All those jobs going overseas? Blame it on the ladies. At least according to MRA blogger The Fifth Horseman – the guy behind The Misandry Bubble, a bizarre apocalyptic manifesto that took the manosphere by storm last year. In a heavily upvoted comment on The Spearhead, TFH explains:
Not many people realize that outsourcing happens mostly due to feminism.
Feminists impose all sorts of costs on businesses in the US, who are forced to employ women despite the low productivity of these female employees.
Since an office is not allowed to have too many men, the next best answer is to move the entire department to India or China, where Western feminists can no longer harass it.
Since Western women cost more than what Western men produce, outsourcing is inevitable, as a means to avoid feminism.
The blogger behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog was impressed enough with this argument that he featured it in a post of his own, adding
Plenty of people have tried to run the numbers on the offshoring of jobs, but they can never figure out where the savings are supposed to be. Business would only offshore jobs if it made financial sense, and running the numbers indicates that it doesn’t make financial sense because any savings gets eaten up by the costs of offshoring. That is the case until you include the costs of feminism in the analysis. When someone runs the numbers on offshoring, they don’t include things like the costs of the false sexual harassment industry, affirmative action, and pure makework jobs for women in their analysis. As soon as feminism is included, offshoring makes perfect financial sense for business. …
If you want jobs to come back to the US (and elsewhere), then you have to eliminate feminism.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it.
I’ve always had what I’d call pretty cushy jobs in terms of physical strain, and even I’ve been hurt on the job. During my short stint in retail I slipped on metal stairs in the back of the store while carrying a side table and gave myself a concussion. Doing sales and customer service has resulted in carpal tunnel from too much typing. When I was doing sales for a start-up I was tired all the time, since I was typically working 12+ hour days. I’m not complaining, because that job paid very well indeed, but it certainly wasn’t stress-free. Journalism can involve being outside in terrible weather and considerable personal danger when covering crime stories. Even music journalism, which is pretty damn cushy, involved some physical discomfort – I’ve slipped and banged elbows and knees on scaffolding while taking photos, I’ve had stagediving musicians hit me in the head with their motorcycle boots while diving over the press pit, and try holding a heavy camera above your head for an hour and see how lovely your arms feel afterwards.
Almost all jobs involve some sort of physical discomfort, and there are a lot of jobs that involve far longer hours than NWOs does. It’s just because NWO is both sexist and selfish that he assumes no one else works as hard as he does, and women don’t really work at all.
That’s not what freedom of association means. It has never meant that.
@ Developers^3
The market fails. All the time. The market doesn’t provide for security, a legal system, police, roads, schools, power, water, sewage, worker’s rights, low prices, pollution, equal distribution of inputs, sustainable consumption of finite goods, sustainable consumption of slow to replenish goods (ie lumber, crops), or many other things. The market (I assume you’re talking about the “free” market, with the invisible hand assumption) doesn’t work the way many current economists think it does.
BTW, the “invisible hand” was brought up by Adam Smith only to disprove it. He wrote his proposal for “liberal” economics as a response to the damaging mercantile policies being pushed by the government of Great Britain at the end of the 19th century. He wanted to help workers, and redistribute more fairly the income from production, as well as ensure fair treatment of his workers.
Now, you may not know Adam Smith, but he is the ‘father’ of modern neoliberal economics, which your arguments seem to follow. However, if you fall more on the libertarian extreme, then you are attempting to follow Nozick, and his theories.
Nozick wrote his seminal work, “Anarchy, State and Utopia” as a right-wing libertarian response to Rawls’s “A Theory of Justice”, which proposed a dramatic restructuring of economic wealth to create true equality of opportunity. In his philosophic work, he provides no defense for his theory, and acknowledges problems without providing solutions, preferring to leave it to later theorists to fix them when his ideas are put into practice.
He also recanted his entire theory later in life. The father of libertarian thinking recanted, saying that personal freedom can sometimes only be obtained through collectivist policies; and that taxes (which in his first book he decries as theft of the worst degree) justly redistribute wealth to save an overly selfish minority from itself.
Just though everyone here should know, since he is the seminal thinker for libertarians, and he admits he was wrong.
That’s a pretty privileged point of view, Developers. What about people who don’t work in an office? What about migrant workers and foreign domestic workers, who don’t work in an office or for a company? Some of them have visas that tie them to their place of employment. Many times, they owe the people who procured the visa and brought them to the US for their traveling fees. Foreign laborers are at an exceedingly high risk for sexual harassment.
If you have no money, no power, no privilege, no education, few options — what then?
What about people who have been sexually abused in their past and are at higher risk for being sexually abused again? They might not be able to act rationally in the face of sexual harassment, but … they don’t deserve to be protected from it?
I dunno. I like knowing that people who want to prey on other people from positions of power are prevented fro doing so, or at very least, are held accountable for their actions.
I’m gonna go “freely associate” with the interiors of my neighbors’ apartments, and then freely associate with their valuables, and then freely associate with a pawn shop, and then freely associate with some Swiss banks. USA!!
