Paul Elam, head misogynist at A Voice for Men, is mad at the ladies again, his wrath provoked this time by an overheard conversation in a local coffeeshop between two women talking about recycling, and how the world would be a greener place if women were in charge.
Elam seems to take deep personal offense at any suggestion that men aren’t the absolute best at every single fucking thing, so he quickly scurried off to his computer to bash out a 1500-word screed that began with him insulting the women as bobbleheaded “latte lappers who were more likely than not completely clueless about how a single thing on the planet with a moving part works,” moved into high gear with some not altogether wrong (if rather trite and woman-blamey) critiques of the diamond and fur industries, and wound up with a stern warning that WOMEN ARE DESTROY9ING THE EARTH WITH ALL THEIR SPENDY SPENDING!!1!!!
So let’s just skip ahead to that part, shall we?
Take it away, Paul:
The thing that drives the bulk of pollution, wars, white collar criminality, cruelty to animals, human slavery and the like is consumerism. Consumerism, especially the market of unnecessary, embarrassingly vain and useless goods, is a woman’s world. It is primarily the consumption of fashion, via cosmetics, plastic surgery, excessive clothing, jewelry and other vanity items. Women drive a world of pain and damage to the planet. And men, to their shame, do the heavy lifting to get it done.
Ah, damn you ladies! God damn you all to hell!
The so-called Planet of the Apes was Earth all along!
Oh, wait. Sorry. SPOILER ALERT.
But Paul, don’t men buy a lot of expensive useless crap, too?
I mean, I just did about a minute of Googling and found a goddamn fishing rod that’ll set you back $4600.
I cannot think of a single item consumed by men en masse, with high social acceptance, that does not also have utilitarian value. e.g. leather items come from food source animals.
Oh, I see. You can use a $4600 fishing rod to catch $4600 fish. My bad.
Essentially it is not that much different from Native Americans using buffalo hide as well as the meat.
Yeah, he really did just say that.
And many of the things men do consume that might appear on the surface to be excessive are things that women size up and measure them by in the process of sexual selection.
Ah, and these men are utterly helpless before these greedy, earth-destroying women and their evil feminine allure.
Most money is still earned by men.
This is true. In part because of that whole wage gap thing you MRAs don’t believe in.
Most money is actually spent by and on women, mostly on consequence-ridden products whose only use is to bolster their egos. That is about as green as a fucking oil spill.
The sex driving the world’s ridiculous over consumption, and therefore decimation of everything, is not men. In fact, women’s level of over consumption is so outrageous that they cannot even maintain it with their own resources. It takes both sexes to feed the excessive appetite of the one.
Ah, but that’s not quite true. Or really true at all. For one thing, while women may spend more than men, that’s in part because women still tend to do more of the shopping for things like, you know, groceries. They’re not spending all this money on themselves.
And women may not really be spending as much as you think. It’s often said that women are responsible for about 80% of consumer spending. But if you ever start trying to track down the source of that oft-quoted statistic, as I did while writing this post, you’ll discover that … there really doesn’t seem to be one. It’s one of these things that’s assumed to be true simply because it’s repeated so often – especially by people claiming to know how to market to women. The Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik looked into this 80% claim last year and found that
In addition to having murky origins, the number appears to be wrong. Several recent surveys suggest that men have nearly equal say on spending, and that when men and women live together, both participate in spending decisions. In a survey conducted last year of nearly 4,000 Americans 16 and older by Futures Co., a London consulting firm, just 37% of women said they have primary responsibility for shopping decisions in their household, while 85% said they have primary or shared responsibility. The respective figures for men were similar: 31% and 84%.
Let’s return from the land of reality to plunge again into the tempestuous torrent of Paul Elam’s testosterone tantrum. (See! I can write as crappily as Paul Elam if I really try!)
If we wanted to save the environment, be less cruel to animals, have less wars, less slavery and less forced labor of children then the best first step we can take is to start raising girls to get over their vanity and their entitlement. We would also do well to teach our boys to assist in the process.
Elam followed up this soul-stirring call to SAVE TEH PLANET with a post castigating male truck drivers for being too nice to lady truck drivers. No, really.
If you’re interested in learning more about saving our green planet, and even if you’re not, I suggest you take a look at the trailer for the excellent if unclassifiable Korean film called, naturally, Save the Green Planet.
Codeine is one of the few pharma drugs that I resent the restrictions on, since it’s the only thing that makes any sort of dent when I get a migraine. It at least takes the pain down to a level where I don’t feel like puking any more.
Gah, migraines. 🙁
Strewth, it’s 1.30 am here. I guess I’d better go to bed! Niters all.
Not all women have a choice whether to work or stay at home.
working class women—invisible
Always have been; always will be.
