13. Arsenic Hour

So many broken kettles.

A few months ago, I was talking to my therapist about how my anxiety reaches a fever pitch almost every day around 4:30-5:00 p.m. I expressed how I started stressing about how to finish my workday while trying to plan what I would do after work and then figuring out what I would make for dinner, and then and then and then…the list went on.

“There’s a reason it’s called the arsenic hour,” she responded.

I had never heard the phrase before but it intuitively made sense - the hour of the day when you’re ready to poison metaphorically (hopefully) either yourself or someone else in your household. It’s the time of day when the end of your (hopefully paid) work day crashes into the (likely unpaid) life work you have to complete.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Huh? I never feel this way at the end of my day,” then it is highly likely that you 1. Are a man and/or 2. Have someone in your life who knows exactly what I’m talking about. 

Roughly half the population has been socialized to expect the other half to do more unpaid work. Engaging in the unpaid labor economy is voluntary for them because it always has been voluntary for them.

The concept of emotional labor has evolved over the years from a very narrow definition of the work of managing one’s own emotions required by certain professions¹ to a broader definition of unpaid and often invisible work done by one person to meet the needs of another. 

Guess who overwhelmingly does most of the unpaid emotional labor? Women. Guess who overwhelmingly does most of that unpaid emotional labor? Women of color.

This unpaid work is also not limited to only emotional labor - mental labor and actual physical labor are also included.

At home, it’s not just physically making dinner. It’s maintaining a grocery shopping list. It’s not just maintaining a grocery shopping list. It’s remembering what particular brand of ketchup to buy. It’s remembering how much of everything is left and trying to estimate when you’ll need to restock something. It’s not just making dinner and just maintaining a grocery list. It’s planning when to go grocery shopping. It’s not just planning when to go grocery shopping. It’s remembering when payday is.² It’s mentally tallying how much the rest of your bills will cost to know how much you can spend on groceries. It’s going grocery shopping. It’s not just going grocery shopping. It’s driving to the grocery store. It’s dealing with traffic. It’s the actual physical act of shopping for groceries. It’s unpacking the groceries when you get home. It’s meal planning. It’s not just meal planning. It’s remembering everyone’s schedules for the week and who will be home when. It’s remembering who has plans on what nights and what times those plans start. It’s deciding what to make for dinner. It’s not just deciding what to make for dinner. It’s running through the list of all the groceries you just bought and figuring out what needs to be used before it starts to go limp or stale or moldy. Or it’s maybe running through the list of what’s left to eat before the next grocery trip. It’s thinking about what you made for dinner yesterday and maybe what else you plan to make for dinner for the rest of the week. It’s prepping that food. It’s setting aside the correct amount of time. It’s hoping that whatever you make will be good and desired. It’s cleaning up after dinner. It’s calculating how long it will take to clean up after dinner and weighing that against all the other things on your schedule for the evening.

It’s never *just* making dinner.

A friend in the industry has been engaged with her supervisor and her HR department about her supervisor’s uneven enforcement of the company dress code. Her crewneck sweatshirt is not allowed by the dress code because it doesn’t have a collar. And yet, nowhere in the company’s policy does it state that collars are mandatory.³ Further, “collared shirts” show up a grand total of zero times in the company’s policy. 

How do I know this? Because my friend has been performing unpaid emotional and mental labor determining how the dress code applies to people for whom the default “golf polo” is not comfortable. Also, this friend is a production supervisor, is not customer-facing, and having a collar on her shirt has no correlation to her ability to do her job. Now, she is taking time out of her actual job for which she is paid actual money to have conversations about what she wears to work. 

It’s not just figuring out what to wear to work. It’s trying to figure out what to wear when the dress code isn’t clear for women. It’s being stressed out wondering if your choice of workwear will be critiqued by your boss. It’s not just being stressed about what to wear. It’s knowing that you are being closely surveilled every day you come into work not in a collared shirt. It’s having a conflict with your supervisor. A conflict entirely unrelated to your job duties. It’s observing your coworkers being able to wear something they’re comfortable in. It’s bringing HR into the conversation. It’s having your appearance litigated between yourself, your boss, and HR. It’s knowing that pursuing dress code clarity may stigmatize you as a “problem.” It’s knowing that that stigma will affect your employment in ways that may or may not be evident to you.

