#80 DOLLARS.................................................................

[nerdvanauniverse]

Most of my life I've felt guilty about needing medical care as a child.

When I was 4, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I needed 2 brain surgeries (which cost $500,000 each without insurance) plus chemo made from platinum (carboplatin). All of this happened between the ages of 4 and 7.

My mom would joke about how I had a million dollar brain. But I really internalized that as I got older and my parents shared more about what they went through.

When I was diagnosed, my mom was a stay at home mom. We were a single income household on an entry-level government salary. Insurance paid 80% of each surgery. Which means my folks would have had to pay $200,000 unless my mom had found workarounds.

One of the tips she got to lower the cost was to ask for an itemized bill. She nearly passed out when she saw the bill for the bone saw that sawed my toddler skull open. But she had to ask for it anyway.

When I was 6 and on chemo, my dad's work switched insurance providers and I was at risk for being kicked off because having a brain tumor was a pre-existing condition. The only reason I was able to stay on insurance as a kindergartener was because my mom made entire spreadsheets and faught with the company daily while on the road to the hospital.

I felt guilty for over a decade because I knew my parents wouldnt have struggled financially near as much if I hadn't been born or if I had died before my first brain surgery.

And the thing is, it's true. My mom had to stretch meals by adding filler to meatballs, by making pasta and fried rice all the time, by stretching pasta sauce by adding grape jelly to it. We had lots of chicken drumsticks. There was a while that my parents were afraid that they would lose our house because of medical debt. We moved cross country for my dad's work with seven dollars in the bank.

And we wouldn't have had to struggle like that if my medical care hadn't been that expensive. I used to feel guilty over that-- I felt like because it was my body it was my fault.

Over the last few years, and a lot of therapy, I realized that no one should have to struggle to afford medical care-- much less for a sick child. And we know that it doesnt have to be this way.

The current insurance system has made a reality where 14 year olds are suicidal over guilt from medical debt that should never exist in the first place.

[evidence-based-activism]

taking care of your own house isn’t “unpaid labour” it’s called being an adult which y’all seem to understand just fine when you’re shaming men but not when you’re the ones doing the work. “most jobs” are not salary. And the only hourly jobs that pay overtime are agricultural positions. Which are male dominated. So if we are talking about unpaid labour that should be at the forefront of the discussion not household chores.

Unpaid labor refers to the massive amounts of work that is necessary for society to function but does not receive direct compensation and is therefore not registered in economic indicators like GDP.

The reason this is a feminist issue is because women are responsible for a disproportionate amount of unpaid work, which results in significant negative impacts both for individual women and women as a class.

Women around the world do three times as much unpaid care work as men [1-3]. A 2020 analysis [4] found that globally, all of women's unpaid work was worth almost 11 trillion dollars. A Pew Research analysis [5] found that when considering both paid and unpaid work, American women spend 2 to 3 times as much time on unpaid work as men, which corresponds to a proportional decrease in paid work and leisure time.

This work is absolutely vital for the continual functioning of society. As mentioned in [4], in "1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women refused to cook, clean, or look after children for a day. It brought the whole nation to a standstill," which is reiterated in [3].

And why does the gender gap matter? Because women's disproportionate burden limits their personal economic stability and advancement [3, 5]. It also has substantial, negative effects on their mental health [1].

With that context, here is my answer to your ask:

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"taking care of your own house isn’t “unpaid labour” it’s called being an adult"

Something can be both necessary and unjustly allocated. Yes, a functioning society requires people cook and clean and take care of children and elders. If it were equally divided across all sectors of society, then we may not have needed a specific term to describe the hidden – but vital – work that underlies our society.

However, in reality, women bear a disproportionate amount of this requirement. This results in gender-specific disadvantages which are most easily illustrated via the conceptualization of a specific term "unpaid work".

(Further, I'd point out that your statement here implies that men are failing to "be adults" by failing to perform their fair share of unpaid labor.)

"which y’all seem to understand just fine when you’re shaming men but not when you’re the ones doing the work"

See everything I wrote above. Further, note that women are doing the vast majority of this work. Men's failure to do their fair share is a reasonable basis for shame.

'“most jobs” are not salary.'

I mean, sure, in America about 56% of jobs are paid at an hourly rate according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [6]. This is not really relevant to the matter at hand.

"And the only hourly jobs that pay overtime are agricultural positions."

I assume you mean hourly jobs that don't pay overtime. Either way, this isn't true. Anyone who is considered an "exempt" employee is not paid overtime, which can include hourly workers in some industries (e.g., railway workers, seasonal employees, etc.). And, again, this really isn't relevant to the matter at hand. The 44% of American jobs that are salaried also don't pay overtime, along with all the other carved-out exemptions for hourly employees.

"Which are male dominated"

In America, sure. Notably, however, when looking worldwide, women are "responsible for half of the world’s food production" and "60 and 80 percent" in "most developing countries" [7].

"So if we are talking about unpaid labour that should be at the forefront of the discussion not household chores."

The issues with America's labor policies are an important class issue that you are completely free to focus on. The existence of this issue, however, does not negate the widespread problem with women's unpaid labor.

And importantly, the BLS also shows that a greater proportion of female agricultural workers are unpaid (3%) compared to male agricultural workers (<1%) [8].

---

In conclusion, women are burdened with a disproportionate amount of unpaid work, which causes significant negative impact on both individual women and women as a class.

References under the cut:

Seedat, S., & Rondon, M. (2021). Women’s wellbeing and the burden of unpaid work. BMJ, n1972. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n1972

Hanna, T., Meisel, C., Moyer, J., Azcona, G., Bhatt, A., & Valero, S. D. (2020.) FORECASTING TIME SPENT IN UNPAID CARE AND DOMESTIC WORK. UN Women.