The only time men like chuckeedee notice women working is when the women have jobs and/or schedules they think they’d like for themselves. One of my best guy friends is currently a stay-at-home father. He and his totally rockin’ wife are both pretty happy and their baby is friggin’ adorable.
But, you know, he’s not an asshole and that’s why it’s worked out so well.
@ Kitteh
Ah ok. I guess the private insurance is selective against pre-existing conditions though? Or do you have a law to ban that? Here we only got the one system which is 100% privatised insurers and providers. But their rates, policies and quality is government controlled and they get subsidies. So everyone pays at least X amount and then some extra, which I guess equals as the private side in other countries. It’s very different from Finland, where we (well not me anymore) have system like Medicare and private pre-selective insurers. But they can and will deny psych help if you had anything of the like before taking insurance. And then you depend on the state care, which usually covers everything if you get strong enough need. But that can be difficult to determine at times…
Ah interesting topic all over. Nighters! Or morning, to keep near future in mind.
The whole issue of pre-existing conditions and medical insurance makes me so angry. Basically, the people who run the system that’s supposed to treat sick people have decided that they’re only going to treat people who are healthy, and that people who’re sick should be excluded from treatment. How does everyone not immediately see the problem with this?
The whole idea of health insurance on a for-profit basis just doesn’t make any sense. The way you make money as a health insurance company is by NOT PAYING FOR CARE. How is that in anybody’s interest but the company’s? My state (Washington) passed a law that insurance companies that cover prescriptions have to cover non-generics as well as generics (please note there’s no generic for my asthma inhaler and last time I got it I paid $118). My insurance company, since they’re SO concerned about my health, responded by changing their policies: now they no longer cover ANY prescriptions. And my rates are going up by $60 a month in January on my shitty $2500-deductible plan.
I swear, my medical issues of the last few years have totally radicalized me on this issue. I cannot wait for universal health care. I hope I fucking live to see it (I won’t if the insurance companies have anything to say about it).
Agreed. Healthcare on a for-profit basis for very rich people works as a concept (if you put aside the ethical aspects of that), but the idea that healthcare for the bulk of the population can effectively run on an insurance model is ridiculous.
Kitteh’s: Codiene is a complicated drug in the us. By itself it’s a Schedule II narcotic, and highly controlled. It requires a prescription. It’s OTC in Canada (8mg in aspirin/acetmenophen/ibuprofen). That means, actually, that one can legally buy it in Canada (or the UK) and get in trouble coming home (though the usual response is to just confiscate it, they could, in theory, arrest you).
When compounded with another drug (mild analgesic) it is on different schedules III-V, and as such individual states can allow it to be sold OTC, with various levels of restriction. It cannot be sold “on the counter”, even in those locales. A form has to be signed, as well as the seller making a register entry to record the removal from stock.
A standard dose in the US is 25mg, for the prescribed medication, though most prescriptions I’ve seen call for, 1-2 tablets by mouth ever 4-6 hours, as needed for pain
The common, “Tylenol-3” which people refer to in the states is 300mg acetmenophen, 30mg codeine, and 30mg caffeine. It comes in two lower strength dosages, 8, and 15mg codeine: which have half the caffeine.
Chickadee: Men who do not provide are invisible.
Yep, no one ever heard of Thomas Beckett. Nor of a single Pope. Issac Newton… completely unheard of. Alan Turing, ignored and forgotten.
All because they never married.
A stay-at-home dad is about as marketable to women as a truckload of beachsand is to an Arab.
My personal experience is that when I was an au pair it was really attractive to women (I’ve done it twice for money, and intermittently when living with much junior [18+ years] siblings). If I am out with a babe in arms, women come to talk to me. When they find out it’s not my child, they flirt with me (sometimes even hit on me directly). When they find out I’ve been an au pair the same thing happens.
Maybe I’m just some sort of Johnny Depp, and they need an excuse to approach me, but I doubt it. I think they find it sexy.
!
Why did nobody tell me this???
I have to stop providing immediately and claim my badass superpower.
I’m really not at all sure how reinforcing restrictive gender roles on men and women is supposed to cut back on overuse of fossil fuels, increase recycling and reduce waste, and save the planet in general, but whatever, I’m not even going to touch the “man hunter, woman cooker” garbage because it’s demonstrably stupid.
But I will say that I can think of a HUGELY wasteful industry that is largely consumed by men, is largely run by men and has some pretty negative outcomes on the general culture.