It’s never *just* a collared shirt.

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There is an uneven expected rate of change between men and everyone else. Women are expected to change faster than men. Men have been socialized to expect a certain level of service from the women around them and get upset when it’s not delivered. They have also been socialized that they should perform unpaid labor when it benefits them, when the goal is to get something they want. Women have been socialized to perform unpaid labor as an ongoing benefit for ::gestures into the ether:: society. 

Trying to opt out of doing unpaid labor is not without consequences and is rarely a viable option. Attempting to opt out exposes us to more unpaid labor in the form of opprobrium and continued fallout. 

When I told my former supervisor it was not my job to manage the emotions of the entirely male leadership team, he responded by telling me that not doing so would harm my ability to move up within the company.

Are you a man? Are you thinking #notallmen? Are you thinking maybe other men but certainly not you? Here are a couple of social experiments for you to try.

First, notice when you think “She’s just better at this kind of stuff.” Why? Why is she better? Because she’s had to do it all of her life, most of the time for free and without acknowledgment?

The same former supervisor routinely foisted undesirable tasks onto me and my (almost all women⁴) coworkers. When I declined to do a project for him that involved putting together mailing boxes because I was working on a project that fell within my actual job, he huffily announced he would do it himself. Then he engaged in performative helplessness and proceeded to act like every hapless person at the beginning of every infomercial, fumbling in the most exasperated manner with the boxes. 

“I don’t even know how to do this!” He petulantly complained. “You’re so much better at it than I am. This seems like it wouldn’t take as long if you just did it yourself.”

From behind my computer screen where I was completing work for which I was actually paid, I responded: “I didn’t have an inherent skill in putting those together. I followed the directions and figured it out. You’ll figure it out, too.”

Next, here’s an easy experiment to demonstrate the expectation of other people doing labor for you: pay attention to how often you expect women and people of color to move out of your way while crossing paths in hallways, aisles, etc. How often do you say excuse me? How often, really?

 

Stalled Revolution

The people who have been doing the heavy lifting to drive equitable change in the craft beer industry are now exiting or taking a giant step away.⁵ Some of the public has expressed surprise. Some have taken the “Nooooooo, you can’t leave” sunk-cost fallacy route. Others have adopted a “Look what you made them do” response. 

Remember back in 2020 when white people realized racism was real? Remember in May 2021 when the industry discovered sexism is real? 

What did you do beyond posting and sharing on social media? How many times did you self-annoint yourself an ally? What are you still doing? 

More apropos, what unpaid emotional, mental, and physical labor did you expect women and people of color to perform? What unpaid labor did you stand by and watch because you “didn’t want to say the wrong thing”? To how many people did you say, “Just tell me what you need from me and I’ll do it”?

Now think about all the times you gave up your comfort to help move the needle on making the industry better. I’m not talking about attending IEJ seminars at a conference you were already attending. I’m not talking about providing your armchair commentary on a sexist or racist issue on social media. I’m not talking about wearing your Antiracist, Antisexist, Pro-Equality Beer Club shirt to industry events. 

I’m talking about risking your comfort. About turning to the coworker or boss who just made a sexist comment and saying, “Hey, what you just said is unacceptable.” About speaking up when there’s a job opening and suggesting your company not only rewrite the description to make it more equitable but also post in places outside of the social media networks and personal networks. I’m talking about advocating for a historically excluded person even - especially - when they’re not in the room. 

The industry is in a liminal position now. Harkening back to my first newsletter (a year ago today!), the Overton window has shifted. The days of the industry being “99% asshole free” and knee-slapping over thinly-veiled rape joke branding are mostly in the rearview mirror. Garment-wrending and hand-wringing industry thinkpiece after thinkpiece lamenting the end of craft beer inundates inboxes and feeds. 

What we’re witnessing in the industry now is a stalled revolution, an arsenic hour all of the industry’s own. It’s stalled in very large part because the burden of the unpaid emotional, mental, and physical labor has fallen - as it usually does - to historically excluded communities. We are burnt out. They are burnt out.

We are tired of having our existence, our humanity, and our agency debated amongst the “devil’s advocates” who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Who are overwhelmingly in the position of being able to move the revolution forward and opting not to because it means being slightly uncomfortable. 

