It's Not "Nagging"

Want to see a mother get mad? Tell her she's "nagging" you after she's been obligated to repeat an entirely reasonable request several times over. And just why is "nagging" a word that's almost exclusively applied to women?

We need the other members of our households to show up and do their share. As the default parents, we own the lists. So do we stop caring whether others like how we ask and remind? Do we enforce a back-to-one where we're not forced to ask repeatedly in the first place?

In this episode Amy and Margaret discuss:

• The sexism and etymology of the word "nag"
• What Amy says are the three types of "nagging," and why we should separate them out
• What to say when our repeated asking is framed as annoying to other people (guess whom it's also annoying, too?)

Links!

• Jessica Zhang on LinkedIn: "What's In a Nag?"
• Episode from If Books Could Kill podcast: "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus"
• McClelland, T., & Sliwa, P: "Gendered affordance perception and unequal domestic labour."
• Our episode with Lynyetta Willis on "Stable Misery"
• Our episode with Eve Rodsky on "Changing the Invisible Workload"
• Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter Culture Study

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