“He’s thinking about sex, I’m thinking about survival”: Women’s sexual, domestic, and emotional labor during the COVID-19 pandemic

Drawing from the author’s experiences as a psychotherapist during the pandemic, this essay highlights the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and quarantines exposed the fault lines of gendered labor and foregrounded women’s role in engaging in multiple forms of unpaid, often unseen labor. Specifically, the essay draws on brief descriptions of psychotherapy cases to discuss women’s sexual labor, domestic labor, and emotional labor during the pandemic and how women negotiated not only their own existential crises and workforce pressures, but also the highly gendered forms of labor within the home. Gendered labor permeated women’s experiences of the pandemic, saddling them with undue burdens and at times hobbling their aspirations for self-care, career advancement, and rest.