How old are you OP?
Genuinely interested. I’m 54.
Despite being brought up with all the benefits of feminism, education etc etc and striving as hard as possible to make all the right decisions regarding career etc etc it has always been the societal default that I should take on and manage the well-being and nurturing of those in need around me because I am a woman.
Fine, everyday tasks equating to “adulthood” are to be expected and one can learn to be organised, but when life throws you curve ball after curve ball on top of those everyday tasks, those everyday tasks become far more daunting, and whether you want to acknowledge it or not, society still has an unspoken expectation that men’s work and well-being should be facilitated by the women around them, be they mothers or wives / partners.
It is an interesting paradox that women are marginalised in the world of work, financially and in terms of status and recognition as they are still deemed less competent or capable than men, yet they are considered superhuman in terms of child rearing, caring, organising their homes and doing all the little, apparently inconsequential tasks required to do just that.
There is a resentful undercurrent building and being driven in society at the moment, underpinned by the implication that our quest for equality is detrimental to men’s health and children’s well-being.
Between Andrew Tate at one end of the “red pill” spectrum and Jordan Peterson at the other, the status of women in general is becoming more and more precarious all the time.
You’re no doubt going to scoff and accuse me of hyperbole, but experience and observation over my 54 years has lead me to the conclusion that our equality has come at a high price. Instead of men being encouraged to think of, and treat us as equals, they have been very subtly encouraged to be resentful of the changes, and as we push forward, they push back, always testing, always using our perceived sex based vulnerabilities as leverage in a struggle as old as time, constructed by men aeons ago, when the fable of Adam and Eve was constructed.
Of course there are wonderful individual men out there, my late partner was one of them. But even he, under stress and if the right buttons were pressed would default to muscle flexing and the expectation that I should fill particular roles that he felt he shouldn’t have to.
On top of those everyday tasks that mount and mount, driven by our fast paced capitalist driven culture, women are supposed to be caring, diplomatic and organised at all times, and if she isn’t woe betide…. She is a nag, deranged, entitled, needy…..
You only have to look at those news stories when a man snaps and murders his wife, or his family, and his long-standing pattern of controlling behaviour is excused because the catalyst was a woman trying to escape an untenable situation, when her “mental load” pushed her to try and leave or disrupt his environment, with the implication that she was at fault for doing so.
So when you belittle the phrase, you deliberately overlook structural sex inequality, you overlook societal expectations of women to always manage her mental wellbeing and that of her children and wider family, and her man.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and we are now bombarded with knowledge of how to improve our lives at every turn. More “mental load”. You sneer at women overwhelmed by more and more considerations regarding how to guide their children through the constantly evolving modern world, fuelled by technology and social media and research which is often contradictory and later on sometimes regarded as harmful.
Providing the basics, love and stability is no longer enough, so the little things do become overwhelming due to the sheer volume of them.
It’s easy to offer advice when you’re not the boiling frog.
The end of our civilisation won’t be nuclear Armageddon, it will be collective nervous breakdown.
TLDR:
Get off your high horse and scroll on by if you’re irritated by a phrase that some people find valuable to describe their feelings.