DOD139: Is "Hermeneutic Labor" a Real Thing?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Tom: Welcome to Dear Old Dads, the podcast that, hey, what you thinking about? I'm Tom Curry. I'm joined as always by Thomas Smith and Eli Bosnick. Hello, gentlemen.

0:00:38 Eli: Hello! I'm thinking about Phoebe's back brace. Are we gonna get a brace update? Brace date!

0:00:40 Thomas: Are you thinking about oh yeah oh man yeah yeah Let's get a little update, not a not-show or anything by any means, but so yesterday we finally had the appointment to get a brace, which is not easy to get, I guess, fucking everybody has scoliosis now. I had it before it was cool, but you know, everybody has it now and uh, got it. Unfortunately. Okay.

0:01:04 Eli: Still not cool, don't worry.

0:01:06 Thomas: Good, the the only appointment we could get was right when we were fucking gonna record, so that was a whole thing, but anyway, um, went to her appointment and, huh, keep in mind this is a six-year-old, she's, she's in summer now, but she's going into, uh, grade, and she has been pretty good with this, I think, you know, it's, it's confusing to her, I think it's one of those things where, again, it's so hard because it's an invisible problem to her, like, I don't know that she can tell yet that she even has it because she's a kid.

Kids are so not aware. It's weird to try to model in your mind, what would that would be like to just not really be aware of a hundred percent of the world? You know, like they have such a weird focus. And so I don't think she's aware of of, this really, in a way I will say it's affecting her right shoulder enough that she might start getting like, it's unfortunately it's really curving it in. So I wonder that might be the first thing she like notices. I don't know, but maybe she won't. Maybe she'll never notice this because she's a kid and she might just be like, this is normal.

0:02:00 Tom: Right.

0:02:00 Thomas: And so this is an invisible problem that is, I'm very worried because it's a problem that to her would be hard to convince her even exists. And the thing she has to do for it is incredibly, you, you like fucking what the right thinks climate change is, you know, it's like, well, it's not real. And then bless you, wanted me to stop using my gas lawnmower her all day, so like that sucks, but you know, but like it is a real problem and you do have to do this thing, so I've been worried and we get there and she sees the brace and I, I could tell right away, like, maybe she wasn't expecting it to be, you, as substantial as it is. I mean, she, yeah, It's, I, I thought it was gonna be, you know, maybe a little more invisible than it was, but the problem is she, it's, it's pretty bad scoliosis, she has to have, you, it's not like, like a, oh, it's just a little tiny thing that she, no, like, no.

0:02:36 Eli: It's girthy, yeah.

0:02:48 Tom: Yeah, this isn't a minor correction, right?

0:02:50 Thomas: Yeah. It's, it'd, so it's, it's a little substantial. And so we first go in and she's, I could tell she was a little, like, you was affected by that. So we do the first try on and the guy, the guy is great. He's, he's, he's like exactly the kind of person you'd want for this, where it's like, this seems like it's all he ever does. And he's nice about it. And he knows, like, has him that sense of like he's done this a billion times, so here are all the tips and tricks with the stuff and the whatever and the, and so it's good. Like, we have not a Dick Seaman, we don't have a Dickseaman situation here. Um,

0:02:50 Tom: Yeah.

0:03:19 Eli: I like the idea that there's a new listener who's just like, he's not a what?

0:03:24 Thomas: Dick Seeman. Um, took away one of Eli's balls. Uh, Oh, I added, sorry, I added third ball.

0:03:28 Eli: And added, no, he added a third ball. Temporarily,

0:03:25 Tom: He did he added he had a Triple ball situation.

0:03:31 Eli: Yeah

0:03:31 Thomas: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And So, uh, he's got that, he seems really good, but she does the first try on and, they and make the brace obviously a little bit big. They don't want to, if they make it small, then it's worthless. So they make it a little big and then he, like, trims it a little bit to fit and, like, curves, you the edges know, a little bit to the office. So that's what took so fucking long. And so that first try on, I think, was a little uncomfortable.

And after he left, he's like, all right, I gotta go make adjustments for 15 minutes or so. And that was really hard. Cause after he left, she was, she don't know. It's hard to read a six -year -old, you know, but it's hard to read as in, it's harder to know how much she's really conscious of it. You much is she processing this?

And then she's just, she's kind of comes over to me and we're talking about it and she's like, do I have to wear it? And she starts crying, you knows, like, ah, damn it. Okay. So yeah, this is, it was hard and we were doing our best and we're trying to convince her like, Hey, yeah, I'm not going to do this, but like it ever gets really bad, I'm just going to have to show her pictures of people who have it so bad that they had to have surgery. It's like we want to avoid surgery. Had to tell her like, if you have to get surgery, they have to put a giant, there's no 21st century cool way they do that.

Apparently it's still, hey, we'll put a Giant metal rod in your back that will like support your curved spine. And I don't want to like scare her unnecessarily, but I know like if if she has a problem, I may have to resort to that. But for now, I'm I was just telling her like, yeah, it's, we have to do this. Cause if you, you don't, then it's. Have to have surgery. It's not going to be good.

You won't be able to do activities as much, you know, you won't all this stuff. And then fortunately she's like, I have to it when I was an adult and we're like, Oh no, you don't have to do it when you're an adult. And for some reason, maybe she was genuinely worried that she had to to do this for her whole life. Oh, that's right. She said, wait, dad, why don't you have to do it? And I was like, yeah, well, I didn't get it in

0:03:33 Tom: Yeah, oh. Right.

