this
is the wrong approach, Because it's not the wrong approach.
Keep doing that, but now that I'm aware of this
term mankeeping, So okay, so I got I gotta shut down.
Don't talk to my wife about the things about issues
anything like that, because now I'm placing a burden on
her emotional labor. So this is a new name called
man keeping. The term was coined by Angelica Puzzio Ferrara,
a doctoral fellow at Stanford University, and it has now
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.
That's like everything. So it's like basically being married. Like
I have said from the very beginning, Christy and I
when we first started dating, like, she is way more
extroverted than I am. I'm actually an introvert. People think
that's crazy, Pete, how could you be an introvert you're
on the radio. It's very simple. I usually just talk
to a wall. See, so I'm like facing a blank
screen on the studio desktop here. But look, I can
function out in you know, big gatherings of people. Sure,
it's just more draining for me than it is for her.
She's energized by that. I am drained. And that's the
difference between introverts and extroverts, and neither one is better
or worse. They're just different. Okay, they're just different. But now,
according to this research or sorry, postdoctoral fellow, the work
women do to meet the social and emotional needs of
the men in their lives. I thought that was just
part of being married, because like I do that for
Christy too. Is that woman keeping I gotta do?
Speaker 2: I go do?
Speaker 1: I get a name for that. Now, she does encourage
me to meet up with my friends. She does do that,
but that's that's part of the deal. Like I turned
over all of the social calendar planning basically to her.
Unless I need to do something, then I, you know,
let her know obviously. But like all of that social
butterfly stuff like, that's that's her wheelhouse. And so I
consider it comparative advantage to use an economic term, right,
that's her comparative advantage compared compared to me. She's much
better at keeping up with everybody. We still we'll send
birthday cards to like probably hundreds of people. Like every
day there's a card on my desk that I have
to sign and write some notes on. I didn't ask
her to do that. She just does that on her
own I'm not. I'm not man keeping her or woman
keeping her. I'm not making her do that. Doctor Ferrara says, quote.
What I have been seeing in my research is how
women have been asked or expected to take on more
work to be a central, if not the central, piece
of a man's social support system. Okay, I've never asked
Christy to do that, and again, I'm just gonna only
speak for myself. I have not asked her to do that.
Maybe she wants to do that, wants to be that,
But again, I always assume that the whole point of
becoming man and wife getting married was that you could
lean on each other, that you could be that support
system for somebody else. I thought that was kind of
part of the deal. In fact, I know it was
because I promised it in front of a minister and
a whole bunch of people at a church. Okay, so
I know that's part of what I agreed to. So
I don't understand now why this is now some burden
that I'm being accused of placing on the woman I love.
The concept has taken on a bit of life of
its own, with some articles going so far as to
claim that mankeeping has quote ruined dating and driven women
to celibacy. So once again, it's our fault, guys, It's
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memories that'll last a lifetime. Men keeping. If you'd like to, uh,
you want to send me a message on Twitter, It's
at Pete Calendar. That's where I got this from Russ.
It's a Pete tweet Russ's We have figured out a
bunch of hacks in our marriage, many the hard way.
The best was her letting me know at the beginning
of a conversation if it was a listening or a
fixing issue, and her being okay with me saying I
don't know what I'm thinking yet, I need more time
to figure it out. That's a very good piece of
advice too. I say, I tell Christy, I'm like, I
have to process this, and as a dude, I generally
process this stuff in my own head. I kick it around,
I think at different things. It's not to say I
go mute you know like I can talk, but like
I don't. But so sometimes though when I ask, you know,
various questions, and I test these different things in my
head as I'm processing something. Then if I'm saying this
stuff out loud to Christy, she then sometimes may think
that like I'm not, I'm not listening to her. I'm
taking somebody else's side on something. And it's not that
i'm doing that, it's just I'm simply running through the
different angles. Well, maybe they're looking at it from this perspective.
Would that make sense? And what would be you know,
some evidence that that would suggest that or would disprove that, right,
And so in walking these things through, that's that's how
I process stuff. So that's a good that's a good
second line as well, which is I'm still thinking. I
don't know what I'm thinking about it yet, So he
says I need more time to figure it out. Russ
then says, this man keeping nonsense ties in with that
Fraya or Freya India article. Indeed it does. From Friday,
I was actually going to do this story on Friday,
but then I blabbed too long and I never got
to it. But on Friday I talked about this article
by Freya India that talked about the therapization of everything
and how we are by you know, diagnosing every single
idiosyncrasy we have and trying to attach some explanation for
it based on genes or trauma or whatever. I mean,
genes G E, N E. S. Like, not the Sydney
Sweeney genes, but like the your genetics and stuff like, oh,
this is the this is the reason why I did
this thing or think this way or felt this way
or whatever, as if everything is a problem that you
can slap a diagnosis on and then get fixed instead
of just being a human that we're all just different.
