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| Apparently, it’s only 15p! |
With Valentine’s day fast approaching, I thought I’d point you all to an interesting little set of online apps, courtesy of the fellows at NoMarriage.com: calculators that purport to tell dudes the true cost of sex — with wives, girlfriends, and what the kids today are calling “randoms.”
The assumptions behind each of these calculators are pretty revealing: they essentially assume that guys generally resent the women they’re involved with, and only spend time with them because it’s necessary to pretend to be interested in them in order to get sex. The calculators also assume that guys are more or less paying for everything.
I ran a few numbers, and the results are telling: for the guys for whom these calculators are basically designed — that is, guys who generally dislike spending non-sexy time with women, and who believe that “every kiss begins with Kay” — the cost can easily be hundreds of dollars for each and every time they and their special ladies manage to set aside their resentments long enough to engage in a grudging bout of the old in-and-out.
By contrast, for guys going out with independent (and perhaps even feminist) women they actually like and enjoy spending time with, who pay their own way, and who live nearby, the putative cost of sex can literally be pennies a pop. For married men who actually like their working wives, the cost of sex can actually be negative, because it’s cheaper to cohabit than to live alone.
In a nutshell: misogyny costs you, big time. But actually liking women? That makes sense — dollars and sense!
For dedicated Men Going Their Own Way, the calculators, with a little tweaking, can also be used to calculate the cost of NOT having sex. Using the girlfriend calculator, replace “How many hours do you spend having stupid conversations with your GF (per week)” with “How many hours do you spend having stupid conversations with other MGTOW (per week).” Ignore the rest of the questions until you get to the one about your hourly wage. Then, for the question asking how many times you have sex per week, ignore this wording and simply input “1.” Voila! You have calculated the (opportunity) cost per week of not having sex!
So, dear readers, what is YOUR cost of sex?
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>I count three that you deleted, one of which was merely a statement of proven fact. Nobody needs to bring forward their personal details to make a point, but if they choose to do so then it should be fair game for criticism.
>The lowest paid male manager was worst then she was per performance reviews.And you know this how? Common, don't hoard information, if you have access to these performance reviews then share them.
>@Cold:When you go on dates with your low-earning girlfriend, do you make sure that you go to places that you both can afford? When you have sex with her, do you pay for half the birth control? When you want to spice up your love life, do you pay for half the lingerie/riding crops/hand-cuffs/…? Unless you can truthfully answer "yes" to all these questions, you're the leech in the relationship and you should worry about your girlfriend looking into its financial aspects.
>@Cold:Here you go, Mr. Never-Heard-About-Google:http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=3564&wit_id=7438And before you start calling her names, please remember that she was under oath when she spoke to Congress. If she'd committed perjury, she would have been in great trouble.
>@girlscientist:My, aren't you curious about my romantic life. Well for your information she's not particularly low-earning, we do go to places we can both afford, the government paid for my vasectomy by way of my taxes except for the tray fee which was about $40, and our love life is sufficiently satisfying that we see no need for lingerie or props. Are you satisfied now?And yes, you will have to forgive me for not taking the word of a self-interested plaintiff at face value. I accept that if she said under oath that she got a "Top Performance Award" in 1996 then it must have happened or else she would have been charged with perjury, but the rest of it is just the word of a self-interested plaintiff and people get away with lying under oath all the time.No elaboration is given as to what that "Top Performance Award" actually meant, and even if it did mean something significant it was given two years before she retired. It doesn't say if she got a pay raise that same year, and it doesn't provide the necessary information to substantiate what dorksfordean said. Furthermore, it's not my job to use Google to verify other people's claims.
>@Cold: Well, you were awfully judgemental to other people in this thread, so the least you could do was prove that you had a leg to stand on.Ledbetter's case went through 3 courts before she testified to Congress, and I'm quite sure she was vetted again before she testified there. If she really was such a bad employee, I'm sure Goodyear could have found the lawyers to make their case and Congress would have found a better person to advertise their case. Nobody wants to find out that their poster child wasn't as pure as they made them out to be to the press. For example, Rosa Parks wasn't the first Black woman who refused to go to the back of the bus, but she was the first one that the civil rights movement felt comfortable about trotting out to the press. Of course, even when your poster child is perfect, problems can still arise: just look at what Michelle Malkin did to Graeme Frost, and what David Brock did to Anita Hill. But I'm willing to bet that the Democrats were very careful to have someone check Ledbetter's performance reviews. Better safe than sorry.
