Quiz: Which of the following is an example of female infidelity? (Check all that apply.)
a) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; neither one sleeps with anyone else.
b) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; the man sleeps with someone else.
c) A man and a woman are in a monogamous relationship; the woman sleeps with someone else.
d) A woman, who may or may not be in a monogamous relationship, works hard at a job she enjoys.
ANSWER: If you answered c, congratulations! You are correct. If you also answered d, you are probably PUA guru and freelance internet asshole “Roissy” or one of his douchey fans. In a recent post Roissy argues, quite sincerely, that women who take their careers seriously are committing a sort of psycho-social-sexual crime against men.
In the post, Roissy quotes a reader of his who’d suggested that “female career obsession [is] a form of infidelity to the family and marrage.” Roissy seconds this opinion and goes on to argue that:
Women who place their careers front and center are committing a kind of betrayal of their sex’s biological and psychological imperatives. It’s like a big middle finger to everything that distinguishes the feminine from the masculine, the yin from the yang.
Is it possible that these women are just, you know, really into their careers? That they’re good at what they do and enjoy doing it? That they want to make a difference in the world? That they might have a family to support? Or that, you know, they simply like making a lot of money?
Of course not. For Roissy, careers are little more than psychological crutches for women who are 1) trying to distract themselves from loneliness and/or sexual boredom:
It’s quite possible that the worst offenders — the 14 hour day lawyercunts and the graduate school hermits — embrace the male-oriented rat race and achievement spectacle because it offers a welcome distraction from either spinsterly loneliness or boring beta male partners who, while intellectually are rationalized as good matches, do not viscerally excite them.
Or, 2) imagining themselves as the heroines in some glamorous romance novel:
Maybe, too, these careerist chicks see their jobs as a way to enter the world of the alpha male, to have a taste of what it would be like to be part of his life. The office cubes and doormen and glassy skyscrapers have given legions of plain janes the daily stimulation to mentally masturbate fantasy romances with the alpha males who run their companies or the alpha salesmen who greet them at the front desk with a twinkle in their eyes.
Or, 3) trying to magically ward off the case of the uglies that apparently infects each and every woman when she hits the age of 40:
When a woman’s SMV [Sexual Market Value] inevitably craters in her 40s, her career might be all she has to lift her spirits, especially if she has no husband she loves, no kids, or even just one kid who spends most of his time playing CoD or robbing convenience stores.
Of course, in Roissy’s mind, these women aren’t quite women to begin with, even before they get hit with the 40th birthday ugly stick:
[T]here is something “off” about women who are excessively devoted to their careers and to obtaining an acronymic parade of pointless credentials. Careerist shrikes are some of the most unpleasant, unfeminine women to be around. They must have more androgen receptors than normal women to be so grating to the male sensibility. Sure, they can fuck like Viagra-laced male pornstars, but as soon as you relieve yourself in them you will feel a second powerful urge to escape their aggro nastiness.
Yeah, somehow I’m guessing that urge to flee is pretty strong in these women as well, as soon as they realize that they guy they’ve just had sex with is a pretentious narcissistic windbag who hates women.
Roissy continues, revealing far more about his own sexual insecurities than about any actual career women:
The women for whom career success is their comfort and their purpose are some sort of weird, monstrous amalgam of man and woman, halfway between both worlds, their sexual polarity askew. These types tend to attract either intense short term flings with alphas or plodding marriages with dweeby, effete kitchen bitches.
Roissy is vaguely aware that feminists – not to mention pretty much anyone who isn’t a complete douchebag misogynist – might have a few issues with his theories here.
The dumbfuck feminists will naturally ask, “Why doesn’t this same theory apply to men? Aren’t they escaping sad love lives by retreating to their careers?”
Don’t you know it’s different for guys? Unlike women, men are evolutionarily programmed to be resource providers for women. It is not a betrayal of a man’s innate purpose in life to ambitiously pursue achievement and accolades. In fact, just the opposite; it’s an affirmation of that ancient purpose.
Remember this, you ungrateful career ladies: WE HUNTED THE MAMMOTH TO FEED YOU!
MRAL hates everybody, including – no, especially – himself.
Ah. “Girlfriend” in his case = “pussy when I want it.” Got it.
