By Emma, translated by Una Dimitrijevic (Seven Stories Press)
ISBN: 978-1-60980-918-8 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-60980-919-5
It’s never been a fair world, although until relatively recently (if our choice of leaders can be seen as contrarily evidential) that’s a situation we all apparently aspire to create and maintain. Simultaneously in that nebulous “recent” period, many have sought to address imbalances between the roles and burdens of men and women in a civil and cohesive society, but the first problem they all hit was simply how to state the problems in terms all sides could understand. We have a lot more names and concepts to utilise now in discourse, but the difficulties don’t seem to have diminished at all…
In 2010, software engineer Emma had a revelation and first joined the public debate: crafting and curating a book of strips reflecting upon social issues impacting women, from long hours to workplace politics and getting on with partners… and how unfair and unjust the world was.
The daughter of two mathematicians from Troyes – in the North-eastern region of France – she studied computer science, grew older and lived like most adults: work, fun (when possible), relationships, family. Things changed after she had her first child…
At age 30 she became an avowed feminist, having been compelled to closely observe and re-assess her life in society even as she discovered the concept of “collective intelligence”. Her approach to formalising her thoughts was to identify and deftly dissect components of behaviour – hers and everyone else’s – and the result was The Mental Load. This was her term for all the unacknowledged, unpaid, incessant, invisible crap (mostly thanks to men, absolutely to partners in relationships, but also to many other women) that comprises and comes with almost every relationship.
Those observations were translated into activism, initially as self-published and distributed pamphlets, and in 2016 she started adding cartoons and drawings to the mix. The extreme positive response led her to launch cartoon blog Emmaclit, focussing on issues of racism, capitalism and police violence as well as feminism, following up a year later with sister webcomic Fallait demander (“You only had to ask”) which first posited the notion of an inescapable relational imbalance… a mental load…
In the webcomic, Emma used her own domestic and work life to provide biographical examples of how an unfair, unspoken – and often unrecognised – distribution of labour and responsibility falls on women in even the most equitable and ostensibly harmonious heterosexual relationships. The material went viral and struck a global chord…
Delivering her thoughts as a series of pictorial essays/lessons, Emma convincingly and compellingly argues that the vast majority of the overwhelming, relentless, inescapably burdensome life-tonnage had somehow settled on one side of the bed in most households…
The book – and sequel The Emotional Load (strips from them subsequently appeared in British newspaper The Guardian) – caused something of a commotion and as much trollish kickback as you’d expect from all the usual (and usually wrong) places…
Because a large proportion of humans who won the gender (genital?) lottery don’t really give a damn about other people’s woes – especially if the food keeps coming and the appropriate drawers magically refill with clean clothes and groceries – I fear there’s a segment of truly needy folk who will never benefit from this selection of treatises, anecdotes, statistics and life-changing stories.
Nevertheless, since many guys are genuinely clueless and baffled but willing to adapt, maybe enough of us will give change and thought a chance, even at this late stage. It’s certainly clear that there’s quite some way to go yet…
Best of all, most women reading this will realise that it’s not just them feeling the way they do and may even risk starting a conversation with their significant others, or at the very least, start talking to other women and organising together…
Working in the manner of the very best observational stand-up comedy, Emma forensically identifies an issue and dissects it, whilst offering advice, suggestions and a humorous perspective. Here that’s subdivided into a dozen comical chapters, preceded by an autobiographical context-setting Introduction, before ‘You Should’ve Asked’ finds sexism and discrimination at work heaped upon anyone bold enough to use their legal right to maternity leave, whilst cataloguing who does what around the house in terms of cooking, cleaning, provisioning, time managing, general “adulting”, noticing and remembering stuff needs to be cooked and cleaned, and providing clear-cut alternatives even an old geezer like me could understand, As always telling examples are offered…
‘Violence of the Oppressed’ offers a non-establishment view of 2016s protests against the dismantling of the French Labor Code and citizens’ rights, supplemented by a history of how women got them in the first place, followed by shocking facts about childbirth experiences and time-saving tactics of some medical practitioners in ‘The Story of My Friend C.’
What guys have always claimed they can’t control is carefully explored in ‘The Male Gaze’ and more fully explored in ‘Show Me That Bosom’ (via a deliciously barbed allegory of a land where bared breasts are mandatory).
‘The Wonderful Tale of Mohamed’ singles out one case to detail the treatment of immigrants and brown people in general. It examines what happens when police can use terrorism threats as justification for overreaction, whilst ‘The Wait’ explores individual freedoms and action in committed relationships with specific attention to Emma’s own life and who usually gets left holding the baby. ‘Work!’ then lays out a possible solution and alternatives to the rat race roles if only we ensure time and resources could be more evenly distributed. There’s also plenty of revelations on the way women have messed up the value of the work market…
Other than making men uncomfortable, ‘Check Your Pussy!’ then offers a public service announcement on knowing oneself for all women, setting out actual facts – and even biological route maps! – before social iniquity returns in the form of another exposé on police treatment of non-whites after the death of ‘Just Another Guy from the Hood’…
The ultimate male shield is the concept of “banter” and most effective weapon is the concept of “just kidding”. Both get a well-deserved and thoroughly effective kicking in ‘Chill Out’ before – to celebrate a year of the blog – Emma opted to share a formulative experience that triggered her late-found militancy. The upshot was personal anecdote ‘The Holidays’: describing her bout of childbirth and how it changed her life in all the ways absolutely no one had warned her about…
Now a full-time cartoonist, broadcaster and columnist, Emma continues to poke and probe an unfair world, but this subversively smart, amusingly addictive, slickly convincing, plausibly rational discussion of the way things should not be is undoubtedly a high point in her work and our communal advancement. It may still be a largely male-centric society, but amidst the many moments that will have any decent human weeping in empathy or raging in impotent fury, there are decisive points where a little knowledge and a smattering of honest willingness to listen and change could work bloody miracles…
Buy this book, learn some stuff. Be better, and please accept my earnest apologies on behalf of myself and my entire gender.
Dial it down and literally Man Up guys!
© 2017 by Emma. English translation © 2018 by Una Dimitrijevic. All rights reserved.