“Mankeeping”

Another meaningless new word to add to our lexicon

I learned a new word today.

Normally I like learning new words, but in this case I’m not so sure.

“Mankeeping.”

It’s close enough to “housekeeping” that you can probably guess what it means, but if you can’t, science website PsyPost has you covered.

“The term describes the effort women exert to compensate for the decline in their male partners’ social networks. It involves behaviours like organizing social events, encouraging men to reconnect with friends, and serving as a primary or sole source of emotional support to prevent the men from becoming isolated.”

Right. Got it.

“Mankeeping” is the central concept for a new study published in the journal Sex Roles. Researchers created a 46-point “Mankeeping Scale” and administered it to hundreds of women in the US and the UK. The women were asked questions about “the actual behaviors women perform to manage their partners’ social life, the emotional impact of that labor, and a recognition that their emotional support is often unequal or unappreciated.”

The researchers found that women who saw themselves as doing more “mankeeping” had “lower relationship satisfaction and higher levels of relationship burden and burnout.” Doing extensive “mankeeping” was also “positively correlated with women’s self-reported depression, anxiety and stress.”

It wasn’t simply recognizing that one’s boyfriend or husband lacked friends and was struggling: It was having to do something about it that ended up having an “emotional impact” and was “associated with poorer mental health.”

The researchers also found that women who “held more traditional beliefs about gender roles” were more likely to engage in “‘mankeeping,” and so to be less happy with the state of their relationship.

The idea that women are underappreciated and receive inadequate recognition for the things they do, especially around the home, is hardly a new one. It’s an idea that, paradoxically, is being asserted with greater vehemence the more equal society becomes, the more women work paying jobs, and the less they do, on average, in the domestic sphere.

Surely you’d expect the opposite to happen? Apparently not.

In recent weeks, to the tune of Paris Paloma’s godawful song “Labour”—bet you can’t guess what that’s about—the women of America have staged the freakout to end all freakouts, jumping to the defense of a woman who brutally strangled her three children with a rubber exercise band, simply because they think her qualities and “labor” as a mother weren’t adequately recognized by her closet narcissist Gemini husband, who probably staged the murder so he could shack up with a new woman, no strings.

I’ve written about this more than a handful of times now, so I’m sorry if I’m trying your patience, but I really do think we need to try and understand where all this anger and indignation is coming from, and in particular that bizarre sense of persecution that seems to have no objective correlate in reality.

I have my theories, as you might expect.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of radical feminists began picking apart Marxist theory to reveal its hidden patriarchal inner lining. One of the key texts they prised open was Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, written not long after the death of Karl Marx and drawing on extensive anthropological and historical research.

The Origin is a pretty radical text in itself, arguing all ancient pre-class societies were “primitive matriarchies” where women ruled the roost because they controlled the means of reproduction, and that the first class society was the first patriarchal society, because the first form of true property was women, under the ownership of their husbands. The implications of this account of history were that the destruction of capitalism would be the end of patriarchy. Indeed, it would be more than that: It would be a return to primitive matriarchy, since women would once again own themselves, their bodies and the means of sexual reproduction. Women had every reason, therefore, to support the program of Marxist revolution.

These new feminists agreed, but not entirely. They noted that Engels—and indeed Marx—had a lot to say about the labor of the mostly male agricultural and industrial workforce, but very little to say about what women do in the home. Is that not labor too? Does that not have value? Is childbearing and cooking and cleaning, “for free,” not a load-bearing structure for the wider economy—the Marxist “mode of production”?