0:05:17 Thomas: Time.

0:05:17 Tom: Just Like, it's too late for me. Right. Yeah. And now, dad hurts all the time, you know? Yeah, hey.

0:05:18 Thomas: Yeah, it is too late for exactly. And mine, yeah. And Mine wasn't as early as and all that. And so, and we told her like, no, she's like, how long do I have to wear it? We're like, like 15 or something. It does suck. Like it bad luck, man. Like that does suck, but that did help her a lot. She's like, oh, okay.

0:05:36 Tom: When you're a kid, 10 years goes by in the blink of uh oh shit. Yeah, that fuck, that sucks. Sucks so much.

0:05:39 Thomas: Yeah. Hundreds of years. Yeah, yeah, I know. It was hard to even say it. I was like, yeah, it's going to be for you. It's your whole rest of your life. Like, that honestly feels, will feel like three lifetimes. Like, but anyway, I didn't say that. Was actually pleased at that news. I think she thought she would have to wear it forever maybe. And she's like oh, OK. And we told her, hey, Hey, you're if we do this right, you take it off at age 14, 15, whatever they say, and you never worried about it again. And your back will be much, much better than it would be. And it really could be an entirely positive, you know, yeah, that's, that's a lot to go through for a kid. It's a lot to go through, but it could be fucking amazing. And so that actually worked, for uh, the time being and, you went pretty well. All, I just want to say that, yeah, old timey freak show stuff.

0:05:43 Tom: Yeah.

0:06:27 Eli: Mm -mm.

0:06:21 Tom: You're just going to have like in the hallway of your house, just like framed pictures of like horrible, like problems and like surgery. Like, yeah, yeah. Right.

0:06:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:29 Eli: Quasimodo, yeah.

0:06:30 Tom: I like, as you're like walking her down the hallway to bed, you just like go down the hall of horrors.

0:06:34 Eli: Mm

0:06:34 Thomas: Unrelated conditions like this person has leprosy. Like, yeah. That's you don't wear the brace. You get leprousy. It's a risk.

0:06:35 Eli: -hmm. Mumps, yeah, mm

0:06:34 Tom: Yeah. And that's why you always leave a note.

0:06:43 Eli: -hmm, mm.

0:06:42 Thomas: Yeah, but I just wanna say like, I, would get tiresome and corny if I did this all the time, but day every I think to myself, I'm just so fucking lucky to have these these kids. And I'm so impressed by them all the time. Like they really do impress me. Not Remy. Uh, they, no, Phoebe and Arlo especially are really so impressive all the Time to Me Now.

0:06:58 Tom: Poor Remy.

0:07:02 Eli: Just Remy and Eamon getting together for their podcast.

0:07:04 Tom: Oh, I don't know why we're singling out Eamon. All of a sudden that's not what is happening.

0:07:07 Eli: Not so Dear Old Dads.

0:07:11 Thomas: No, Remy's been walking talking, now. That's cool. But, uh. I'll talk about that later. No, I'm just so impressed for my Pheebs. And and then we had to put the brace on when when she got home and that was a whole thing. Cause it was hurting her. I like, I thought we were good to go from the doctor's appointment. She's like, yeah, it's not so bad. We put it on her again. She is like, it is hurting. It and there is a red spot and it is like based fuck.

On where it was, it was like, well, I think that is not a problem with the brace. I think it is actually just the brace does have to push on you. Like it has to stop your bones from fucking curving. So it is going to, yeah. So, you we are getting through it, and I just want to say I am so proud of my Phoebe. She has truly, just marvel at at, you know, like, it's just amazing the way they and Yeah, it's like the stakes for them are 1500 times higher, and to see them overcome anything is, like, to me just amazing, you

0:07:33 Tom: Right.

0:07:46 Eli: They're so, so flexible. Mm,

0:07:55 Tom: Will offer you some context that you've offered on this show before, and that is that kids will normalize anything. And that is actually a comfort, right? I think that's a that is a coping mechanism that kids have that is unique to their developmental space that actually will be good for Phoebe going through this because she'll just normalize this. And yeah, no, I'm not trying to minimize that. I'm just trying to offer you like the same kind of like I remember you saying that. And it kind of stuck with me that like that's a really good way to phrase it. Like kids will normalize anything. We a lot of times think about that in a negative context. Like they'll normalize, you we only eat lunch on Wednesdays. You know, that's just how it is. We're hungry all the time.

0:08:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:01 Eli: Mm?

0:08:12 Thomas: But That transition period, that's, you know, Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. We only eat

0:08:32 Tom: Like they don't normalize everything.

0:08:32 Thomas: At McDonald's that's the only restaurant we get to ever eat at

0:08:34 Eli: Mm -hm, mm -hm.

0:08:33 Tom: Yeah, right. So they can normalize some really horrible shit, but they can also normalize things that are difficult but good for them. And And I think that that's something that you can maybe take some solace and comfort in here.

0:08:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:45 Eli: Yeah. I, when we used to do Make-A-Wish at FAO Schwartz, one of the things that they told us in the, like, little mini training that we got was, like, are kids having a normal kids experience?

0:08:45 Thomas: I'm Jesus.

