Every day, it seems, I learn a little bit more about the oppression of men. Recently, for example, I learned that men who are working customer service jobs are oppressed because they are prohibited from punching their customers, even when these customers are really, really annoying, and possibly even ladies. At least that’s the lesson I took from a recent Facebook posting by MRA and frequent Spearhead contributor Jack Donovan. Here’s Jack:
Men want to carry their own weight, but to do so, they may have to take a job which requires them to choose “flight” over “fight” as part of their regular duties. All customer service oriented jobs, for instance, require men to take abuse from … someone who is angrily issuing insults and challenge cues … and reply submissively.
Even worse is when some of these poor men, like Jack, are natural “alphas” forced to take these beta-ass jobs because for some reason the people in charge of hiring haven’t recognized their awesome alphaness:
It would be interesting to see someone do a study tracking the testosterone levels of “alpha” type men who would not choose a customer service job, but who were forced to take a position where they had to apologize and beg forgiveness from abusive women and “betas” all day.
It’s almost like you have to act as if the customer is always right!
As a man who had blood in his face for *several hours* after having to hold my tongue while I was screamed at by a neurotic old female customer this week, the physical effects were pretty noticeable in the short term. I was murderously furious for hours and then emotionally exhausted and kind of depressed through the next day.
Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone – with the possible exception of the old lady, of course, and the rest of the customers, and maybe the firm employing Mr. Donovan – if he could have chosen “fight” instead of “flight,” and just popped that old bat in the nose? Problem fucking solved!
Let’s just shut down the economy and the judicial system for a day or two while we work out a way that Mr. Donovan can just punch people without any consequences. Because he’s an alpha, damn it, and he really shouldn’t be hemmed in by petty “laws” and “social conventions” and “moral codes” clearly meant for betas and ladies and other losers.
EDITED TO ADD: Donovan has responded to this post in the comments here. He says he’s not an MRA, so I’ve edited out that part. (I did find his Facebook post through a link on the MR subreddit, FWIW.)
I should clarify that Donovan did not talk directly about punching people; he talked about the “fight or flight” instinct.
If you’re anywhere near 30 and you are still doing customer service, I think it’s time you resign yourself to the fact that you’re basically a complete failure in life. If you’re female, to remedy this, you need to find a man of means to take care of you and marry him. But don’t wait too long, as once a female reaches 30, so beings the steady decline in sexual market value. This is important because the female who in this predicament has little to trade on but her looks. As your 30’s progress, your SMV will begin to plummet rapidly, and so too, your odds at landing a man dumb enough to marry and support you. Contrarily, if you are a man and still doing this sort of work, well, what can I say, you have failed miserably.
I hate not being able to punch people in customer service. It’s ok Jack! I feel your pain!
Kate – you probably haven’t met any MRAs because I’m none of the more devoted ones bother with women much. I’m not an active MRA but I do study game in order to bed women, so you’ve probably met guys hundreds of guys who are loosely aware of the MRA life, they just aren’t going to mention it whilst trying to get down your pants at that tasty vag of yours.
Ah, customer service. A special kind of hell, where you wake up in the morning disappointed you didn’t die in your sleep and you go home at night fantasizing about murdering everyone in the world. You see your future spread out before you like an endless nightmare, 40 years worth of angry faces and crying yourself to sleep. Sometimes you want to beat the customer into a bloody pulp, and the rest of the time you just want to put a bullet in your own brain. No, customer service isn’t fun. Yes, I most certainly understand the emotions described in this guy’s post. No, it doesn’t have a damn fucking thing to go with the gener or alphaness of the customer in question.
If I didn’t need the health insurance, I’d be out of here so fast my boss’s head would be spining. But, I do need it, and so here I am. Too bad the mental health services it provides are worse than useless. -eyeroll- None of the mental health professionals in my town accept referrals from my office’s program, so it’s basically just there so they can say they have it. I get REALLY fucking resentful of my boyfriend when I start thinking about this topic. He’s Native, and therefore received FREE fucking service for all of his health care needs. FREE! If I could get free health care, I’d take a significant pay cut in order never to have to work with customers again. But I don’t, because of all this white privilege I have that does me so much good here in the ass end of nowhere. [ / bitter ]
At leat cubicle customer service is better than retail customer service. Thank God for small mercies, eh? I suppose I should be grateful I even have a job. The internet tends to not be very forgiving/understanding of work-related complaints these days, with so many people still out of work. At least, in the US.
That would have been a better story. Just sayin’.
That’s how I read it too, and for a second I was way more interested — but then he was just describing his high blood pressure. Eh. You hate like half the population, bro, we know you have high blood pressure! :p
Well, if it weren’t for us white people being murdering lying raping conquistadors then yeah, I guess you would get free health care ’cause you’d be in Europe right now. I’m sure Native people think it’s totes worth it though!
