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Reading through some of the stranger comments from MRAs and PUAs and other manospherean types I often find myself wondering to what degree this “new misogyny” reaches beyond the internet. I don’t mean old-fashioned misogyny and sexism, which are obviously fairly common offline. I mean the elaborate misogynistic ideologies we discuss here – the “feminism runs the world,” “all women are hypergamous bitches who will dump you in a second for an alpha,” “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” kind of stuff.
I run across much less of this offline than on, though the people I hang out with aren’t exactly a representative sampling of the general public.
So I’m asking you, dear readers, to tell me a bit about your own experiences. Do you run across MRAs/PUAs in the real world on a regular or even an irregular basis? Where (online or off) did you first encounter MRAs and/or PUAs? What aspects of what we might call the manosphere ideology are the most common offline? If it seems less common offline, is this because the beliefs are not that widespread, or is it that people are less willing to say the kind of horrific misogynistic shit they say online to other people face to face?
Thoughts?
Pecunium: Poor women always had to work for wages. But richer women were expected not to work in the labor market, but to work without pay at home. That changed in the last fifty years. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force ‘s graph.
…You must be incessantly stymied by everyday problems if that’s the extent of your problem-solving skills, especially since neither of those options would actually work.
Over/under on when Drew sheds his reasonable veneer and melts the fuck down?
So the practical effect of women in the workplace is that people are worse off materially (assuming that the marginal extra income is worth less utility than the leisure time and services offered by having one partner in a relationship stay at home). It also makes labor cheaper, for sure.
Unless women are people, of course. That would affect the calculus somewhat.
You don’t realise it, but your underlying assumptions here are reproducing an ancient economic fallacy (that originates with Gary “Fucking” Becker IIRC), that assumes that every household is headed by a benign all-powerful patriarch who distributes the income optimally for every member of the household. Thus there are no balance of power issues within a household, and the utility function of every member of the household is incorporated within the utility function of the benign patriarch. This assumption is of course purely one of mathematical convenience and has no political implications, just like all the other simplifying assumptions economists make. That last sentence was sarcasm. That last sentence was for the benefit of MRAs.
And just like all the other mathematically convenient simplifications that economists make, some people actually believed it and there was some squalling when it turned out not to be true.
It’s not true. Women are people. Earning our own income, making our own choices, and not having to get married to a man if we don’t want to is valuable to us. Yes, it has more utility than the sole option to be a 1950s housewife. People are better off because women have choices. Because women are people. And when people have choices, they make choices that increase their utility (that’s actually another simplifying assumption that economists make but some economists seem to think this doesn’t apply to women.)
Also, you need google “lump of labor fallacy.”
The problem isn’t that we have more productive workers in the workforce. That makes everyone better off. There are huge economic problems creating the problem you describe… the staggering growth in inequality, a historically low labor share of income, but they’re not down to more people working.
Also I don’t know whether you are misreading Elizabeth Warren’s book deliberately or just out of a lack of reading comprehension, but I suggest to you that you’ve rather misunderstood it.
“Historically, though, women entering the labor market en masse (as opposed to domestic work for which they weren’t paid) is what caused the trend.”
You didn’t even look at the links I provided on this very page, did you? Take a look. They’re pictures, they won’t strain your reading comprehension.
History’s a tad older than the twentieth century. You can’t impose its norms (or cultural tropes) on earlier times.
One of the interesting things about the 1920s-1930s, is the ways in which women were portrayed. They were intelligent, energetic, and seen as quite capable. They had a wide spectrum of jobs (newspaper reporters, photographers, owners of shops/businesses, etc).
They were in positions of authority, and they often bossed men about.
This lasted into the middle of WW2, and was completely reversed after the war.
Hellkell: I give him 3 hours. I sense he’s the intractable type who will just keep retreading the same ground for ages.
Drew: Pecunium: Poor women always had to work for wages. But richer women were expected not to work in the labor market, but to work without pay at home.
Oh… so you admit that “women entering the labor force en masse” isn’t a new phenomenon. What was your argument again?
I guess it’s debunking day!
I’m really shy, so interacting with people is usually not a thing I do. The worst things I’ve dealt with have been an old man who started yelling at me, an at the time a very skinny 17 year old girl, for daring to be outside doing a man’s work. I was a bagger/cart wrangler at the store I worked at. He announced to the parking lot that I should be inside, pushing buttons because that was all women were good for. He then went inside and complained to my manager about my not being behind a register. While I stood there flabbergasted.
The other time it was really bad was when I finally told my family about the sexual assault I’d suffered several years back, at the hands of a guy I was friends with. My mom called me a liar, and while my father believed me, he expressed that it was really my fault for letting myself be put in that situation to begin with. He frequently engages in victim blaming, and both attitudes really stopped me from getting help dealing with it recently.
Kitteh: I did, and I loved them both. I’m not talking about older history – I was examining MRA’s complaints about post-war changes. Communism was pretty novel in how it dealt with women’s roles, though. Russian women were always expected to perform certain tasks – including the ones your art linked to. But, the soviets promoted feminism and gender equality such that women could take more professional jobs in the arts and sciences.