I only take care of myself, and I can say that grocery shopping takes several hours a week. This may or may not include time spent going to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, and riding the bus. Depends on which stores I go to. The closest two are about 8 and 15 minutes on foot, so that’s roughly a half hour that gets added every time I go. Then there’s time spent figuring out what I want to eat, reading labels (allergies), deciding if I have space for X since it’s on sale, and so on. I guess if you have a car and only ever eat frozen dinners and ramen noodles, an hour a week is accurate. And is you microwave stuff or dump soup in a pot, an hour a day might be accurate…
But not if you have to chop, hand mix, marinate, or bake anything.
My mom was a sahm for the first decade of my life. And yes, she was lazy as fuck. She just …is. And so is my brother. In fact, he’s even lazier. At least my mom could cook SOMETHING. Laziness is not a gendered condition, though it may be inherited (harharhar). I did a homestay and my host mom was a sahm to 3 kids way younger than me (plus me), and she would get up at 4am and go to bed at 1. She never stopped moving. You might say, “Well, foreign women make better wives,” but I can assure you that the prevailing opinion is “Japanese women are lazy as fuck” and that they’re “spoiled princesses who refuse to work.”
“MRAL hates everybody, including – no, especially – himself.”
Well at least I am…partly…in good company!
“Frankly, I would think I was doing something wrong if douches like this didn’t hate me.”
-Fuck MRAs
Quote is full of win it is!
Shaenon, I think you nailed it! Could I run this as a guest post?
Graham, I know, right? How can I enjoy rereading Story of O now that it’s become polluted in my brain by this asshole?
I’m just glad he didn’t call himself “Cheeseburger,” because that cuts even closer to home for me.
Sally Strange – “Women do two-thirds of the world’s work”
That claim that has been debunked. If women did 2/3 of the work don’t you think that they would be the taller stronger ones?
Men and women the world over do roughly the same amount of work.
Couch Entitlement Surprise—men do just as much work as women do.
By Joel Waldfogel
Everyone from economists and sociologists to Oprah knows that women work more than men. Their longer combined hours, at the home and at the office, stop men from taking afternoon naps on the couch and cause fights that end with men spending nights on the couch. And yet according to new study, those longer hours are a myth, because it’s just not true that women carry a heavier load.
Three economists, Michael Burda of Humboldt University in Berlin, Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas, and Philippe Weil of the Free University of Brussels have analyzed data from surveys in 25 countries that ask people how they spend their time. Some of the countries are rich, like the United States and Germany, some are poor, like Benin and Madagascar, and some are in the middle, like Hungary, Mexico, and Slovenia. The people surveyed were asked to fill in diaries indicating how they spend each segment of their day.
The 24 hours we all have each day can be divided into four broad activities: “market work” that is, work for pay, typically outside the house; “homework,” including housework and child care; “tertiary time,” including sleep, eating, and other biological necessities that people can do only for themselves; and the time left over, which is leisure. Leisure is not essential to survival, but we like it.
Rest is here
http://feck-blog.blogspot.com/search/label/Working-gap
I’ll admit I object to Fuck MRAs screen name, but only because I believe the course of action that her name describes would be highly inadvisable, not to mention unsatisfying.
Shaenon, if we could Like or Upvote comments here, I’d be liking and upvoting the crap out of that!
ah hahahahaaa…
Captain Bathrobe, I thought just exactly that shortly after I posted the first time and considered changing it. Just never got around to it and now it’s kinda grown on me.
😀 @Shaenon
Ami Angelwing’s version of the “History of the World” story staring White Shaft from last night is worth the look too if you haven’t seen it.
Shaenon, I think you nailed it! Could I run this as a guest post?
I would of course be beyond honored.
After being forced to listen to my tales of Manboobz, my husband says I have ruined the NWO for him, which is a cryin’ shame because the night Hulk Hogan joined was one of the highlights of his teenage years.
Roissy is an uber-CREEP. Ugh.
Nice to know he pretty much hates all women. Stay at home? You lazy gold-digger. Work? How could you put anything other than your man’s needs first?
Honestly, he writes like women are only sentient when a man is interacting with them. If we’re not servicing them in some way we just turn off, I guess, since having any needs at all (emotional, physical, financial, sexual) makes us into monsters.
Mr. Al, your blithe dismissal of the work one can put into one’s home and family is touching. You should have written that on your mother’s day card!