Not all gaps are created equal: The true value of care work. (2022, May 25). Oxfam International. https://www.oxfam.org/en/not-all-gaps-are-created-equal-true-value-care-work

Wezerek, G., & Ghodsee, K. R. (2020, March 5). Opinion | Women’s Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/04/opinion/women-unpaid-labor.html

Parker, K. (2013, March 14). Chapter 6: Time in work and leisure, patterns by gender and family structure. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-6-time-in-work-and-leisure-patterns-by-gender-and-family-structure/

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2022, April). Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2021 U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2021/pdf/home.pdf

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Fact Sheet: Food Security and Gender. https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnadr706.pdf

Employed persons in agriculture and nonagricultural industries by age, sex, and class of worker. (2024, January 26). Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat15.htm

[transgaysex]

finally had to give in and make a school purchase (<- sick to its fucking stomach)

[tvneon]

[gender-trash]

step 3.5: one of the chunks of moulding previously contained a non-working power outlet. it's got about 120 millivolts across it, which is just large and consistent enough i don't thiiink it's a parasitic from nearby wiring? but both my dad (electrical engineer) and i were baffled. just to be safe, cut and electrical-tape the wires and tuck them down into the crawlspace where they hopefully can't do any harm.

(i didn't take a picture of this but just imagine a power outlet that does not work)

step 3.75: remove or cut off all the nails in the removed moulding strips so they don't hurt anyone. stack up the moulding in the living room because nobody else is here and it can't get much worse

step 4: AWWW YEAHHH BABEYYY it's finally time to PULL UP THE OLD WOOD FLOOR!! i think this is actually the original 110ish-year-old floor: it's 3/4" thick tongue and groove in long planks about 3" wide, nailed through the tongue. i would have seriously considered keeping it and just refinishing but i already spent several thousand dollars on parquet and it's really banged-up soft wood (i think pine?). it looks better in photos than it does irl :p still, i'm trying to keep it mostly intact so i can save it and reuse it for something else later.

unfortunately whoever did the floor used these absolutely ridiculously large nails for some reason?? so they don't just pull out easy, oh no. this is a PROCESS. i shall spare you the description of various methods my dad and i have experimented with, but we've landed on a technique involving multiple prybars for leverage which lets us get out the nails without breaking off parts of the tongues or grooves about 80% of the time.

pulling out the first four or so rows of planks exposes a bigass hole in the subfloor. try not to think about this.

step 4.5: go over the floor with a magnet to mark out all the nail locations in advance. this works okay for about half the floor, but then the magnet starts twitching every few inches. surely even the madman who chose the above-pictured flooring nails wouldn't go THAT nuts with them, right...? unrelatedly there seem to be a lot more headless tacks floating around than should be left after the tacking strip removal, given how many times the floor has been swept since then. it's like the magnet keeps pulling them out of the cracks...

pry out some of the mystery gap-filling compound to find the WEIRD HEADLESS TACKS EMBEDDED IN IT. ???

theorize that possibly the tacks, or nail cutoffs, or whatever they are, were swept into the cracks by accident before the gaps were filled. this is annoying, but with practice they're fairly distinguishable from the powerful pull of the gigantic flooring nails so it doesn't present TOO much of a problem.

step 5 (concurrent with step 4): after the planks are removed from the floor, pull out any nails or partial nails remaining (before we landed on the current method we experimented heavily with using an oscillating multitool to cut off the nails between the floor and the subfloor), and pile up the planks in the increasingly-poorly-named living room.

you can tell this is an old, old floor because a lot of these planks are full length (slightly over 12 feet). where do you see 12-foot-long floorboards these days?? i almost feel bad cutting the long ones in half but i have nowhere dry to store wood other than the attic, i just cant maneuver 12-foot-long planks into the attic, and i cant think of anything i might possibly need to make that would be 12 feet long.

we're about halfway done removing the old flooring rn; hopefully soon i will be able to tell you about exciting things like underlayment and parquet dry-fitting but for now i shall leave you with zeezee gazing yearningly into the Forbidden Realm (full of rusty nails and plaster dust):

sorry for the relative radio silence lately i have been seizing the opportunity of a long break from work (and @combat-epistemologist and @transbionic-shieldmaiden being out of town so i can temporarily take over the entire house with my stuff) to refloor my bedroom! i have made many House Discoveries of all kinds (good, bad, neutral, baffling) and hammered my own hand twice (SO FAR). this is an exhausting process; i don't think i'm cut out for the flooring contractor lifestyle.

[mipexch]

v1 comfortable moments

[shiftythrifting]

sarcophagus….

[fjordfolk]

"only the best for her" i sob as i click purchase on an 80 dollar winter jacket for my double coated dog

[rocketqueen1989x]

if he looked at me like that … istg I would get on my knees immediately

[marciliedonato]

i’m fucking crying.... not the duet 😭 💀 💀nickisnotgreen was right, this truly is history in the making

[guzhufuren]

need a rich spouse so they could buy me all english translations of danmei and baihe novels my heart desires and all ql dvd boxsets my soul craves

[albatris]

why tales from the gas station so expensive

[eightiesfan]

Sandra Bullock - Bionic Showdown (1989)

[bbluesidess]

they’re listening to some cheesy love song

[mikoriin]

hey guys, i hate to beg for commissions, but i would appreciate some help. i had some bills come up that took a lot of my money, and i need some help to make rent. my commission info is here, which u can find examples of my art as well as commission examples.

id really appreciate some help, any help. and please spread my commission post around for those who may be able to help around this time.

[actuallysaiyan]

everyone just LOOK