There are sentences that are not sentences. They are touches.
A book title, for example. You don’t just read it – you are read by it. It lays a hand on your shoulder even before you have decided whether you want to enter. And my AuDHD brain, this hyper-attentive system of pattern recognition, justice radar, and stimulus-response shortening, reacts to such a door sign not slowly, not “literarily”, but physically: ping. Category recognized. Conflict recognized. Positioning imminent.
“The Exhaustion of Women. Against Female Availability.”
There, in a single breath, an entire world is already explained: a group, a condition, an opponent. And I notice how a small, embarrassingly quick counter-movement arises in me – no refutation, no polemic, more like an inner flinch: And me? Am I a person here or just a foil?
That is the moment that interests me. Not because I think the title is “unfair” – but because I sense how easily, in public discourse, analysis becomes a judgment, structure becomes a character test, a focus becomes a tribunal. And because at the same time I know: If a title provokes me, that does not automatically mean it is wrong. It only means: It hits a spot where concepts and biographies get entangled.
In my last texts I described this entanglement from two sides: once as the overlooked difference between power and behavior (when “man” becomes the abbreviation for guilt), and once as the strange field of “responsibility without resonance” (when men are supposed to reflect, but may articulate their own exhaustion only under suspicion). This third text is an attempt to tie both together – and not to remain on the surface, where people throw labels at each other, but to go deeper: to the philosophy of address, to the ethics of focus, to the economy of availability.
Because perhaps the real issue is not only “exhaustion”, but: Who is allowed to count as exhausted – and under what conditions?
1. Availability: the silent contract that no one signs and yet everyone fulfills
“Availability” is one of those words you first think is banal, until you realize that it contains a complete social theory.
Available is the one who is not only there, but ready: ready to react, to care, to smooth, to carry, to feel, to explain, to apologize, to organize. Available is the one who does not truly own their own time, because internally it is already allocated – as a reserve for the needs of others. Available is the one who sits in the room and at the same time manages the room’s humidity.
And availability is not just an individual pattern (“I find it hard to say no”). It is a cultural arrangement: an architecture of expectations. It is composed of role models, institutions, economic incentives, family narratives, of what we call “normal”. It is what happens when care is not considered work, but nature; when emotionality is seen as a resource, not as a limit; when “responsibility” is not negotiated, but assigned.
Schutzbach – as I understand from blurbs, interviews, and reviews – starts exactly here: exhaustion not as private failure, but as political symptom. Not “you are wrong”, but “the rules of the game are built so that certain people run empty more often”.
That is a strong thesis, and it hits a reality that can be very clearly observed in everyday life: in care work, in mental load, in relationship micro-logic, in the silent assumption of who is “responsible” when something becomes unpleasant. It is plausible that this logic of availability is historically and currently distributed unequally – and that women (and people read or socialized as female) are structurally more affected by it.
And still: my first reflex is anger.
Not because I don’t want to see this inequality. But because the language of inequality in discourse often acquires a second, unnoticed function: It decides who, as an individual, is still allowed to speak without being judged as a category.
2. The hurt of the category: When “man” is no longer description but fate
There is a special form of hurt that has nothing to do with “insult”, but with simplification.
It happens when I feel that my concrete behavior – my effort, my practice, my shortcomings, my learning movements – suddenly count less than a group label. When “man” is no longer a fact, but an argumentative shortcut: Ah, you. Then I already know how this goes.
In my “overlooked difference” line, this is the core: when, in debates, structure becomes so strong that it replaces action; when “position” automatically means “intention”; when “power” is shortened to “guilt”. Then a discussion loses something crucial: precision.
And precision is not a luxury. Precision is respect.
My AuDHD brain has low tolerance for this, because it feels category errors like sand in the gears: You cannot say “It’s about structures, not individual morality” and then, in the next breath, sort people morally via their category. That is not only unjust – it is also logically sloppy. And logical sloppiness in debates is what later returns as emotional violence.
So when a title provokes me, it is often not “I want to wriggle out of this”, but an alarm: Caution, here a system concept could tip into a personal attribution.
This is the point where many conversations about feminism harden. Not because people cannot bear structural critique, but because they do not know how to read structural critique without feeling erased as a person.
And this is exactly where it becomes philosophical: How do you read a sentence that speaks about the world without taking it as a sentence about yourself?
Or in other words: How do you remain addressable without feeling accused?
3. The ethics of focus: Why “just” a focus is never just a focus
Of course a focus is legitimate. Not every book has to treat all perspectives symmetrically. A magnifying glass is not an atlas.
But focus is not neutral. Focus is a decision about whose experience counts as exemplary – and whose experience may, in that moment, be treated as a “side issue”.
The problem arises where a focus in discourse is not read as focus, but as boundary-drawing: This counts. The other is a distraction. And when the typical follow-up question (“And what about the men?”) is automatically seen as disruption, then a focus becomes a conversational rule that says: You may be present, but please do not speak, at least not about yourself.
This is where my two previous texts touch: In “Responsibility without resonance” it was about this strange situation that men are supposed to take responsibility, but cannot put their own exhaustion into the room as a legitimate subject without immediately being suspected of: relativization. Narcissism. Defense.