The post is gender neutral. When I was in college, I worked at a bank as a customer service rep. The rule was if a customer used profanity or abusive language, you had to warn the customer you would hang up if he or she continued. If the person repeatedly cussed, then you were allowed to hang up.
Most Customer Service jobs are difficult jobs. Whether for a phone company, bank, or any other company. Many customer service reps. are underpaid and overworked. Customers call in and often vent their frustrations on the particular representative regardless of gender.
The management of these particular companies, usually have the mindset “The Customer is always right”. So therefore, customer service representatives regardless of gender have to learn to “suck it up”. It can be a stressful job. I would tell Mr. Donovan you have to take your licks.
Lastly, I would tell Mr. Donovan that customer service representatives should be grateful they even have a job. Many customer service jobs are now being replaced by computers or voice response systems where a customer can get information by their phone pad without even speaking to someone. Also many customer service jobs in the USA are being transferred overseas to places such as India where wages are less. Stop whining Mr. Donovan. this is not a gender issue.Suck it up.
I don’t even think MRA’s have the seeds of a legitimate grievance here because it’s not a men’s issue. Customer service workers take a lot of abuse regardless of their gender, and as far as I know, there are more female customer service workers than male ones anyway, at least in capacities that entail the maximum interaction with the company’s clientele. For all we know, what this MRA is saying here is that it is perfectly okay to treat customer service like shit, it’s just that only women and “betas” should be “forced” to take those jobs.
As to the rest — doesn’t the fact that Donovan was “forced” to work in customer service prove he’s a beta? Hey, I thought if you are alpha, you do what you want, take alpha-ish jobs, fuck the world, and not let anyone force you to do anything. I love the fluid definitions MRA’s employ. What’s the definition of “alpha” in this case — an asshole who likes punching people in the face but is “forced” not to?
@Bagelsan
I’m pretty sure the Russians got there first, in this particular case. Although, of course, Russians are also white, and American white people did plenty of fuckery later. You’re right, I shouldn’t have added that last sentence. It just takes away from my point that customer service sucks ass and most people who are in it are stuck with it.
(In my defence, he isn’t actually racially Native, only legally. That’s what makes it so frustrating. If my mother had been adopted, I, too, could have white privilege AND free health care. But, then again… if my consciousness had been born into one of my brother’s bodies, I wouldn’t need the health insurance in the first place, because I wouldn’t need birth control. If I hadn’t been born/raised/probably will die in a shithole small town, I’d have more options. If I hadn’t been taught that life was sunshine and roses and I could be anything I wanted to be, I wouldn’t feel so disappointed, disillusioned, and depressed now that I’ve reached adulthood and seen the truth. There’s a million “if onlys” in everyone’s life.)
True story: For the first 22 years of my life, until I started browsing feminist/sociology blogs like this one, I thought I was so emotionally unstable because I had a vagina. Now I can only attribute it to being an immature little shit who’s been sheltered by a small town life where the worst that happens is some 20-something kills themself a couple times a year and some high schoolers get into a drunk driving accident every graduation. I miss ignorance. Now my problems are my fault. :p
I did temp work as a phone operator for a company (now the job is probably automated). I had customers who were angry and hostile, sometimes cursing. I never noticed that women were any worse than men. Some people just consider themselves special and demand special treatment. Sometimes when I was transferring calls, I would tell callers that they were going to go to voice mail because I could see a line of customers waiting in the office. Some would yell and demand to speak to a person. Sorry, but there was no way that a customer on the phone is going to go ahead of someone who is standing in line in the office.
It could be very stressful. I never cried, but there were times when I was biting my tongue to be polite. What helped was that my coworkers were great and I could grumble to them.
I didn’t realize that my being a woman should have prevented me from feeling angry over rude customers. I guess it only matters when it’s an alpha man receiving abuse.
You should, but I’ve been t here.
The OP is even more stupid than David indicated; he’s trying to talk about Game and Alpha as if they’re actually established by studies and science.
And yeah, he’s basically trying to say that it’s okay these jobs are what they are for everyone else; it is only an alpha male who suffers from grovelling at the hands of egotistical power tripping customers.
I did realize that you hadn’t said where you are, but I figured that we white people probably fucked the place up at sooome point so I just went with it. :p
Your point about lack of access to healthcare stands on its own in my opinion; free healthcare should be a human right no matter a person’s legal status or ethnicity. And yeah, if a white person can’t get healthcare and dies from it they still obviously have white privilege but at that point their privilege is a bit moot for that individual on a practical level ’cause, yanno. Dead. As an academic point I mention it here, because it is worth keeping in mind even under duress, but I wouldn’t dig some poor deceased Caucasian up to lecture them about it.
And as someone who has healthcare I won’t lecture you on how to feel about it, either. That would be an asshole move.
Omg, slowly-becoming-less-ignorant-sheltered-young-woman high five! It sounds like we grew up similarly, though I’ve been reading online blogs from a slightly younger age. ^^
“Hey, I thought if you are alpha, you do what you want, take alpha-ish jobs, fuck the world, and not let anyone force you to do anything.”