>Cold, unless you're making the (utterly unsubstantiated) claim that Ms. Ledbetter was by far the worst manager Goodyear had, then it doesn't matter whether she was their best, or simply mediocre. Furthermore, the amount of the paygap doesn't matter.* What does matter is I've met your challenge to "name one employer that pays men more than women for doing the same job at the same proficiency with the same hours and seriority."** You assumed that nobody could proffer an example; I was able to, with three seconds of thought, find an example from among America's largest corporations.While you could fairly (though incorrectly) argue that it's not a tremendous problem, you should also do the civility and intellectual honesty of this conversation a favor and have at least a slice of the humble pie I just served up.*For the sake of this argument. Obviously it does matter in terms of the damages to which Ms. Ledbetter is entitled, and the heinousness of Goodyear's actions, and so on and so forth.**The challenge was, of course, rigged. Workplace sex discrimination can and does operate through unjustified imbalances in promotion, leading to women unfairly being less senior than their male colleagues; then, even the nominally acceptable difference in pay between jobs can be a mechanism of discrimination. Ditto differences in training, mentoring, and the absence of reasonable maternity and paternity leave.******Before you start talking shit, notice that I included both. And unless you don't like an economy where people can raise children and also work, you're going to need both rather than neither.
>The corporation you named said that she was paid less due to poor performance, while she said that they paid her less due to her gender. It doesn't appear that any hard evidence was presented during the case; just testimony which makes it a he said, she said affair. Unless the jury had access to some compelling evidence that has not been mentioned in any of the documentation on this case, they decided it in error as the plaintiff's word shouldn't be worth any more than the defendant's.So no, you have not yet served up any humble pie, although you are the first to actually answer the challenge with something. You did not prove that Goodyear currently pays women less than men(my challenge is worded in the present tense) nor did you prove that Ledbetter's self-interested claim of being of equal or better proficiency to her male counterparts is actually true.
>The person who pulls out the wallet isn't always the one "paying." So the observations of waiters about who pulls out the wallet don't always reflect what's really going on.If the couple is married or sharing finances, or she gives him money before they leave the house, then maybe they are both paying, or maybe she is paying, regardless of who appears to be paying.My brother-in-law hated to be seen in a group where a woman paid the check, and my mother would humor him by handing him money under the table. He can't be the only one.
>Oh, and then there's the added problem that paying a good manager less money simply for being a woman means that they run the risk of losing her to a competitor who is willing to offer her a better salary since she is such a good manager. That's kind of the whole point of performance bonuses in the first place. So really, her claim of being paid less due to her gender isn't even of equal credibility to Goodyear's claim that it was because of her poor performance. She has essentially claimed that Goodyear hated women so much that they put their own profitability at risk just for the satisfaction of paying her less, and that is far less likely to be true than Goodyear's claim.
>The challenge was, of course, rigged.Only in the sense that the challenge calls for you to provide an example of an employer who is willing to flush money down the toilet just for the satisfaction of keeping women down. This is going to be difficult for obvious reasons, but you made it unnecessarily difficult for yourself. If you want to make a serious effort to meet my challenge, then large, publicly traded corporations are the worst possible place to look for a solid example as their shareholders put the highest priority on the bottom line.
>As someone who litigated cases both for plaintiffs and for defendants in employment cases, I know from personal experience that even in cases of the most egregious and obvious discrimination, the employer will always say that the plaintiff was fired/demoted/not promoted/paid less on account of poor performance. To claim that a plaintiff's testimony is self-serving while the defendant's is not is nonsensical at best, intellectually dishonest at worst. With exceedingly rare exceptions, ALL testimony is self-serving. That includes testimony by men.Also, no matter how compelling the evidence, a person who is clearly biased can still choose to ignore or reject it.