We all have different idio idiosyncrasies and that's okay. It's okay.
We used to call it personality, right Anyway, back to
Russ's message, he says, I'm sure that the PhD who
coined the term has a very healthy quote unquote relationship.
They're slapping psychobabble labels on totally normal behavior and trying
to make it seem weird. At the same time, they're
trying to normalize really fringe and destructive behaviors. That is correct,
Melissa says, that's why I have no women friends. I'm
a problem solver, not a therapist. I don't know. Bob
wants to know about gay households. I don't know. I
don't know who carries the emotional burden there? Who does
the man keeping? Is it a mutual man keeping? I
don't know. Doctor Ferrara, who researches male friendship at Stanford's
Claimant Institute for Gender Research, along with Dylan Virgara, a
research assistant, published a paper on mankeeping in twenty twenty
four after investigating why some men struggle to form close bonds,
a growing and well documented issue. It's the apps, guys.
I don't know. I don't know why you need to
do all of the research. It's it's the social media,
like video games, social media. Yeah, because it's it's in
every demographic category. It's people are isolating themselves. They don't
they don't need, they don't need to be in contact
with as many human beings anymore. And there's a downside
to that. Just like Thomas Soule, right, the uh, the economist,
he says, there are no there are no solutions, there
are only trade offs. Right, trade offf you have all
the information that the world has ever known in the
palm of your hand at all times. Downside, you can't
pay attention to any of it because your attention span
has been so shrunk by the algorithms in that same device. Right,
So there you go, right, trade offs.
Speaker 2: In a.
Speaker 1: Twenty twenty one survey, fifteen percent of men said they
did not have any close friends. Fifteen percent. That is
up from an earlier poll asking the same question in
nineteen ninety. So what thirty one years ago the number
was three percent of men who said they did not
have any close friends three percent. Now it's fifteen percent.
The same report showed that thirty one years ago, nearly
half of young men said that they would reach out
to friends when facing a personal issue. That nearly half,
so under fifty percent. Two decades later, just over twenty
percent said the same. Once again, I will remind you
of the book. Men are from Mars and women are
from Venus. Right, I only reach out to somebody if
I actually need the help. Right, That's I think what
most men do. And if you do it too much,
then people start thinking, like you don't have your stuff together,
you know what I mean? Like this guy's always asking
me for help, Like just like attention seeking thing, and
it's always asking to borrow every single tool I have
no Actually I'm fine with the lending of the tools
unless they don't give them back. But that's why I
put in my old address labels. Stick those on there,
put them on the tools. Doctor Ferrara found that women
tended to have all of these nodes of support they
were going to for problems, whereas men were more likely
to be going to just their spouse or girlfriend. So
men and women are different, right, Men and women are different.
See again, it's as I said from the book, like
the highest honor you could give a guy is to
ask the guy for his advice on something, how to
fix something, because it's an admission that you haven't been
able to fix it yourself. And so what do we
have here? We have a premise, an unstated premise, that
the female model is the correct model for men. That's
the premise, right, because you're you're comparing, well, women go
to their girlfriends all the time for their emotional support
and men don't, and the right thing is for women
to do that, and therefore the right thing for men
is to also do that. Right, But what if it isn't?
What if men being different, very transphobic, I know. But
men being a little different, they process this stuff differently.
Maybe we don't require not all men hashtag not all men,
but like not all men, but most men probably may
not need this kind of emotional support from their dude friends.
I am a dude like I can speak with some
authority on this matter, as opposed to doctor Angelica Puzzio Ferrara,
who is not a dude as far as I know.
Ferrara says man keeping is an important extension of the
concept of kinkeeping. The work of keeping families together that
researchers have found tends to fall disproportionately on women. Why
would that be? May there be some reason why women?
Why females have some sort of a greater drive to
keep the family unit together. Could there be some reason?
Maybe it traces back I don't know, millions of years
or something. Is that possible. I'm just spitballing here. I'm
not a Stanford Fellow, so I don't know, but I
would submit there may be something a little bit instinctive
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us go to the text line and read some texts.
Right now. A couple of people asking about that video
that I played. Where was the nail in the head.
It was right in the middle of the woman's forehead.
