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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?
Ugh: Average real wages have also doubled over the past 60 years.
Have they? Certainly the normed dollar value of minimum wages has decreased. If Obama were proposing to return the minimum wage to the 1960 level, the number I am seeing is about 10.50USD as the set point.
I can only assume you just figured that out in the past hour, because an hour ago you were saying that the only options were to:
@pecunium it’s true that minimum wage earners are in pretty much the worst spot they’ve been in since the Depression.
However, the percentage of people who earn the minimum wage steadily declined during the 20th century. The current average non-management wage is around $14/hr in 2001 dollars, and the same figure for 1947 was $7.50.
According to the Wiki, average wages have changed not at all in the last 60 years.
Here’s the specific chart from my link: http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.truckandbarter.com/tb_images/real_wage2.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.truckandbarter.com/2004_01_01_truckandbarter_archive.html&h=375&w=548&sz=10&tbnid=xZP8N8V9mudnPM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=125&zoom=1&usg=__ATeYULSdHR9Thkx0M-SiQDY-U_I=&docid=cUsZ9G7C50jgNM&sa=X&ei=0WolUY3EHY28qQHEhYDYCQ&ved=0CDcQ9QEwAg&dur=116
@katz
The chart you posted shows a huge increase in the 50s and 60s.
Ugh, what was it in 1960 dollars?
Because that’s the baseline for the question of minimum wages. The median wage I’ve been seeing shows a steady decline, in “real dollars” from 1965 to the present, with the “household income” masking it, because of the increase of middle class women to the workforce; as well as the move to later childbearing.
Sorry, changed not at all in the past 40 years, rather.
No, in 2001 dollars. Most charts I’ve seen show wages holding more or less steady with inflation from about 1974 to 2008, followed by a bit of a recession dip. Do you have a link?
This is really far afield – maybe we can make a new thread if we want to keep talking about this as it’s beginning to feel tacky having this conversation in the midst of people trying to share meaningful personal stories.
But,
Ugh: I wouldn’t rely on average income as an indicator because of the way productivity gains have been paid disproportionately to top-income earners while people at the bottom are both less mobile and worse-off than 30 years ago. EPI has an agenda, of course, but you can see generally how workers are worse-off here: http://stateofworkingamerica.org/subjects/wages/?reader
Pecunium: as to rich women, see KUH’s comment to jonimal, and, going full circle, back to Elizabeth Warren’s books, which charts the economic impact of middle class and up women entering the labor force. As to the labor force stats, I linked this a while ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_force, apparently generated from data at http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000.
.
@Drew
That’s why I posted average non-managerial wages, which doesn’t include rich wage earners or capital gains.
Dude, it’s a blog.
Ugh: Your chart shows dip, and return among workers (not supervisors, that’s a chart of “private production and non-supervisory workers, i.e. longer term employees, whom we might suspect of having been hired in at minumum wage), from 1968-1977, and then a decline until 1998.
The interesting thing is, the trend was of steady increase until 1968, and then the stagnation… which tracks to the efforts to bust unions, and it matches katz’ chart.
It still comes back to women being in the paid workforce being identified as a problem that’s at the misogynistic core of Drew’s comments. Not a thing about there being more people getting paid, or wage rises, or labour market, or anything … it’s identified as one half of the population getting paid work, and that being a problem for “people”. That framing automatically means people = men. Though perhaps it’s a problem for women to be paid for their work, who knows?
Drew, giving you the benefit of the doubt for the time being, don’t you see that putting the question of cost of living etc in these terms is inherently hostile to women? It suggests we’re superfluous, not “real” workers or real people, and is based on something that’s a flash in the pan – one society’s notions from a very brief part of its history.
Also, the link you posted only says that median wages have stagnated over the last decade, because up until that point they were increasing at about the rate of inflation, after doubling in the 60s.
So, how does this prove that women entering the workforce caused a decline in wages? I don’t think that many more went to work in the 2000s than the 1990s.
Drew: Pecunium: as to rich women… you are ducking the questions raised by the arguments you made.
@Pecunium
It’s true, wages have only held with inflation for the past few decades. However, they are still twice what they were in 1947.
@pecunium
I’m not arguing with katz’ chart, it actually is making the exact same argument as me.
I had figured that this is what the Republicans were trying to do: force women to become baby making machines only, insist they stay home and tada! Jobs for men! Cuz, ya know, they didn’t seem to be working on creating jobs like they said they would so they would get elected. Instead we got lotsnlots of fetal personhood bills.
Ugh, saying that wages have risen since 1947 is a bit deceptive, since virtually the entire increase took place in the 50s and 60s, before women were as much a part of the workforce.
But we’ve really got a couple of threads of ideas going here, because of course that doesn’t mean that women caused wage stagnation (if anything, it just suggests that, in the face of wage stagnation, more people need to work).
Jobs for fetuses! Make those little suckers earn their living!
@katz
Actually, roughly the same percentage of women worked in 1970 as do now:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110105.htm
(About 55-60% of total adult population)
The main spike of women in the workforce correlates almost exactly with the rise of real wages.
KUH: Of course. That’s why I said poooosts ago that trying to get women out of the workforce is “repugnant.” AlexB did a good job articulating reasons why it was repugnant, in short that it makes hetero women entirely reliant on a husband for financial support.
That’s a recurring them for MRAs – once the government stops employing women for “useless” jobs and everything crumbles, only men will have productive jobs and women will be forced into subservient roles again due to economic bargaining power. See, e.g. http://manboobz.com/2013/02/17/crystal-bawling-spearheaders-look-forward-to-an-apocalyptic-future-in-which-the-ladies-finally-get-their-comeuppance/ .
But in modern history, what happened is that women’s entrance into the labor market disrupted everything and we haven’t sorted out what to do about it yet. Pretending like the MRA complaint is baseless factually – that men haven’t been economically dislocated by post-war changes – just gives credence to their utterly wrong solutions.
To some extent men should be dislocated – men who are less good at their jobs should be dislocated by more talented women, and some men are best off staying home and supporting a female breadwinner and feminism is good for them in that it liberates them from gender stereotypes I don’t know how we solve the fact that Americans have less bargaining power in the labor marketplace, because unions and any other possible solution is politically unfeasible. So I tend to think we’re all headed for a multigenerational decline in wealth and real wages.
I don’t get why people are so resistant to the notion that adding women to the labor marketplace increases the competition for jobs and has a downward effect on wages. It may also have beneficial effects from the growth and demand caused by more people working, but Warren’s point is that this trend has been a net _negative_ for middle class families, because more dollars are chasing the housing stock and education and other goods bidding up those prices in a way that leaves them worse off.
From looking at the “jobless recovery,” it looks like the new trend is for productivity gains to be captured by employers to make the same amount of people do more work for the same amount of pay, rather than raise wages or hire workers.
Drew: the is Manboobz, where off-topics is the topic.