@filetofswedishfish
The marketplace I refer to is the labor market. If a place is absolutely discussing to work for, leave. Or, make a union. This is clearly a perfect case of unionization.
You have recourses that do not require infringing on the freedom or property of others. You may not like the consequences, but they do exist.
@Sharculese
Well, okay then.
I value personal property rights and freedom of association over social equality. Therefore, I will not sacrifice these rights for equality, even if that means less equality.
The 1st amendment to the United States constitution. I have the freedom to peaceably associate with whomever I choose. This includes those who choose to engage in sexual harassment. Requiring my business to fire those who engage in sexual harassment violates that right. It is prohibiting my business from associating with these people.
Low != Zero. However, I’ll take a closer look at this point.
(The other argument I’d raise against myself on this point is that it doesn’t make sense just to look at the cost-of-compliance, since there are benefits to the company in preventing sexual harassment, as I openly admitted)
I’m working on said citation. To be clear, there are a good number of sexual harassment policies that make it clear that consent is justification. However, the fear of lawsuits often makes employers be overly cautious with these policies.
@oldfeminist
To my knowledge, there has never been a single instance of an AIDS infection at a Nevada brothel. At some point, pointing out that prostitution is dangerous is a bit like saying being a drug dealer is more dangerous than being a pharmacist. It isn’t so much the act that’s dangerous but the circumstances around it.
@ithiliana
So, does this also mean that men are not responsible for the gender disparity in engineering?
Oh, women have parts of it, sure, like the efferent autonomic nervous system, but we lack sensory nerves and most of the frontal cortex. (Whether or not we have motor nerves is still up for debate; women seem to be able to make physical movements but we’re obviously way way way weaker than all men ever.) So we can still become irrationally hysterical over things and cry, we just can’t sense and process stimuli nor think on a level much above that of a worm. Science!
DSC – ” (nwo)”If I’m an employer and I want to allow sexual harassment in my office, the government shouldn’t stop me. Doing so would infringe on my right to freedom of peaceable association.
That’s not what freedom of association means. It has never meant that.”
Harassing people IS TOO peaceable association!!!
Also, ffs – NWO – did you see my saying that even if I agreed totally with the most glibertarian right to hire and fire discriminate, it wouldn’t give anybody the right to harass anybody? Also, it doesn’t have to be the government. There’s contracts when you hire people. There’s unions and standards. There may be no “right to a job” in the vulgar parlance but there’s sure no “right to an employee, much less right to have people put up with x shit without compensation” either.
I ask again, do you envision any way in which an employer employee relationship can be actionably exploitative? You’re like the most perfectly trained boss bootlicker vulgar-crony-capitalist creature I have ever seen in my LIFE. And that, believe you me, is really saying something.
I didn’t know that “associate” meant “employ”? :p
“It infringes on the rights of employers. If I’m an employer and I want to allow sexual harassment in my office, the government shouldn’t stop me”
This is the worst thing anyone has ever said. Ever.
The patriarchy has historically excluded women from physically dangerous paid employment, and also from jobs in engineering (which aren’t even mutually exclusive.) So really it’s more of the same thing but in a safer field. And, as always, the patriarchy != men so really blaming “men” for any of this isn’t entirely accurate.
But I’m sure you knew that already.
Developers 3 –
Would you argue that there is currently a more-or-less truly free market in labor? What IS your understanding of laissez-faire and civil rights or the labor movement? Please elaborate, because if you’re gonna be on a high free market horse, this is a jousting zone.
So this is what the woman who “took your job” (according to some HR guy that totally didn’t break confidentiality agreements) at Pepsi Co. would be complaining about, right?
Inconsistant Troll is inconsistant.
Developers, I wrote up a little analogy here about an employer who punches his employees and then tells them to get a new job if they don’t like punching but it got complicated and anyway it boils down to this:
Sexual harassment law, like assault and battery law, is not an infringement on your right to run a company like your own private fiefdom, because you don’t have that right. (And trust me, unless you’re prepared to field your own army, you don’t want it.)
Just wave a magic wand and leave or make a union? OK then.
Nice misreading of the 1st amendment, BTW. We have lawyers/law students on the board, so I’ll let them eviscerate you.
All these pro-sexual harassment dudes seem to be cool with “might makes right” when women are getting groped and threatened, but I doubt they’d be equally cool with it when women start bringing tasers to work. If someone wants the “right” to freely associate with my unwilling nethers then I want the “right” to freely associate a bajillion volts with their tender conductive flesh.
@zhinxy
I don’t think he has a coherent understanding of the current market model, or really of any capitalist market model.
The market is a good thing in many ways, but it is no omniscient being. It needs to be guided and regulated by people, preferably the government (at least a government truly elected by the people, not a puppet or authoritarian one). It in no way pertains to sexual harassment, as harassment is something people do to each other, and is independent from market forces.
Harassment, be it sexual or otherwise, is something easily combated by explaining what it entails to people, and then punishing people who harass knowingly (even unknowingly, but I agree that many guys think too highly of their ability to discern harassment from other interactions).