0:08:55 Eli: It's your job not to try to make this about your illness. I know you're in your head, you're like, why would I do that? But then of course you see a kid who's sick and you're just like, you are sick, sick child child is not supposed to be sick. Wrong.

0:09:06 Thomas: This is a tragedy Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I

0:09:10 Eli: Bad. Bad, wrong. And they're like So can I see a magic trick? And you're like, you can cry, cry, do you want to have a cry?

0:09:10 Thomas: Wouldn't be able to do that Sure. Sure. Kid Yeah. You

0:09:17 Eli: And they're like, uh, you've made, you've made this about you.

0:09:19 Thomas: Want to see your last last magic

0:09:19 Tom: God.

0:09:20 Eli: Truly Because that's the shit you're constantly like, this is the last time this kid will see a magic tree.

0:09:20 Thomas: Trick, final magic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Um,

0:09:28 Eli: I can't. And then you mess it up because you suck and you're like, oh god, of me.

0:09:32 Tom: Your last memory is of a shitty magician at a toy store.

0:09:35 Eli: Oh,

0:09:36 Thomas: Yeah. No one's last memory should be me. I, I'll just be like, sorry, I'm out. I can't, sick day.

0:09:36 Eli: Yeah. I would bring another person into hospice at all times in, like, a headlock, just in case. Yeah, No, that's important. Well,

0:09:45 Thomas: Yeah. So End the story, I had a hard time. She got through, she's supposed to do an hour total on the first day, two hours, second day, three hours, you know, until day five, apparently then she sleeps in it that night. And then it's 18 to 20 hours a day forever after that, for the rest of her fucking life. And so that's the process we've been given. And, you I just told Lydia, I Was like, Hey, if she feels fine, like, you know, let her push it a little. Like if it were me, I'd be trying to push the world record of how long I could wear it. But that's just me. But, I was like, Hey, if she's watching a show and it's not noticing, like you don't need to like, you at an hour on the dot, like maybe she'll get a little bonus time, get used to it faster.

0:10:19 Tom: Right.

0:10:20 Thomas: And, that didn't happen. She was very uncomfortable. And so we got to that hour and it was like yeah, absolutely take it off. Then Like, the, what was so impressive though, was after all that kind of bad bad experience. She was having a hard time with it. I to put her to bed and we're like, all right, saying, you know, she's like, wait, don't I need to wear my brace? I was like, oh no, you don't have to wear it at night yet until she's Like, I, I do. I'd need to where it at night. And she was all, she was ready to go. She had it. She's like I need a word at night. I thought, and we were like, no, not until Friday basically. And so it was so impressive to me. Like this thing that was obviously not fun. It was like miserable for her. Is she pretty painful for her and she was ready to go to sleep with it.

She was like, yeah, I'm ready to put it on. And so I'm just so impressed. And I really, I just, I really hope it slows the curvature because it's, it's pretty bad in it. You know, it'S if, if it all goes well, you know, I'll update you guys fucking in 18, 10 years and

0:10:38 Tom: Well, there, you go. Yeah.

0:11:10 Tom: 10

0:11:10 Thomas: We'll see.

0:11:10 Tom: Years We'll a we'll have a Phoebe takes her brace off party, you know, a brace burning party.

0:11:12 Thomas: Yep. Yep. Oh man.

0:11:14 Eli: We could Do it at the same time as Remy's intervention, right? And then it'll sort of in the same Yeah.

0:11:17 Thomas: Yeah. His, his second one. Yeah, sure.

0:11:20 Eli: No, because that's the one that everybody comes to. Now

0:11:15 Tom: Yeah. If He'll

0:11:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, the first one we don't really.

0:11:23 Tom: Stop crying long enough for us to have it.

0:11:25 Eli: That's just a friends and family one because nobody really means it, you know what I'm saying? Especially when it's Remy. I mean, Tom gets it because of Amen. Anyways, you know the only thing worse than how Tom feels about Amen. Why why it's the auto ads, unlike

0:11:31 Tom: Okay. I don't know where that comes from I love Amen very much. God damn it

0:11:36 Thomas: The only thing worse. Poor Remy's going to be the Hunter Biden of the family.

0:11:44 Eli: Phoebe, and unlike Finn, who Tom is happy to see all the time, Amen, like, the auto adds is just kind of there and there was not enough money in the world for Tom to get rid of Amen. He tried, he tried in the divorce settlement.

0:11:52 Tom: Oh, God damnit. That's not true. That is Amen. This is not true. This man does not represent me.

0:12:00 Eli: His official statement on divorce forest papers. Was you can keep that one but you can put an end to that at patreon.com/dearolddads, where for as little as a dollar you'll get access to a commercial-free extended version of every single show, as well as bonus episodes like AMAs, a movie review, more AMAs, and sometimes just us talking about a thing that ends up being a bonus episode. Check it out over at patreon.com/dearolddads. Rip into it. I

0:12:02 Tom: This is not I'll let you read them.

0:12:05 Thomas: That one.

0:12:29 Thomas: My favorite ones. Took you a second to remember the stupid catchphrase. I was, you might have forgotten it.

0:12:38 Tom: It did. There was a pause. There

0:12:40 Eli: Was actually pausing to give Thomas the chance to fill it, to embrace our new catchphrase. Rip into it. And

0:12:44 Thomas: Sure.

