Sustainability and Feminized Debt

Because it is summer, and because I have children, and because I also have the audacity not to put my career on hold on account of these two prior facts, I have been thinking a lot lately about gender roles.

Last night, I paneled a sustainability discussion at Theory with my brilliant friend Sophia Li, and one of the questions she asked was: what does sustainability look like in your personal life?

I never know what people want to hear when they ask this, because - depending on who is asking the question - the desired response is either a list of personal sustainability chops (composting! electric vehicles! veganism!), or the desired response doesn’t matter because the questioner is just teeing you up for an argument about how unsustainable everything is.

This was a panel entirely of women, with an audience that was 95% women, in a store primarily staffed by women, all talking about sustainability. Sophia was certainly not teeing me up for an argument - she is an incredibly bright journalist and I’ve never left a conversation with her not having learned something new. My answer though, has less to do with electric cars and more to do with a philosophy of living.

If the choices I am making every day are offsetting responsibility, cost, or impact onto someone else to deal with, this is not sustainable, and it is not community-minded. So, if I center my way of living around not offsetting those costs - or, if I do, doing it sparingly - I will naturally not only live a more sustainable life but also will create a more sustainable environment around me.

Offsetting can mean many things. Responsibility offset is blaming companies or infrastructure for 100% of the damage caused by what you buy or experience, but not changing behavior to account for those inadequacies. Cost offset is the transference of cost from yourself to another person - so, when you buy that $5.99 top from Shein (I do not know much about Shein but I have heard their prices are in this realm), you are actually just taking the remainder of what that top should cost and charging it to whatever marginalized person (often a woman) has made it. Impact offset takes no responsibility for the life cycle of any product or service, making the impact of that item the responsibility of a system that we know is currently not even designed to handle it.

But there’s another offset that I would have liked to get further into, had this been a freewheeling podcast rather than a multi-participant panel discussion, and that is personal offset. Personal offset is when you offset the impact or responsibility of a decision or action to a later, wiser, mystically richer version of yourself.

I am specifically talking about the rise in pay-over-time purchasing options such as Affirm, Afterpay, Quadpay, etc., beginning to peak in popularity in tandem with the media messaging that “Americans have never had more money”, but also as we see record inflation meant to head off a recession that has doubtlessly already begun, according to Cardi B but not CNN yet. 

Pay-over-time is available across multiple points of retail, but particularly popular in travel, consumer packaged goods, and especially fashion & beauty. Women are only half of the American population, but they control or influence 85% of consumer spending. Which stands to reason that women are interacting with pay-over-time schemes much more so than men.

_________________

I will digress a moment to say that this winter, Harper Collins was kind enough to send me an advanced copy (I am cool!) of Angela Garbes’ second book, Essential Labor. Garbes’ analysis of the intersection between devalued feminized labor and devalued labor by women of color is worth the attention, reads quickly, and is accompanied by several heart-warming stories of her own parenting and childhood experiences. Is feminized labor devalued because it’s cheap, or is it cheap because feminized labor is devalued? 

We have just come through a two-and-a-half-year sprint (note that in this case, ‘through’ does not indicate that it has ended) of stripping down the expectations, tolerances, and false promises of gender equity. I would venture to say that few, if not no, women that provide care have entered the year 2022 under the impression that her labor in and outside of the home is exceptionally seen or exceptionally valued - if you’re anything like me you have entered this year finding that your care has been societally demoted to the rank of A Given, like a trust fall with just one receiving participant who is also answering emails and trying to contribute to her retirement fund with her free hand. 

To boot, the country seems hellbent on reaffirming its complete indifference to the survival or wellbeing of women - again laying bare the actuality of life here, which is that we’ve never prioritized women to begin with, and every right we have begrudgingly been given, from voting rights for Black women (1965), to the chance to get a credit card without our husband signing off on it (1974), or sue if we are sexually harassed in the workplace (1991). 

Equal Pay Day is the date of a year that women have to work until to catch up to what men were paid the year before. This year, Black women will need until September 21st to catch up to white men. This is more than a month later than it was in 2021.

Women hold two-thirds of U.S. student loan debt, approximately $833 billion dollars.

______________

Why do I bring this up? In a year when our money is rapidly worth less, after a two year stretch of our work being even more devalued than usual, in a moment of an impending recession (which, it is known, will disproportionately impact women in both the short and long term), looking at an industry where anywhere between 60 and 95% of the people making our clothes are women, I am asking you, please, to not pay-over-time. 

For many years we have hedged our bets on this planet and prioritized good times and record profits over sustaining human life, and rapidly we are seeing the effects of those decisions playing out across the world in ways that absolutely no one is prepared for. All of these decisions were made in a pay-over-time mentality. Someone later - maybe even a better version of me - will fix this.

This echoes across the sentiment I hear so often, which is the extreme displacement of hope into a generation of activists whom have barely yet graduated higher education. The next generation will do better. Concurrently, our last two American presidents have been in their 70s, and our senate leaders are in their 80s, which means we have what is referred to as a gerontocracy, or an oligarchical rule where the leaders are significantly older than the average of the adult population. 

My point is (inflamed by the exhaustion of summer and the impossibility of modern caregiving in late stage capitalism and a heat wave), we have thoroughly entrenched a sense of displacing responsibility into western culture such that it pervades all of our broken systems. The government runs according to values held by people who were last considered commonly employable 35 years ago. We socialize everyone into governing their personhood, their day-to-day and their future selves with a mentality of displacement. And then we wake in shock each morning to the consequences of this mentality, this governance. Where is the future self who was meant to take responsibility for this?

Women will bear the brunt of this culture, and as feminized labor remains devalued and underpaid, these debt pitches that are 85% likely to be decided upon by women, who struggle well into the next calendar year to catch up to men’s pay, will be disproportionately felt for many years to come.

______________

To move away from this mentality, we can only use the vehicle of building community built on real information. We cannot consume at breakneck speed if our consumption involves our relationships with others. Some suggestions the next time you find a New Fashion Thing that you can pay-for-over-time. 

Host a clothing swap event for your friends. Or just give your friends your clothing! Not everything needs to be resold at a nominal profit. Sometimes the profit is simply the happiness of a friend. 

Teach a friend how to mend or sew. Or crochet! Or knit. Or bead. Ask a friend if they can teach you.

Learn to thrift! Thrifting takes time and searching, and the development of relationships along the way.

Instead of buying something and paying for it later, save for the thing! Save for it then buy it in person! Engage with the sales person in the old ritual of purchase, which used to be very normal!

And, as always, talk! Talk nonstop about what plagues us and how to work together to fix it.

And let me know how you’re doing.

X 

p.s. For fun, please calculate your Invisible Labor Inventory, courtesy of Amy Westervelt.