And this is the moment when a feminist focus – completely unintentionally – can become an asymmetrical order of recognition:
Women are allowed to be exhausted, and it has meaning.
Men are exhausted, and it has suspicion.
I am not writing this to draw up a balance of equality. Not “us too!”. But to point to a communicative physics: recognition is not only a moral act, it is also a social glue. When recognition is distributed unequally, justice does not automatically arise – sometimes what arises first is defiance. And defiance is politically unproductive, but psychologically understandable.
So when I briefly get angry at the title “Exhaustion of Women”, it is also the friction between two systems of recognition:
the feminist attempt to make female burden visible,
and the male need not to appear only as a problem frame.
Both can be true at the same time without one destroying the other. But it requires a rare ability: multi-tracking.
4. Multi-tracking: Two truths that do not cancel each other out
I believe a large part of the current exhaustion of discourse arises because we constantly try to win one truth by pushing another out of the room.
Yet there are issues that are not “either/or”, but “both/and”. And exhaustion is such an issue.
Truth A: There are structural patterns that overload women – historically, economically, culturally. Care work, mental load, emotional responsibility, body politics, sexualized expectations. That is real.
Truth B: There are men who do not want to dominate, who strive for fairness, who are themselves burdened – and who in debates are often treated as if their speaking were suspect per se.
If you emphasize truth A without recognizing truth B at all as a legitimate experience, it feels like a moral one-way street.
If you emphasize truth B in order to devalue truth A, it feels like defense.
Both lead to what I would call “immunizing debate”: every reaction counts only as proof of the accusation.
Multi-tracking would be something else: not “parity”, but simultaneity. A way of thinking that acknowledges differences without disempowering people.
And now comes the decisive step: How do I read Schutzbach in this multi-tracking?
5. The translation that helps me: From personal shadow to system question
I can read the title in two ways.
Reading 1 (quick, reflexive): “Women are exhausted because men …”
This is the reading that triggers my anger, because it casts me as a shadow figure in a moral plot.
Reading 2 (deliberate, systemic): “Women are socially addressed in many contexts in such a way that availability is expected of them – and this expectation produces exhaustion.”
Here the question of responsibility does not disappear, but it changes its form: away from “Who is to blame?” toward “Which mechanisms are at work?”
This translation is not a trick, but a discipline. And it is particularly important for me as an AuDHD person, because my brain tends to take language literally and personally when it sounds categorical. The deliberate translation is my way of opening a second reading track for myself.
On this second track I can read Schutzbach as diagnosis – not as accusation.
As map – not as judgment.
As mirror for expectations – not as wanted poster for people.
And suddenly another role appears for me as well: not defendant, but co-creator. Not the “perpetrator” who has to defend himself, but the participant who can think along: Where do I reproduce availability? Where do I benefit from it? Where can I actively dismantle it?
That is uncomfortable, yes. But it is a different kind of discomfort: not that of shame, but that of responsibility that becomes manageable.
6. What actually holds this trilogy together
When I read my three texts as a block, I notice: It is a single red thread, just from three perspectives:
- Concepts must remain clean, otherwise people become stand-ins (“power” is not “guilt”, “structure” is not “character”).
- Responsibility needs resonance, otherwise it becomes a moral duty without psychological ground.
- Focus needs translation, otherwise it is heard as a personal accusation and experienced as a conversation stopper.
These three points are not a “male position”. They are discourse hygiene. They are, if you will, a small ethics of speaking about inequality: so that structural critique does not become a new dogma, and so that individual capacity to learn is not buried under category logic.
And here is perhaps the most paradoxical insight: I can take Schutzbach’s focus seriously precisely when I take my own reaction seriously – not as a counterargument, but as an indication of how language works in social spaces.
Because it is not enough to be right. You also have to speak in such a way that being right does not tip into a ritual of dehumanization.
7. An ending that is not an ending: What I want to decide for
I will not get rid of this anger by lecturing myself (“don’t make such a fuss”). And I also do not want to cultivate it (“aha, there’s the feminist accusation again”). I want to use it.
As a signal that I am standing at a boundary: between the need for individual fairness and the necessity of structural perception. Between the desire to be seen as a person and the fact that categories are politically effective. Between the impulse to defend myself and the chance to understand more precisely.
Perhaps this is the adult version of this situation: not being right, but being able to read.
If I read Schutzbach in such a way that “female availability” does not mean “male malice”, but arrangements of expectations, then I can take the book as an invitation to look more closely: Where is availability built into my life? Who has the invisible night shift? Who keeps the relationship going, the mood, the calendar, the transitions?
And at the same time I will insist that conversations become better when they can bear the difference that I worked out in my previous texts: identity is not behavior. Responsibility is not guilt.
If discourse can bear that, then a provocative title does not automatically become agreement – but perhaps something more valuable: a precise engagement that does not wear people out as categories.
That would, in the end, also be a form of resistance against availability: not only against female availability as a form of exploitation, but against the availability of people as templates in discourse.
Because perhaps that is the deepest source of exhaustion of our time: that we no longer encounter each other as persons, but as functions in a conflict.
And that in doing so we forget that thinking – good thinking – is always also care: for concepts, for people, for the possibility of changing something together.