0:12:46 Tom: Yeah, was it Rip him to it. Alright, alright, so I found this article in Washington Post, and I hate it, and I hate it so much, and I want to talk to you guys about how much I hate him because there needs to be a public forum where I can hate on this article some more. So this is the from relationship side of Washington Post. It's called "Trying to Decipher a Man's Mind." Now there's a name for this.

And it starts off with talk of women sitting around and sort of dissecting the language and the text messages that they get from boyfriends and love interests and other people that they're dating or otherwise in romantic relationships with. These are cishet relationships, it seems like, from the article. And that is drawn is that this attempt to understand what people are saying when communicating with them is a new and newly coined term called hermeneutic labor.

And I want to read what it says here, and then we'll kind of launch into why I think it's fucking nonsense. Hermeneutic labor, Anderson says, encompasses three phases of emotional work: interpreting the feelings of others, determining when and whether to bring difficult emotional conversations up, and interpreting your own feelings. Anderson argues that hermeneutical labor is largely performed by women who are forced to interpret the emotions and motives of male partners who lack the emotional vocabulary to explain themselves. So I read this article and the article has obviously a lot more depth and detail of it, but that's that's kind of the concept itself. And I

0:12:56 Eli: Your response is, leave, leave me alone. I really do nothing. My mom

0:14:18 Tom: I fucking hate this. I hate this with a fiery passion. I think it's absolute nonsense. And I think that I'm generally fairly sympathetic to idea of emotional labor as being real and genuine and worth exploring and recognizing as true. Um, feels like creating a name for something and then just outlining a bunch of steps and details for perfectly normal behavior. And then being like, well, that's hard. If that's we write down all the steps in a almost pathologically insanely detailed way, we can make go to the grocery store, really a 21-step process of arduous, you decisions and it's go to the grocery store. This is talking to people.

0:15:06 Tom: This is like human communication. Just writing down all the details does not impress me here.

0:15:05 Eli: Yeah. What What struck me as odd about this article is that it feels like it took a human difficulty and put it through that, like, sitcom lens, right? That You often see things put through where

0:15:23 Tom: Yes. It's

0:15:26 Thomas: Or like infomercial, black and white infomerical

0:15:28 Eli: Yeah. There's got to be a better way, right? And, like, I feel like it would have been really easy to do this in reverse, right? To talk about the trouble men have in understanding women because she never says what she means. She says she wanted to go to brunch with her mother -in -law, right?

0:15:28 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:41 Tom: So Tropey. Yes. Yes.

0:15:43 Thomas: Interesting.

0:15:43 Eli: The whole thing felt very hacky to me in terms of like actually talking about it. And it also felt like a way to, rather than deal with innate toxicity, to like tumblerize and heighten language in a way that made conversation useless useless, and diagnosis imperative, right? Which is a little bit of what we talked about last week, right? Because I want to be too harsh on the people who are doing this because I know that they are talking about this in an academic context, and I know that that has its use. But practically, when I was reading this article, I was thinking about how people are calling this hermeneutic labor as opposed to, I don't know what his text messages means, because hermaneutic labor sounds like a highfalutin thing you can explain to your friends was a reason for a breakup rather than, I don't know, he never fucking told me how he was feeling, you

0:16:03 Tom: Thank you. Yes.

0:16:39 Thomas: Interesting. So, I don't know how much I might disagree. I think I might disagree a little, but I'm not sure I want want to to. I put it in terms maybe for Tom because there There are things we talked about here where it's like, there you are, differences, whether they're socialized, which probably they're mostly socialized, or not, differences between, on average, men and women that we talk about on this show.

0:16:48 Eli: Hate your mom, dude. Wow.

0:17:01 Eli: Bigot.

0:17:02 Thomas: And one of the, like, if you talk about, okay, are women safe at night in a park or something, Tom will hand out three free guns to all your female children because he feels so strongly.

0:17:13 Eli: It's just a fact of life. Just

0:17:14 Thomas: Yeah. Like, and, and so, so

0:17:15 Eli: A factor life. Thank

0:17:16 Tom: It's Not free, I'll subsidize them though, like I, I'm not, you know I've got a 501c3 for it.

0:17:18 Thomas: Here's

0:17:18 Eli: You tax exempt guns. Come on down To Tom Curry's tax-exempt gun. That's an auto ad, everybody. That actually wasn't me doing a bit on our show. You got Tom bought an auto ad for Tom Curry's, uh, tax-exempt guns .com Check it out because

0:17:30 Thomas: Tom bought an auto ed finally. So, two ways of coming at this Tom and, and seeing if maybe this at all, has uh, you reconsider or not? I'm not sure, um, one, I feel like the three of us are pretty firmly on the "hey, men, go fucking get therapy, like go to therapy, don't you think it at least" and that doesn't mean obviously only men need therapy, but I think in general I, I feel like our feeling has been on the show that, yeah, for reasons, uh, mostly social, maybe, maybe there could be other reasons, but for whatever reason, men don't ask for help as much, and etc., etc., and the men of our, I know, country at, at the very least.

More of them need to be in therapy than are. And that's step one. Step two, I think, recognizes that, you more vulnerable, you in ways that men aren't. And I want to put those two things together and say, doesn't it make sense that potentially there would be this problem where where if I can't interpret, I, I'll use Lydia and I as an example, even though this is not at all, anything

0:18:37 Eli: You do beat the shit out of her. This is a good example oh

0:18:38 Thomas: At all. Yeah. If I can, if I care, interpret Lydia's mind correctly.