Alphas must be the worse customers *ever*.
Customer service for the Post Office. I lasted four months. The threats, the ass ignorance of the customers, the dudes so pissed off about not getting any mail that they threatened to hunt me down and rape me because I couldn’t magically make envelopes appear in their mailbox… it was hell.
er, “worst” even
I don’t believe that men have it any worse in customer service than women, for sure. Mostly it seems like the misery level is affected by stuff like how your boss treats you, what resources/recourse you have to deal with shitty customers, and whether or not it’s a finite job. I worked retail (UPS store) a few summers/Xmas breaks and just the fact that this was an “optional” part-time job helped me keep my cool more easily. Having some person harass you over the shipping costs of their stupid crap is waaay nicer when you can say to yourself “this too shall pass (and won’t college seem so pleasant after this)!”
Even though I had it pretty easy — very few incidents, and my bosses (a married couple with kids) always backed me up — just that little bit of service experience has made me loads kinder to waitstaff/cashiers/customer service/etc. Not that I was ever mean to them, but now I try to go out of my way to make it clear I don’t blame them for things outside their control and that I appreciate their help and so on.
As much as Mr. Donovan is an inexcusable asshole with delusions of grandeur (Alpha? Seriously?), shit like this is why I am very patient with customer service people. It’s tough job, and I’ve dealt with my fair of entitled jerkwads in the glamorous world of retail garden centers.
“…my fair [share] of…”
(Also, if you treat people nice they are usually way more helpful, if you want to take pure empathy out of the equation! Customer service people can occasionally make your life slightly more or less frustrating; why piss them off?)
This bit particularly tickles me:
Feigning gameness? How does the concept even apply? Does he think people whining about their telephone bills etc are trying to sleep with the customer service reps? Oh, I see, they’re feigning it because… um, some reason. Quite frankly it seems like this PUA gives people such backward concepts that they have difficulty interpreting human behavior on a fundamental level.
BTW, I don’t get the whole “punching” angle to the OP, David. Has Jack Donovan said something about how manly men should be allowed to punch people in the past? Because I really don’t see it in his post or the comments and this is the only post about him on Manboobz. So either I’m missing some context or maybe David is reading too much into this.
-high fives back- We is larnin’! XD
I’m trying to get a job with the local school system right now. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while but have been avoiding because a) it’s too feminine and I’m still learning to get over the knee-jerk reaction of rejecting anything feminine in order to appear more tomboyish/masculine and therefore “better” and b) it’s what my mother does and for some reason I feel like I should be doing something different than she did. (B is especially funny because I’m currently doing pretty much exactly what my dad does, except in a different department. He even made a point of warning me not to fall into this trap, and I did it anyway.) That way the only customer service I would be doing would be with the kids themselves. Since I wouldn’t be an actual teacher or an administrator, parent contact would be limited. Yay!
Word. I know around here we will bend over backward to help you find the best solution to your problem if you make us like you or have sympathy for you. If you act like a jerk, we won’t even try. Sadly, the jerks just work their way up the ladder until someone finally just gives them what they want so they will go away. The nice ones tend to give in and do what we tell them the first time, so they still kind of wind up with the short end of the stick most of the time. (The ones that cry seem to make most of us think they’re lying and not want to help them. I wonder why that is? Maybe the whole “tears=woman=weak” thing?)
Wake up, Jack. Customer service is not fun. That is why you get PAID. If it was fun, you would pay to do it.
If memory serves, this Donovan person started a mini civil war within the men’s groups, about six months ago. It was about the same thing also, the whole “men are real men” sillyness. It was a wonderful popcorn and soda kind of moment.
Maybe I remember wrong. Not worth looking into.
The way the PUA guys describe alphahood, I would expect that good looking men just set up an office where women come and give money to them. If for some reason an alpha doesn’t have money, he could pay his bills with “game” rather than normal currency.
[bold emphasis mine]
Ay, there’s the rub. Men men men men, manly men, oo hoo hoo, hoo hoo, ooooooo should NOT be required to reply submissively.
The comments here are from “lowly” customer service people, but I’d like to point out that us higher-status customer service people (aka doctors and lawyers) have to put up with a lot too. That is, if we expect to make a living.
So if my client turns unreasonable, I have to be the soul of reasonableness (or write off the fee). People scream at me, hang up on me, call my office at unreasonable hours (why why why do you think I’m there at 2 AM to “call me RIGHT BACK”???), indulge in personal insults….. this proves what? That I’m “oppressed”?
No, it proves that I work in a trade that requires me to interact with the paying public, and that he/she who pays the piper calls the tune.
Yes. Customer service people are required to behave submissively to the people who are responsible for them getting paid.
If the “alphas” here don’t like it, perhaps they should move out into the woods and take to clubbing down deer for their meals. Honestly, grow up.