>I never said that the defendant's word isn't also self-serving. It should be no surprise that they say it was on account of poor performance because that is the most logical reason from the point of view of someone who cares about making money, which is the whole point of a business.Anyway, thanks for enlightening me as to how you derive that six-figure income about which you bragged so much in your comments on a previous post, as well as further justifying my overall negative opinion of lawyers.
>Only in the sense that the challenge calls for you to provide an example of an employer who is willing to flush money down the toilet just for the satisfaction of keeping women down. This is going to be difficult for obvious reasons, but you made it unnecessarily difficult for yourself. If you want to make a serious effort to meet my challenge, then large, publicly traded corporations are the worst possible place to look for a solid example as their shareholders put the highest priority on the bottom line. Shareholders in large, publicly traded corporations have very little ability to control the bottom line. There are laws that limit the power of shareholders, actually, and besides that, actors in the market do not always act rationally. While corporations pursue the bottom line in the manner in which they produce consumer goods or render services, their managements have showed themselves more than willing to spend considerable amounts of money on ego-boosting stuff that doesn't further, and at times actually hurts, business. If corporations truly looked never to overpay ever, then there wouldn't be all those corporate executives, whose compensation is as obscenely excessive as their management is incompetent.
>"It should be no surprise that they say it was on account of poor performance because that is the most logical reason from the point of view of someone who cares about making money, which is the whole point of a business."Except they don't only care about money, and making money isn't the only perk of being in charge of a business; and even when it is, people don't always pursue that goal in a rational way."Anyway, thanks for enlightening me as to how you derive that six-figure income about which you bragged so much in your comments on a previous post, as well as further justifying my overall negative opinion of lawyers."*Shrug* What difference does it make? You already detest me simply for being female, so it doesn't matter what I do for a living. This comment has about as much effect as if an anti-Semite told me he doesn't like lawyers. Not to mention the fact that your opinion simply doesn't matter to me.
>"Oh, and then there's the added problem that paying a good manager less money simply for being a woman means that they run the risk of losing her to a competitor who is willing to offer her a better salary since she is such a good manager."That's certainly what happened with Black people, right? No one ever underpaid them for the same work, or overcharged them for the same goods, as others did or got?Discrimination works when everyone does it and so everyone in the discriminating class benefits by it. It works even better if there's a strong culture against letting people know what others earn or pay.If everyone pays all blue-eyed people less, then the cost of doing business goes down. If some people start paying blue-eyed people more, and they start demanding equal wages, then everyone pays more for no more work. Cost of business goes up.
>I don't detest anyone for simply being female and claiming that I do without proof is libel. If my opinion truly didn't matter to you then you wouldn't respond to it, would you?At any rate, when I buy shares in a corporation I only care about money, and I would rather own a rising stock in a corporation that pays a huge salary to its CEO than a falling stock in that pays only a modest salary. Now if the CEO takes a huge salary while my stock plummets, THEN I'm going to use my shares to vote against the continued employment of that person, but otherwise as long as I'm making money I don't care if the CEO gets paid a lot. Multiply me by a few million and you have the reason why CEOs make so damn much.
>You can't pay any employee less than the minimum amount for which that employee is willing to work, or else you lose that employee. The only way that you can pay black-skinned or blue-eyed employees less without losing them is if you were previously overpaying them, which means you are still overpaying your other employees. It's not in the economic interest of an employer to overpay employees, especially not for such a silly reason as having the "right" skin or eye color or gender.
>> I don't detest anyone for simply being female and claiming that I do without proof is libel.No it's not, you sanctimonious dweeb. It's impossible to libel an anonymous internet commenter.