Seriously though, having laws about not doing awful things to one another in the workplace is mutually beneficial. There is no way the guys who are all gung-ho about sexual harassment would always be on the giving end of the misery; they’re too purdy for
prisonthat kind of workplace. :pWhat if everywhere you could work has sexual harassment? What if there are five people for every open job and you’re lucky to be employed, so you suck it up? What if there are children at home and if you quit they wouldn’t be fed?
I just wanted to share with everyone this article about the False Rape Society, who decided to print my name in an article directly attacking me for acknowledging their lust for domestic violence and rape. It can be found here: http://resistingthemilieu.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/the-so-called-false-rape-society-attacks-me/
While they are more than willing to print my name, they are far too cowardly to print their own anywhere on the site. Here’s a quote from FRS:
“I hate to say ‘you were asking for it,’ but . . . you were asking for it! If you get intimate with someone who can hurt you, then you have only yourself to blame when you get hurt.”
These guys are scum, period.
Holly – “Sexual harassment law, like assault and battery law, is not an infringement on your right to run a company like your own private fiefdom, because you don’t have that right. (And trust me, unless you’re prepared to field your own army, you don’t want it.)
Noting – Yes, and That’s actually a big reason why I’m uncomfortable with it being so apparently subsumed by discrimination law, because it gets dragged into the “right to hire and fire who I want” argument, instead of being an aggression against a person that would be just as wrong if you WEREN’T their boss. It belongs much more in the assault and battery and stalking and blackmail realm than the “hiring and firing” realm, but again, not an expert on the area.
….
Developer 3, though I can’t help suspecting there’s no way on hell you’re gonna read it in good faith, but you could surprise me – Here’s just a taste of some great libertarian stuff on the civil rights and labor issues –
Context-Keeping and Community Organizing. Cato Unbound (2010-06-18):
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/18/sheldon-richman/context-keeping-and-community-organizing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cato-unbound+%28Cato+Unbound%29
http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/06/12/freed-market-regulation/
Opposing the civil rights act means opposing civil rights? It just aint so!”
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/it-just-aint-so/opposing-the-civil-rights-act-means-opposing-civil-rights/
See, if you’re really honest, you don’t have to handwring and stand up and beat your chest and say you HAVE to let racism and sexism happen because of your devotion to the free market and private property, unlike all the facists who say they’re for equality. You can work alongside them in their concerns and say that your system will work against these things. It’s really amazing. So if you really are taking a strong, moral stance, saying that you’ll just have to accept these things because of yoru devotion to free markets, free association, and rights… BREATHE EASY! YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
Or, you know, I guess keep doing like you’re doing, cause it really wasn’t about freedom?
“:Libertarians need not shy away from the question, “Do you mean that whites should have been allowed to exclude blacks from their lunch counters?” Libertarians can answer proudly, “No. They should not have been allowed to do that. They should have been stopped—not by the State, which can’t be trusted, but by nonviolent social action on behalf of equality.”
-Sheldon Richman.
Hopefully, I just took a huge load off your shoulders.
Grinner, well, I’m a far Left libertarian and market anarchist which is difficult from current capitalism, and now more and more defining itself as explicity ANTI-capitalist so I disagree about regulation by governments, (A good article here http://www.fee.org/articles/tgif/regulation-red-herring/ on our perspectives ) but regardless of why exactly you think it doesn’t, our current system is not going to show merit based outcomes, and acting like it does is utterly ridiculous. So yeah, he doesn’t understand current capitalism, and he’s up on the high horse without knowing what he’s talking about.
Ben Fenton – They ARE scum, and you have my sympathies that they’ve directed their vile attention at you. I’ve tweeted your post out.
All this “you can always quite and work somewhere else” talk (besides being the same thing skeezeball bosses say as they unzip their pants, knowing full well it isn’t that easy) presumes that employees get advanced warning.
Like at the job interview, they tell you about the benefits and how there’s double pay if you work holidays and then they throw in: “Just so you know, we have a pro-sexual-harassment policy, so there’s quite a few playful shenanigans and ‘well-intentioned romantic advances’ in this office. But we try not to take it all the way up to assault, ha ha! That’s part of our corporate culture, so if you aren’t comfortable with that, I’d urge you to reconsider accepting this position.”
No. You don’t find out that way. You find out when someone is already telling the male staff detailed fantasies about you fucking the only other woman in the office or has already cornered you in his office to try and get you to watch hardcore porn with him. (Both actually happened to me, at the same job, and I didn’t leave, not because I liked it but because it had taken me months to get that job.) In other words, when harm has already been done, when you’ve already been humiliated and threatened.
That’s not okay. “We’re going to harm you, quit if you don’t want it” is a shit deal, but “oops, we harmed you, you should have psychically known this was coming and quit before we got the chance” isn’t a deal at all.
if your actual argument was that you enjoy being a selfish creep, why didn’t you just say that at the beginning?
wrong. that is not what freedom of association is. its about your right to form a group that works to a common goal, without regard to what that goal is. it should be obvious that your argument is nonsense because as soon as you start harassing someone, youre not behaving peaceably, youre behaving aggressively. no court has ever endorsed your position, no court will ever endorse your position. you dont get to make up what the first amendment means.