Russians in practice were still sexist and had all the old assumptions, so what happened was is that women ended up with the dual burden they have in the US – the same professional standards as men in the workplace plus all the domestic responsibilities at home. Gail Kligman has a whole bunch of interesting articles about it and it is distinct from prior patterns of women’s labor.
Pecunium: That in the last 50-60 years, women’s participation in the workforce has doubled and that’s indisputably changed labor markets and the cost of living.
@kitteh
My wife grew up working class poor (her dad was a railroad track worker and mom was a waitress) and every woman she knew worked outside of the home. Poor women have always worked outside the home.
The 1950s idea of the stay at home mom appears to me to be a short lived event in the US middle class. In fact, just ten years earlier, during WW2, most women in the US worked outside of the home.
Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Women” speech was delivered mid-19th century. I suspect (but will accept being proven wrong) that women have worked outside the home for most of human history.
I’m bemused by the assumption that, if twice as many people work, employers just have to pay them half as much. It’s inevitable! And the only possible way to get employers to increase wages is to decrease how many people are in the workforce.
Drew is boring. He’s bringing nothing to the table that hasn’t been thoroughly debunked before.
Where are the new NWOs?
crmsnfrn, I’m so sorry about both the sexual assault and your family’s reaction to it. I hope you are able to figure out a way to deal with it; let us know if you need our support or help.
It’s MATH!
No, I think if people organized and unions made a comeback you could extract higher wages from employers. But with a globalized economy and the electorate we have in the states, I don’t see how we avoid descending into a new gilded age.
But sorry to tromp all over crmsnfrn’s more-important story. Sorry about your story. Do you need resources for finding help? I hope your mom can overcome what ever prompted her to deny your story, come to grips with it, and apologize to you.
crmsnfrn – I’m so sorry about what happened to you, and your family’s response.
What was your manager’s response to Weird Creepy Old Shouting Misogynist?
Drew – if you’re going to talk about “women have always done / not done such and such” you’d better let people know that “always” means “a decade or two of the twentieth century”. It’s not a definition I’ve heard before.
joanimal – yes, exactly. It’s very much a 19th century, English middle-class ideal, and is all bound up with growing class consciousness as well as sexism. The middle class was notoriously insecure, always trying to move up and keep the distinction between them and the working class clear. Having a wife who was not doing physical work but organising the servant(s) was something only the wealthy men of the middle classes could do, and those who didn’t have that sort of money often enough put on the pretence that they did for visitors and the like. It was an extraordinarily repressive time for women. It always strikes me that a middle-class woman in Victorian England was worse off in, say, property and money matters, than her equivalent in seventeenth-century France, which was a seriously misogynistic society itself.
Women working outside the home/women should be homemakers only has been around since at least the Civil War, if what I’m reading is correct. “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines” by Gail Collins. And just cuz I want to share the love/pain: my very first Evo Psych book. I picked it up by accident, I swear. “The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill” by David M. Buss
“I picked it up by accident, I swear.”
Sort of like catching a virus! 😀
In my defense, this is the title of a program on ID. I like watching those murder-y shows and thought “ooooo – lite reading!” Turned into “what’s this? OH NO!” Book got good reviews on Amazon but still it sounds like a bunch of horse hooey to me. (virus I got was a headcold. gets me out of packing and painting for a few days)
@Drew
Average real wages have also doubled over the past 60 years. This means that in real terms (i.e. in reference to basic life neccessities) a working couple makes about 4x as much as they did back when very few women worked.
Source: http://www.truckandbarter.com/2004_01_01_truckandbarter_archive.html
I mean, the whole idea that “if more people are more productive, there will be fewer jobs to go around” is so obviously wrong that it’s bizarre that it has to be refuted at all. Jobs come from consumers. More workers means more consumption. There isn’t some “job mine” somewhere that’s in danger of being tapped out.
Joanimal: Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Women” speech was delivered mid-19th century.
I think it’s more later 19th century (ca 1880s). But as you say, it ain’t new.
Aw, look at the little ArksyDragon, trying so hard to get people to pay attention to him.
(Pats the pathetic little sod on the head.)
Drew, meanwhile, is giving an excellent demonstration of the idea that some people should really stop trying to help.
Drew: That in the last 50-60 years, women’s participation in the workforce has doubled and that’s indisputably changed labor markets and the cost of living.
Got citations for either half of that claim?
Also, can you explain the high productivity, the increase in labor, and the increase in wages which happened through the 1960s?
For bonus points explain the sudden onset of stagflation, and try to tie it into your theory.
More to the point (and part of the primary marks to be awarded), explain what you mean by, “rich women”, and 1: What percentage of the population they were, 2: why they were expected to work, as shadow labor; in the hom, and 3: how their move into paid labor (outside the home) caused such a change (and what happened as a result of the loss of shadow labor that their “sudden” entrance to the ranks of the suddenly remunerated, from the loss of [or need to replace] the work they were no longer doing).