Sports. I live in a very football-centric (American football) city and know that there is a TON of energy and resources poured into the building and maintenance and upkeep of football stadiums. Just all the power alone that’s taken to keep the field in decent shape is a huge drain on resources, but then there’s also all the energy used for the fans. Lights, the bathrooms, the vendors that need power to be able to cook and sell their food stuffs. Then there’s also all the waste that comes from the packaging of the products. Everything from the wrapper on the hot dogs to the beer bottles to the tags and shopping bags and packaging on all the memorabilia that also takes a shit ton of energy and creates a shit ton of waste to make, package, ship and sell.
That’s not even including either all the energy that’s used up by fans driving to the games, tailgating at the games, fans at home watching from their TVs and the waste from all the prepackaged food that’s most commonly cooked for football parties. Or including the fantasy football leagues energy is wasted on.
Then there’s the negative cultural aspects. Because professional sports are such a huge money maker, they’re hugely prevalent in western culture and, at least in America, literally massive amounts of money, time and energy goes into sports programs at schools. Then the waste starts all over again. Energy into building. Energy into maintaining. Energy into the games with lights and refreshments. Energy into getting the teams to the games. There are plenty of schools that will build a new football stadium before building a new computer lab if the team is doing good. Sports are cared about more than academia in a lot of American culture.
Then there’s the sporting culture itself. At least in a lot of predominantly male-oriented sports, the sports are actually physically quite dangerous, and have a long and very sad history (and current culture) of bullying and violence, hospitalization, and sometimes even death. The bullying is overlooked, tolerated, sometimes even encouraged by coaches and educators alike who often either view the rampant bullying deeply entrenched in many male sports teams as “just a part of the game” or even a necessary team building tactic.This is how even more serious transgressions (like what happened at Penn State) are allowed to occur and are allowed to continue to occur.
None of this is to say that sports are the root of all evil and waste and bullying, or even that there aren’t a lot of positives in athletics (keeps people fit, teaches kids team building and strategy, etc) but seriously, if the dudes carrying on about ladies with their furs (cause all ladies can afford to buy and would totally want to buy a dead fox to wear around their necks, amirite?) and their SUVs are in any way shape or form regular consumers of sporting products (whether it’s box seats at the stadium or buying a new jersey or just tuning into the game every week without fail) they are kidding themselves if they seriously believe that their negative impact on the planet is so very very virtuously low in comparison.
Cassandra: It doesn’t even work as a model for rich people.
So long as stockholder have the legal right to maximal return on investment (which they do), the for profit insurance company has to keep making a high rate of return. They can’t do that and provide healthcare to all the policy holders.
So they have to strip people from the rolls, one way or another, on a steady basis. Having managed to lose most of the non-healthy already they have had to increase policy costs. Not to stay in business, per se, but because if the profits fall, they will be out of business.
Even at that the ungodly rich can’t afford to pay, out of pocket, for some things (cancer springs immediately to mind). One of the suppositions for Romney’s oddly structured non-retirement from Bain was that Ann Romney had just been diagnosed with MS, and the costs of treating it can be really high. If he stayed on the books at Bain he got to keep the really good healthcare (much better than the ACA he wanted to get rid of, “on day one” of his presidency).
And, of course, he wasn’t paying for it. The investors at Bain were. A little bit of income redistribution he doesn’t have any problem with.
But, eventually, to meet the “projections” the cost of a policy will have to be damn near what the cost of getting an expensive disease would be.
At which point why bother?
Anecdata – Whenever I see a man showing affection to a child it makes him more attractive to me than he would otherwise have been. The idea that seeing that would put a woman off a man who she might otherwise have been interested in is so weird. What’s not to like about seeing someone demonstrate kindness and the ability to nurture?
I think that’s why the Heritage Foundation (a right-wing think tank) proposed what became “Obamacare”, back in the 1990s. They saw the writing on the wall, and making everyone pay into the program would keep the insurers afloat (it is, after all, a form of tax subsidy to make everyone pay… I say subsidy because the money never enters the General Fund, and the benefits of scale don’t accrue. If Medicare could negotiate drug prices, drug prices would fall. Drug companies might also see an increase in profits… think Laffer Curve).
@ pecunium
I didn’t mean insurance for rich people, I meant that they could in theory just outright purchase medical services on a case by case basis. The insurance model just doesn’t fit healthcare as an industry at all, regardless of who the customers are.
@Cassandra
Tell me about it. I had a youth insurance policy that expired when I turned 22. My parents bought into it in the 80’s as it seemed reasonable. Only they didn’t predict that I would be the child with the chronic illness from the age of five onwards. It basically excluded me from all useful private health insurance in Finland for all my adult life. I’ve thanked my lucky stars (if I believed in them, that is) that I was born in a country where the private sector is just for vanity reasons like wanting to have your minor operation in a fancy hospital, and all the heavy lifting happens in the public sector and publically funded university hospitals. In the US I’m pretty sure I would not have qualified for taxfunded health care thanks to the income of my parents, nor for any new insurances. And with my health history I would have been dead at least twice so far after the insurance expired, without miraculous funds that I also couldn’t have made thanks to being ill so much.