0:18:39 Tom: Jesus Christ

0:18:43 Eli: She beats the shit out of you. That, you know what, that's a better comedy point, can I put that out there? Good job. Good punch up, Lydia.

0:18:48 Thomas: There's not many, not much physical stakes to that. Obviously I, I have every interest in, in but also if I'm a shitty dude, just, just beat him.

0:18:54 Eli: You pause editing this episode right now and just put Thomas in a headlock be like, how are these physical headlines, how are these physical mistakes, just powerbomb him into his desk.

0:18:58 Thomas: Yeah. But also for the average dude there, don't even know how much the average dude gives a shit and frets about not interpreting their, we're talking about a cishet relationship, their, you female partners' feelings properly. Like I don't, I don't know how you, how much they fret about that, whereas often women, if they are in a not great fucking relationship or situation or household, a lot rides on how well they they interpret the, like, figure in their lives, feelings and thoughts and emotions in ways that over time maybe would have led to kind of a, of bit of an imbalance in that situation. And so kind of putting all that together, I don't know, Tom, does it, does there be something there? What do you think?

0:19:05 Tom: I I agree that there is an imbalance, right, in terms of the stakes. I agree that the stakes are different, right, just indisputably true. Where I think this article falls apart for me is one, this feels like, I'll use my grocery store example again, this feels perfectly ordinary work of interpersonal communication in a way that is, to Eli's point, intended to be diagnostic rather than useful. And I think when we do that, we don't accomplish anything good or anything terribly valuable. So if I say, "I've got to go to the grocery store," that's OK. We'll go to the nursery store. But if I decide, well, OK, what I really have to do is I have to get up and I have put on clothes and then I have have to make a list. And then I have to drive to the store and then I have to select these items. And then I have to, you know, budget

0:20:26 Thomas: Can't tell me about it. Jesus. Unintentionally, yes. Unironically, Tom. That's really fucking hard for me. God damn.

0:20:36 Tom: I have to budget in my mind, what I am spending.

0:20:37 Thomas: Oh, fuck.

0:20:37 Tom: And then I've got to check it out and I've got to take it home and I got to unbag it and I gotta put it away.

0:20:38 Thomas: Fuck, I can't do this. I'm so stressed. I

0:20:42 Tom: You Like we've taken a perfectly ordinary part of life and we've dissected it into a point, but we've dissected it into a place where it's just like kind of meaningless. And then we're making things out to be bigger and harder than we need to. This description, this three point description includes interpreting your own feelings.

0:20:42 Thomas: Gotta go, guys. That Thomas has a really hard time with. Yeah, I get it.

0:20:49 Eli: Okay,

0:21:07 Tom: Interpreting our own feelings is just part of being alive.

0:21:06 Thomas: On. Okay. At first, I had that same reaction. I at first, I had the same reaction and then I thought about like, and again, I don't know how representative this is. So don't quote me on like, this is absolutely representative of all men, all women or anything by any means. But I know those couples. I know the couples where the dude just not introspective at all, needs therapy, doesn't understand why he gets depressed, when He gets mad, when it gets upset, when He gets sad, He doesn't fucking understand it at all. And then like the, the partner is like trying to like anticipate it, figure it out, get them to go to therapy, which won't happen and do stuff like that. So like, at first I had the same reaction where I was like, all right, come on, that's just life. And then I was Like, I actually do know that stereotypical couple, or at least, uh, again, I don't know how representative that is. Maybe that's just unique, but I do at least know that situation in real life in at least a few instances.

0:21:51 Eli: So issue that I have with gendering this is that men are worse at everything, right? Men are toxic at everything. So by gendering this, I think it becomes a man -woman problem unnecessarily, right.

This is what, what I wanted to point out during Tom's grocery example, right, is that, like, I am sure, I am certain to my very bones, that men are worse at using the grocery store than women are, right? Probably take longer trips, we probably spend too much money, right? We are probably ruder to staff, right? There are a million metrics by which we could judge it, and just based on how women treat people as they move the the world and how men treat people as they move through of the world, I would be willing to bet that men are worse at using grocery stores. But right?

If we, using the grocery store, if we start calling that hunter -gatherer behaviors and how they affect gender dynamics, then we've used this heightened false language to talk about a new facet in a way that's not useful to the people we're trying to help, right? Because the men who are dealing with that toxicity... today, and, like, I think this is actually a really good example, because at least two people on this podcast have their emotions in a tiny little box, and they're not going to read the journals, and they nothing their mom, right? And that's interesting.

0:22:50 Tom: Yes. Yes.

0:23:16 Eli: Right read The channels read the journals.

0:23:16 Thomas: That's so not an accurate representation of, okay, me me, not reading the journals is a very healthy thing. You needing me to read, me Not Reading the Journals is me not going, announcing I'm on a social media break on fucking Facebook. You dramatically need to soak this up. You need me to need to read the journals and I don't need to reading the journals because because I'm, I'm more healthy in that way. I'm up messed in plenty of ways. Me not needing to read the fucking journals, I think is fine. I'll be honest.