She had a nail protruding like a good four inches
out of the right, out of the center of her forehead.
He said, that's so true and hilarious. Matt says, my
wife and I have used that video in premarital counseling
for years. It's funny and true. Now look up marriage algebra.
I've not heard of that. Rodney says. My vows were
to have and to hold, and do as you're told,
or I guess as I'm told. Okay, someone's complaining about
an and uh this is and that's for the morning show. Okay,
So caught up on the text line. So this is
the piece from the New York Times why man keeping
is turning women off? And then it tells the story
of Eve Tillie Coulson, thirty seven years old, who was
relieved to stumble upon the concept of man keeping on
social media. Finally I have a diagnosis. Right, Yeah. She
finds herself offering her live in boyfriend. By the way,
they are both lawyers. Okay, so I kid, I kid
the lawyers. She finds herself offering him a fair amount
of social and emotional scaffolding her role as the de
facto social director of the relationship includes more serious concerns too,
like when are we going to meet each other's parents?
When are we going to go on our first vacation together?
So like at like I don't know, sit down and
talk about it. How about that? How about you sit
down and say, hey, well let's let's book a vacation. Okay,
what we do? We want to do it? Look, this works.
Christy and I have done this exact thing. I know
other couples that do this too. They actually sit down
and they talk to each other about going on vacation someplace. Yeah,
but now she has a diagnosis. Now she has a
way to blame the dude. You're not doing enough. And
maybe he's not. I don't know. He didn't even want
to give his last name for the interview. He's just like,
I'm gonna go by Glenn. He agreed to speak to
The New York Times, but first name only. He said
when she first described man keeping to him, was that
it seemed consistent with what he had seen play out
in many heterosexual relationships, and he wondered, Okay, but is
that bad? Ms. Tillie Coulson, the woman that's the lawyer,
but also she is a content creator, and she made
a post about it on TikTok. There you go, the
therapization of everything. Right, this same sort of thing that
I went over in the in the first hour about
the Sydney Sweeney outrage kicked up by these leftists online. Right,
it's the same pattern. Some random on TikTok or Instagram
does some video. New York Times reporter comes across it,
does a story on this random TikTok video opens up
this whole world of mankeeping. And now you've amplified this thing.
Because I gotta tell you, not for nothing, but if
you tell guys that talking to their wives and girlfriends
about stuff in their lives, if you tell them that,
now you're placing a burden on them. You know what
dudes are gonna do. Take it from me, I'm a
due ude. Dude's not going to talk to them about
this stuff. They're't going to talk to them about anything.
So be careful what you wish for over here in
New York Times. After this decades long campaign of making men,
you know, emotionally available in all of this, and if
you need look, I've talked about this. I watch these
bachelorette shows or whatever, not religiously, but I watch them
with Christy. Christy likes watching the shows and it's one
of my It's like junk food. Okay, I like, I
got nothing going on tonight, I'll sit down and I'll
watch the episode with her. And they all speak in
this kind of language. Everything's a diagnosis. Everything is you know,
thank you for being vulnerable with me. All this kind
of therapy talk all the time, and they all end
up alone at the end of the shows. They're like
all alone, like I'm just so tired of being played
and all this Like yeah, because you created this entirely
fake vocabulary instead of just talking to people as if
they're real, you know. Now, granted they are on TV
and so they you know, and they've got you know,
content creation careers ahead of them, so they got to
make sure they got to, you know, not make any
big mistakes. Rather than viewing mankeeping as an Internet approved
bit of therapy speak used to dump on straight men,
experts say they see it as a term that can
help sound the alarm about the need for men to
invest emotionally in friendships. Okay, so guys have have friends.
How about that have some friends. I don't know what
kind of emotional scaffolding your your buddy is going to
provide you. But yeah, it's good. It's good to have friends.
There you go, small steps encourage a client to share
something new about himself with a friend he already has,
or invite a friend he normally sees in only one
context to do something new. It's a friendship building concept.
But some of the challenges men face and making strong
connections are scie til there you go. Many of the
institutions in spaces where men used to organically make friends
have eroded, like houses of worship, civic groups, and even
this simple workplace. What did I say, it's the apps.
People are not engaged civically. I have encouraged people to
get engaged in civic organizations, in anything, in your church,
your ho eight, whatever it is. Become involved for many reasons.
But there is actually a good reason for you to
do this is that you meet other people and then
you can get some emotional scaffolding and you cannot emotionally
burden your spouse. How about that? All right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
so if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you heard it here. You can also become a
patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone. M m
Speaker 2: Hm