I really like the Dutch system, and I think it beats the Finnish system although it could use some streamlining such as getting the altmed out and reducing some overlapping services. I also think the model would fit the US, as it’s 100% private. Base insurance is mandatory although you CAN opt out by paying a fine every year, and paying your own expenses. Pre-selection is forbidden and the government sets price guidelines and the minimum services that the companies must cover in the basis package. Healthcare providers are nonprofit, though I think insurers are not. Ideally the system functions solely on the insurance fees paid and competition between insurers, though government subsidises if needed. You decide what you pay in addition to the base cost depending what extra you want, but everything necessary is covered. Birth control too, if you like. I do pay more now than I did in Finland, as I pay monthly instead of the little own risk fees every time you see a doctor or get prescription meds, but the basis insurance per year costs about the same as what you have to pay out of pocket in Finland until the yearly cap is reached, after which everything is paid from taxes. That used to be 650€ for medicines and 650€ for appointments/hospital stays etc before I moved out, probably a bit more now. This year in Holland I paid 135€/month plus own risk 150€ (plus the awful physio bills 750€…), base insurance being 99€ of that 135€. With higher own risk I think you can pay as little as 70€/month. 2013 I will pay 167€/month and own risk 350€ (not all services fall under own risk), which is higher now thanks to me being very ill the past year. But now I upgraded with dental care up to 250€, physiotherapy 36 sessions, hormonal birth control up to 200€, travel vaccinations, glasses/contacts up to 250€, psychologist’s appointments covered fully should I need some, IVF, sterilisations and a whole lot of other things covered if not fully then for the most part. Oh, and of course my 1000€ worth of magic water. And that’s the extras; prescription meds, doc’s appointments, hospital stays, examinations, MRI’s and everything necessary is covered 100%.
I totally agree, for-profitness of health care is evil and the core reason why in the US you don’t get as much out of your health care system as we do. It should be enough that costs are met and salaries paid. Making money, especially large sums, out of someone else’s misery is evil. The Dutch regulation of insurers prevents the kind of insanity that runs amok in the US, and yet keeps the system running quite smoothly.
If any country is going to have a for-profit system providing the bulk of healthcare I think the government has to make it illegal for providers to screen people out for preexisting conditions. The providers won’t like it, but who cares? If you’re not willing to treat sick people, don’t get into the healthcare business.
Carbon footprint by nation, total & per capita (2007)
Cotton is a resource sucking bastard but it could be worse: in America, you probably don’t have to worry about buying clothing made by cotton picked by schoolchildren who are bused to the fields to help with the harvest. On the bright side, Uzbekistan has an enviable carbon footprint.
Bamboo? Probably rayon. Lets make that ‘certainly’ if it feels good to wear and you didn’t pay out the ass for it.
Organic at Walmart? I have my suspicions.
It is extremely difficult to be an ethical consumer, and anyone who tries has to accept that they absolutely won’t be batting a thousand. Anyone who wants to turn it into a holier-than-thou purity olympic event can be safely dismissed. My personal crusades are diamonds (that’s easy enough), chocolate (child slaves), local meat, and companies that are known to use child sweatshop labor. But I can’t judge other people for having a different priority list.
It is hard to change this when you have companies that specifically create misery to make profit.
Chuckeedee completely missed the point of David’s argument there…
Like spectacularly, reading that otherwise relatively coherent post I could just hear this whooshing noise as it went straight over his head and he tried earnestly to refute an argument that had never been put to him. Or that has been made by anyone here.
I can attest to this from the other side: when taking my baby son out in his buggy, I found I’d often strike up casual conversations with women, which they’d normally initiate. But I assumed that part of the appeal, besides the nurturing thing, is the fact that I didn’t pose any kind of threat, either in terms of hitting them or indeed hitting on them.
Cassandra: I didn’t mean insurance for rich people, I meant that they could in theory just outright purchase medical services on a case by case basis. The insurance model just doesn’t fit healthcare as an industry at all, regardless of who the customers are.
It’s a nice theory but I don’t think, because of the models we have, it works.
I had a kidney stone some years ago. The ER visit was 8,000USD. I was told that, had I had insurance, it would have been a charge (to the insurer) of $1,500. The price I had to pay was as high as it was so the insurers could get a “discount”.
Which means the nominal charge for something like a coronary bypass (listed as about 50,000 to an insurer) is going to be what…? If that rate is constant it’s something like $400,000.
That’s one procedure, not the follow up, etc. The other thing is that the infrastructure depends on the insurance companies. No steady state use of the facilities and they will go away, which will increase the price in the places which do have them.