0:23:31 Eli: Tim Please start a poem. Why

0:23:47 Tom: And I'm reveling in the idea of Eli Bosnick questioning my mental health and emotional sanity.

0:23:53 Eli: Here's the thing, it's all in the... let me just say if we If we open all the boxes, Tom, if we open all the boxers, my siren is loud, but your siren's not on.

0:23:55 Thomas: Okay. I back Eli on this one.

0:23:57 Tom: Like, really?

0:24:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:05 Eli: You know what I'm saying, bud?

0:24:06 Thomas: Yeah. If Tom shocks his own balls, every time he has an emotion, he doesn't have emotions. It's fine guys.

0:24:12 Eli: Doesn't have emotions. He nothings his mom.

0:24:15 Tom: I doing great.

0:24:16 Thomas: Spend most of my day crying. Might, I're I not unemotional as well as all my My point is, I just don't need to read the journals. That's all.

0:24:22 Eli: I also think you should read the journals. Here's the thing. By this into hermeneutic labor also, we turn it into a contest rather than about helping our partners and ourselves. So, to use a reverse example, and use a stereotypical gender difference, if instead of opening pickle jars, talking about fucking stereotypes from sitcoms, if instead of opening pickle jars, we called it kitchen maintenance labor, and talked about how men are actually in charge of 97% of kitchen maintenance labor. Now then all of a sudden now we have made it a contest a between men and women and it's a contest that men are winning, or or in the case of this article, it's it's a contest that uh are losing unfairly

0:25:01 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, sorry. This is a competition. I can find some jars, dude. Watch. Watch how fast I open these jars. I know it's so hard.

0:25:12 Eli: I'll turn off right now I'll I'll draw off so hard

0:25:15 Thomas: Ah, God, my hand. Ah, fuck. Do I'm it. It's fine. It's blood.

0:25:17 Eli: Anything not to read those journals. I can't read the journals. I'm opening all the charts in the the house, I'm opening all the jars the way I could never open his love can

0:25:27 Thomas: I genuinely forget the journals exist every time until you bring it up. I genuinely every time. I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess. And I'm, like, Oh, I could ask my mom. And then I forget after we record every time, and it doesn't matter at all.

0:25:39 Eli: Set a date so that you can be late for the journals, and then you'll be, oh my god, fuck, I read all the journal. Oh, they were due at 8 a.m., so I read them all on the way over here. Turns out he was gay the whole time. Uh, so that was really, he was trapped in a sort of hell.

0:25:44 Thomas: Uh. I wish.

0:25:53 Eli: He fell in love with a young man, and he killed himself, actually, when my father turned him down and married my mother. So yeah, yeah, no, I read them all, and fuck that guy. Like, here's the thing. I and think this is a problem in general that doesn't get talked about, because I think good people aren't willing to talk about this sort of over-diagnosis, this contradiction problem, because it feels like denying the problem, right? Like saying, well, men aren't worse at grocery stores than women, or men aren't worse than emotional labor than women. And we are. There's no question we we are. This show wouldn't exist if we weren't worse at all those things than women, right? By making it a contradiction, right, by making a point to score in the men versus women fucking competition that sitcoms raised us on, we lose the ability to help our partners and gain the ability to blame our partners in couples therapy, right?

0:26:00 Tom: Absolutely.

0:26:45 Thomas: Interesting.

0:26:45 Tom: Feel like what this also does, and I'm going to go back to the three, the pieces of it, because I think they're insane. Like, I think that it sort of subtly pathologizes, um, because like, obviously if you're doing this work. That's a good thing. If you're not doing this work, it's a deficiency. Deficiencies are often like subtly, like psychologically, like I'm talking about pop site, like pathologized in the sort of public vocabulary space. Right. Like we're pathologizing shit, like interpreting your own feelings and interpreting the feelings of others. That'S literally just communicating with other people.

Like we really cannot be in a place where we are saying, well, there's really three uh elements to this idea of hermeneutic labor, and one of them is understanding your own feelings. Like, no, that's just being a person in the world. You are required to do a certain amount of work, and and it also gets us away from offering to people, and specifically to women in this case, right, real advice. This is not advice. There's no advice here. There's nothing actionable. Because like what I would suggest is, if you're with somebody who's inscrutable, don't be with somebody who's inscrutable. Right? Not engage with inscrutable people who

0:26:46 Thomas: Okay.

0:27:17 Eli: Right.

0:27:29 Eli: And

0:27:55 Tom: Force you to do this kind of work.

0:27:55 Thomas: There's already so few men available that

0:27:58 Tom: Then be single.

0:27:58 Thomas: Are worth a damn. Okay, yeah.

0:28:00 Tom: Actually serious. Then actually being serious. I think that, like, we have there's there's a twofold problem. Which, right, is is like, oh, well, if I have to put up with this in order to be with somebody, then I have to put up with this to be with somebody, and this is the price I have to pay to be a man or whatever. Well, just be fucking single. We should just not lower our standards for how we want to be treated and what leads to happiness for ourselves in order to pair up with people.

0:28:00 Eli: Six foot in finance, scrutable. Well,

0:28:05 Thomas: I think there could be another bad bad component too is that there's actually some women who want that. They see it all the time where there's women who are like, I one One, I don't ever want to see a man cry. That's a huge turnoff. For two, I mysterious don't know what. It's like, yeah, okay, that comes with all this, though. I hope you're ready for some hermeneutic labor.