“Dear Mom – Thanks for the tiny amount of your life you spent raising me, I guess. Aren’t you glad I never had to be fed or clothed or cleaned up after or taken anywhere for the entire time I lived in your home? Hell, why am I even sending you a card? You lazy bitch – Mr. Al”
Roissy is a more intelligent and humorous version of the female game related and endless dating advise that has been published in the female media for decades now.
“teh eviils menz are doing what we do, oh noes!!!!!”
Ah, I can’t believe I forgot about this, but the Bureau of Labor has a pretty interesting site with annual reports on their Time Use Surveys. Mr. Al will like it because it’s the American Time Use Survey. Other people will like it because it contains a lot of information about how people spend their time. There’s one report for everyone, and one for married parents, plus a bunch of tables. Enjoy!
A dude who says all women are worthless is humorous? Not really.
Sorry, you lost me there. I couldn’t see the rest of your comment through tears of laughter.
Shaenon…brilliant.
Louie – Personally, I think both Roissy’s advice and the Cosmo equivalent for women are both pretty bad. Honestly, from what I’ve read he really isn’t any funnier or more intelligent than Cosmo (which means boring and dumb, by the way). Mainstream feminism – particularly mainstream sex-positive feminism – typically eschews both.
It’s not “teh eviils menz are doing what we do, oh noes!!!!!” it’s “shit, this is bad advice and humans shouldn’t treat other humans this way.”
Oh and Louie again – read the Waldfogel piece, very interesting. One thing I want to point out:
“While men and women spend about the same time working in rich countries, women do work more than men in poor countries. And the gap widens as countries get poorer. While in the United States, which has a per capita GNP of roughly $33,000, there is no difference between the amount of male and female work, in Benin, Madagascar, and South Africa, which have a per capita income of less than $10,000, women work one to two hours more per day than men…Many women with demanding careers tell me that it is women working full-time in the market, not women overall, who work more than comparable men. This study cannot settle that question because it does not report work time separately for people with and without market jobs. But if women with careers work more than men, while women overall work the same amount as men, then women without market jobs must work less than men. Men can use that argument to hit the couch in the afternoon. Or to end up there at night.”
So, this kind of makes me wonder, if you did the analysis based on socioeconomic status, if the result for the US would look different? Anyone know of any work looking at this?
Citation please. I gave mine.
Are you a Lamarckian? Now THAT is something that was debunked… by Darwin. Like, a really long time ago.
I think you are using a gendered definition of the word “work.” Here’s a hint: not all work is paid work.
You know what I never understand?
The constant complaints that “women these days just don’t act like women!”
If it was in my nature not to work, if I was not evolutionarily designed to work, then… why is this even a problem? Why would I want to work?
Anyway, as everyone on the blog has said already, it’s not like there was some historical period where women (other than very high-class ones) didn’t work. We may not have had the same jobs as men, but women have been working from 1940s munitions factories to 1800s sweatshops to medieval farms all the way back to putting the “gathering” in “hunting and gathering.”
I actually agree with MRAL that keeping a modern house only takes a couple hours a day–without kids. With kids, whooole new ballgame. I like kids enough as people, but in terms of realizing what they’d do to my options in life, there’s no contraception like babysitting…
Tabby
“Roissy is a more intelligent…
Sorry, you lost me there. I couldn’t see the rest of your comment through tears of laughter.”
Give me one example of female game/dating advise out of the endless drivel that has been published by women over the last three decades that is a funny, smart and on the money as roissy in dc.
“If women did 2/3 of the work don’t you think that they would be the taller stronger ones?”
Yeah, echoing Sally on that being really, really dumb. “Work” doesn’t necessarily mean lifting heavy objects and being able to reach the high shelf.
ah hahahahaaa…
Captain Bathrobe, I thought just exactly that shortly after I posted the first time and considered changing it. Just never got around to it and now it’s kinda grown on me.
I know what you mean. If you tried to change it now, you’d have to explain all over again who you were. Oh well. 🙂
Sally you didnt read the article.
Couch Entitlement
Surprise—men do just as much work as women do.
By Joel Waldfogel
http://www.slate.com/id/2164268/pagenum/2
Paid work and unpaid work considered, men and women do the same amount of work.
Why? Is this a competition? Roissy vs. Cosmo in the Great Humor/Dating Advice Smackdown? With Roissy representing ALL men and Cosmo representing ALL women?
What are you, 7 years old? If so, that would explain your Lamarckian take on evolution.