>Cold – "Yeah, no police are actually enforcing the idea that men pay for dates, but when a man starts insisting that dates be dutch as I started doing a few years ago, the quantity of dates they get sinks like AIG stock."Yes, this is probably true. If you put more limiters on what you want from a date, you are going to return fewer results. But we aren't talking about the difference between getting a car and getting a car you want where you might be willing to sacrifice your tastes, we are talking about sacrificing things you strongly believe in order to be in a relationship. That does not seem like a great way to ensure future success of said relationship. I'm very, very picky about people I spend time with, not just people I have sex with but *everyone* I choose to interact with. That means I spend more time alone than I absolutely have to, but when it is time to judge the quality of my relationships, being selective pays off because I don't have one friend I don't respect or one lover I do not trust implicitly. If you *decide* that the compromise you're making is okay, then it totally is. But please don't frame it as a compromise you are somehow being *forced* to make. It is not.
>It's impossible for an anonymous internet commenter to successfully sue for libel, but it's still possible to make a false statement that is damaging to that commenter's (online)reputation which is the very definition of libel.
>Cold, several points.A culture of discrimination allows businesses to save money by underpaying disadvantaged groups. For example, telephone operators were uniformly female because they were cheaper, even though they did "same job at the same proficiency with the same hours and seriority." Because women expected less pay, underpaying them was possible and in fact an efficient cost-saving measure. The free market does not operate to increase equality in the face of social norms; in fact, it can perpetuate those norms. This is well demonstrated throughout history. The extremely free labor market of the 1880s failed to attenuate either the growing racism or the rampant sexism of the period, for example. The free market simply doesn't work the magic that you claim. There has been real inequity in pay for women and minorities under free market systems, and there still is.As for the Ledbetter case, she was unaware that she was underpaid. She couldn't jump ship to escape discrimination that she did not know of. It simply isn't possible.Regarding your commentary on the facts of the Ledbetter case: it's certainly true that we don't have access to all the evidence the jury saw. Therefore, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that the jury saw something. You've claimed this was a "he said, she said" situation–if that's so, why didn't the jury find for the defendant, with their better-equipped corporate lawyers? The presumption in this case ought rest with the jury's findings–unless you disbelieve in the jury system altogether.About my "rigged" comment–you're missing my point. One of the easiest ways to discriminate is by hiring women and minorities for lower paying positions, or not promoting them as much. Of course this does render the company marginally less efficient, but that doesn't stop it from happening. Your original challenge assumed that the only way to discriminate is by paying equally ranked employees unequally. However, denial of promotion can be just as discriminatory, even though it doesn't meet your challenge.Finally, as for your original inquiry, let's take another tack. The EEOC reports 73,058 Title VII filings in fiscal year 2010. Unless you're going to argue that every single one of those filings is without merit, then real wage discrimination is taking place in America today.
>"You can't pay any employee less than the minimum amount for which that employee is willing to work, or else you lose that employee."Unless all places of employment underpay those people."It's not in the economic interest of an employer to overpay employees, especially not for such a silly reason as having the "right" skin or eye color or gender."Sure, if you're the decision maker and you have the right skin or eye color or gender. It makes huge sense for me as a blue-eyed person to say blue-eyed people should get paid a lot more. If traditionally in my society blue-eyed people already handle all the money and make the decisions, we are the ones running the company, then we all as the company owners benefit. Screw the people with other eye colors!Your claim only makes sense if we were all dropped on this planet yesterday with equal wealth and health and training. But we weren't.
>Mr. Cold that is a libertarian assumption about the behavior of humans. People do things for all sorts of reasons that have little to no bearing on their finances. For instance, it has been shown in a study to have a baby in your twenties is a bad economic decision. Yet women still have children in their twenties. In fact a now MIA poster in another blog post was going to insist on his wife bearing children in her twenties. In a perfect economic world, yes your premise would be accurate but this is reality and people do get paid less and have no idea that they do get paid less and the fact that women have been traditionally paid less has not been any guarantee that women will be hired for a job…especially in upper management.
>Cold: "I also asked my friends how often they see the woman pay for the entire date cost of the meal or for both tickets, and every single one of them answered that they had either never seen it happen, or it happened maybe once in a month."This doesn't surprise me actually. Nearly every time I pay for my boyfriend and myself in a restaurant or bar (which, incidentally, is nearly every time we go to a restaurant or bar), I pay with my debit card (with my clearly female name). After running the card, probably 95% of servers will place it in front of my boyfriend and thank him.I think many more women pay on dates than servers notice.