0:28:50 Tom: The article addresses that this is actually... The article specifically addresses that idea, Thomas, that men, let me are... read this many men think of their role in a relationship as the provider, the father, and sometimes the protector, and that's because they have been groomed to believe that that is the role, not because they have chosen it. So actually specifically addresses that the problem is, like, if we have a system and a society that rewards that behavior, right, by rewards it with mate selection and other things. If it rewards that behaviour, then you can't pathologize it at at the same time.

0:28:56 Thomas: Oh, read this one. How did I miss that?

0:29:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:29:23 Tom: It's not functional. I'm not saying that we shouldn't academically study it and recognize the truth of it, but what I'm saying is that it's non-functional. And this moving things out of the academic and into the public sphere where they cease to be functional is really a problem. It offer any value to the person in the world.

0:29:43 Thomas: Maybe I wasn't understanding the objection. So is it more like it's not that, like, this as a thing doesn't exist, it's that you don't need to bundle these concepts together under a new term and, like, buzzword?

0:29:55 Eli: Just that this this is the least helpful way to address it, right? It's it's not helpful with your partner, because you've made it a way to score points on them being bad in the badness scale. Now, where I would disagree with Tom is I would say, maybe this isn't a place where you draw lines. Maybe this is a place where your reach out to help your partner. So I'll use a random example. Let's say there's a guy who had a horribly abusive mom all growing up, and he thinks he nothings that mom and he needs to unpack that with a medical professional.

0:30:04 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, veins pop out of his forehead, Winnie nothing's his mom for

0:30:23 Eli: I wouldn't just let him zap himself in the balls every day when he wakes up, and that's his way of dealing with it, right? I would maybe say like, Tom, you need to get some help with a therapist on a regular basis.

0:30:35 Thomas: Example just generic name, Tom,

0:30:36 Eli: I'll use a random name, Tom, right? Thomas, read the journals, right, I'm just using random names, right. But like, I think the with articles like this, is right they give us like really catchy, snappy ways when talking to our friends to blame other people, right to put other people into like you were were saying, Tom, pathologized boxes, right? There's a lot of problems with pathologizing people as a non -professional, but one of the other problems is that when something becomes a pathology, you don't help that person anymore, right, like something that I hear a lot, and I'm not alone in this, is like a lot people are describing each other as narcissists these

0:30:37 Thomas: Like Yeah,

0:30:38 Tom: Oh,

0:31:14 Eli: Days, all and it's just like every other moment you hear someone like describing their ex as a narcissist, and don't be wrong, there are people out there who have narcissists in their lives and they fucking suck. And I have nothing but empathy for those people. But like you and your best friend decided not to split the check at brunch. Doesn't mean you should be calling each other narcissists all of a sudden. And what that actually does is it removes empathy from the equation and it removes conversation from the equation.

0:31:14 Tom: My God. Yeah.

0:31:38 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:39 Eli: Well, I can't reach Tom because he doesn't want to engage in the hermeneutic labor of reading the journals, right? Opposed to Thomas, you have to read the journals. We have to find out that your dad was secretly gay, like, how does that make you feel?

0:31:39 Thomas: You're

0:31:53 Eli: And Thomas is like for

0:31:53 Thomas: Like if I had a buddy who's like, so, so quiet, thirsting for drama, is like, you need to read the journals of your dead dad that you forget existed for summer. For me, for me, that's what that person's saying I'd be like, hey, why don't you talk to a therapist about why you need Oh, okay. Well, if you put it that way, I didn't realize all

0:32:03 Eli: Me and my podcast hey, we're putting him behind the Patron wall. And My therapist have a lot going on right now, Thomas. We can't possibly we is bailing that boat out as fast as he can. Don't put another thing on that man's way. Oh, is he not leaving up to his hermeneutic labor his psychonomic labor for you

0:32:11 Thomas: Right. It's

0:32:11 Tom: Well, I – bring this well,

0:32:22 Thomas: It's sort of like how you can't go cold turkey on, like, alcoholism. He's like, no, actually, that one's fine. Yeah, he should read the journal. Yeah, a little bit of heroin, whatever. Yeah, Thomas, can you just read the journals? Make my job a lot easier here.

0:32:24 Eli: No you gotta go yeah it's like read the journals. Honestly, honestly says something will make him happy. I just want to see it once. I just wanna fucking, I'd love one session where he says it was a good day. So read those fucking journals, right?

0:32:41 Thomas: And would

0:32:48 Tom: It back to the original like framing or the original context of the article because I hear your point. But like that point is sort of like when you're already in a relationship with somebody. But what like I'm saying, like don't enter into relationships with inscrutable people. The framing of this original thing is these women are gathered around and they're reading these text messages of people that they are in the process of dating, and they are like doing all of this hermeneutic labor of trying to interpret and understand this text message. And like, if somebody is being that difficult to understand, the advice should not be like, well, gosh, are you really doing too much of the hermeneutic? It should be like, don't put up with that shit. Like, just don't put up with uncommunicative people. Like it. That's the answer. You move on to the next person. That should have a low tolerance for being forced to put up with people who have, you guys ever dated somebody who was fucking like inscrutable like this? Because I have. It's the fucking and worst. It, it is genuinely unpleasant. Yeah.