It means having to have conversations with other men about changing their collective behavior, not about talking at historically excluded populations about how much you support them.

Craft beer isn’t over - it’s changing. It has the potential to change into something much more equitable and much more diverse than it ever has been. And there are a ton of individuals, groups, and organizations doing the work to make that happen. However, the weight of all the unpaid labor going into changing the industry is too heavy to remain solely on the backs of the people most negatively impacted by the industry not changing. 

When I resigned from my former brewery due to their repeated and continuing mistreatment of women and people belonging to other historically excluded communities, I implored them not to expect their employees to do the unpaid labor of educating them:

Unsurprisingly, they did not heed that advice - why would they? They did not and do not care about actual change. The entirely male management immediately called the few women who were their direct reports and demanded to know if they had experienced sexism.⁶

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I read this analogy recently that really resonated with me:

“You get trained to think handling all this is what A Good Woman does. That it’s selfish and cruel to be angry or unhappy about someone…hurting you, and God forbid you express that aloud or make them feel any more distress about for what they’ve done. But that’s because in your head, you’re running towards them and imagining they’re running towards you too, that the path to recovery will be short because you’re both running towards each other.

But really, they’re just standing there checking their phone and waiting for you to run a marathon over to them while they complain that you’re always late, why does it take you so long to get there, you get enough practice after all.”

We’re tired. The unpaid emotional, mental, and physical labor we do is WORK yet is undervalued and invisible and dismissed as not “real” work, just things we do to make our work and personal lives “nice.” But it’s none of those things - it’s the glue that holds our workplaces, homes, societies, and communities together.

You see it, though. You see the work that needs to be done and oftentimes categorize it as SEP - someone else’s problem. Maybe you tell someone later how you saw something sexist or racist happen and how you did not like that it happened at all. Not one bit. 

But you didn’t do anything in the moment because you didn’t know the exact right thing to say - performative helplessness. Besides, you don’t think what you witnessed actually affects you. Sure, a more equitable industry would be a “nice to have” but you already benefit from the way the industry operates, so you can opt out of real advocacy work when it requires you to give up some of your comfort temporarily. But it does affect you. White supremacy and patriarchy negatively impact everyone. 

Do you want change or not? Stop waiting for us to complete a marathon to get to you and start fucking running towards us.

Further Reading

Seriously. Read all of these all the way through. And don’t expect the women and the people of color in your life to give you any kind of award for doing the bare minimum by reading them.

What is Emotional Labor, and Why Does It Matter? by Hope Reese; Greater Good Magazine (April 5, 2023)

Emotional Labor: The MetaFilter Thread Condensed - For men specifically: make sure you read all the way through to the part about men complaining about having to read this condensed thread 

Cassandra Among the Creeps by Thee Rebecca Solnit; Harper’s Magazine (October 2014)

“Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor by Jess Zimmerman; The Toast (July 13, 2015)

The Invisible Workload that Drags Women Down by Lisa Wade; Money.com (December 29, 2016)

Women Aren’t Nags - We’re Just Fed Up by Gemma Hartley; Harper’s Bazaar (September 27, 2017)

Flowers by Wendy Cope (1992)

And finally…

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to:

1. Watching this STANA interview with my sensory daddy Harold McGee, author of Nose Guide: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells. Nose Guide is one of my favorite sensory books and I love that it’s written in an entertaining and approachable way for the layperson.

2. Reading Saliva: Secretion and Functions because saliva is my new hyperfocus.

3. Working on two malt-focused presentations. I mentioned the first presentation about using malt sensory for recipe development in last month’s newsletter. I will also be presenting on beer style anatomy at the 2024 Craft Malt Conference.

1. This definition and the term “emotional labor” are attributed to Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.

2. I’m not going to front and pretend that most of us aren’t a paycheck or two away from losing what semblance of financial security we have.

3. Dress codes are antiquated, fraught with sexist rules, and can (and may) be the entire subject of an upcoming newsletter.

4. He loved to tell us that he “preferred to work with women” when what he meant was he preferred to interact with women only when there was an uneven power dynamic he could take advantage of.

5. Namely, Ren Navarro and Erin Brandson

6. At least one employee was also coerced into not sharing their story publicly.