0:33:43 Thomas: Someone telling you, hey, just don't do it, would that help? I

0:33:47 Tom: Well, no, it- You know what, it might have. If somebody had said, hey, it's a big red flag when people are, you know, if we talked about this in terms that we're not psychobabble bullshit like this hermeneutic labor, and then we talked about it in terms of like, hey, it is actually a big red flag if somebody is, you emotionally unscrutable, then you'd be like, oh, that's actually like something I need to learn either through through experience or through advice. We don't do that. That's what I'm saying by like, we by move away from like the usefulness of this when we sort of like create this, I don't know, this sort of pseudo-academic language around it.

0:34:22 Eli: Yeah.

0:34:22 Tom: And we talk about it as if like, oh, we're all supposed to do a certain amount of this. I'm sorry. Interpreting your own feelings or the feelings of other people, that's just talking to people.

0:34:32 Eli: I You, what you're speaking to is also something I think that's really important, which is that often when we pathologize things, we don't allow people to put boundaries up around them, which is pretty important, right? I see a lot of talking about shitty men. I see a lot of shitty men do this, right? Which is like, shitty men have pathologized and diagnosed their bad behavior, and therefore like when they do it, it's like a slip as opposed to like a shitty thing that they did. And so that's part of what I worry about this, and right, again, like, want I to completely acknowledge that it's mostly men that are the problem in this, but like if who is dealing with a man who doesn't communicate in the way that she needs to reads this article, it becomes about encouraging hermeneutic labor rather than her allowing herself to set the boundaries of someone who needs to communicate.

0:35:16 Tom: Yes. Yeah. I Could not agree with that more. I think that that's is I exactly think right. And I think, you know, anecdotally and I agree that this is probably a more male problem. But I also don't like but like I I don' like the framing of this as being almost exclusively male. I will say maybe this is just personal bias from experience. I'll acknowledge that I could be just dead wrong. But I have met just as many emotionally and like intellectually inscrutable women in my life as I have men.

0:35:30 Eli: Like all problems

0:35:49 Tom: I many like emotionally stunted and unavailable women as I have men, literally as many it's one -to -one.

0:35:49 Eli: Yeah, Whatever the numbers are, the problem isn't fixed by gendering it. Right, there are problems that are fixed by gendering, right? Where they, where the offense is so disproportionate that, um, about it the other way is a distraction, right? Like fucking, let's say sexual harassment, right, as an example, right? The the amount of people doing sexually harassment is so overwhelmingly male that when someone says, well, what about women who sexually harass men, it doesn't mean that that's not a legitimate problem in the small cases that it happens. It doesn't mean that it's not real concern and that people should have empathy for the men who are sexually harassed by women. It means that the overwhelming problem is men doing this, so let's talk to men about the problem, right?

0:36:01 Tom: Right. Absolutely. Yes.

0:36:14 Tom: Great. Yep.

0:36:15 Thomas: Yeah. Fair. Yeah.

0:36:37 Tom: Yes, I

0:36:37 Thomas: Yeah. Faire. Um.

0:36:38 Eli: In this situation, right, where it comes to being emotionally unavailable, I do not think the problem is so heavily weighed towards men that needs to be be gendered by nature. I also think it, um, to acknowledge the fact that a lot of women who aren't emotionally available do so because of the abuse they have undergone at the hands of men, right? The few women in my life that have been emotionally unavailable have often been that way because they were treated so badly by the men in their lives. If they read this article, all of of the sudden now it's a fancy word thing they do badly as

0:36:45 Tom: Don't either.

0:37:18 Tom: Right.

0:37:18 Eli: Opposed to a problem for them to move forward from, right? And again, I don't want to dismiss everything that gets language, and I understand that these people are academics and keeping it in the academic sphere is important, but I also think that, like, as the media presents us this stuff, we should be aware that in the era of the social internet where everyone talks like a Tumblr post that jumped up its own ass, like, it's It's really important to understand, like, you give the public academic talking points like this, it will not always be used to, like, further educate and open our minds.

0:37:18 Thomas: I could quibble, but we could also just call it, I don't know what

0:37:54 Eli: The end of the episode. Fuck it. All right, gentlemen, before we go, my wife bought me an invisibility cloak this week, but I just can't see myself wearing it.

0:37:55 Thomas: I feel Like, you did that. Didn't you do that one, man?

0:38:14 Eli: I did not.

0:38:16 Tom: Don't, I don't remember that one. I like it though.

0:38:17 Eli: I didn't do that.

0:38:17 Thomas: I remember something like that. All right. Listeners, chime in. Did he do that one?

0:38:21 Eli: Did I do that one already and if if I didn't thomas has to read the journals uh

0:38:32 Clip: Want to meet sexy DILFs in your area? Email the dads at DearOldDads.com or, better yet, send us a message on Patreon. You can follow us on all social media by checking the links in the show notes. And if you need more podcasts in your life, you can find Tom on Cognitive Dissonance, Thomas on Serious Inquiries Only, and Eli on Godawful Movies and all the Puzzle in the Thunderstorm shows. Dear Old Dads is edited and produced by my favorite DILF, Tom Smith, who also wrote and recorded the intro music, which is used with his permission. This podcast is a production of Daddy Issues LLC. Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.

0:39:15 Eli: Opening all the jars the

0:39:17 Tom: Rip him to it alright