Professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly – perhaps best known for her fervent opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – seems to have been channeling the manosphere in a column she published yesterday on the issue of “paycheck fairness.” Turns out she thinks such fairness is actually a bad idea, because ladies love marrying rich guys more than they love earning money.
According to Schlafly, equal pay messes with the fundamental female desire for “hypergamy” – that favorite manosphere buzzword – and undermines marriage:
[H]ypergamy … means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Indeed, Schlafly argues, women love marrying men who earn more than them so much that when the pay gap is eliminated some of them just won’t marry at all. Which is apparently the end of the world, or something.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. …
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
So it’s not enough that most people end up getting married; civilization will crumble if more than half of them don’t marry before the age of 30!
And so, she suggests, if American women knew what was good for them they would be begging for employers pay them even less, relative to men.
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
Hmm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Schlafly – a best-selling author and popular speaker on the right – didn’t send back any of her royalties or speaking fees so that she would feel more like a woman and her late husband would feel like more of a man, and I doubt she’s doing so now, as a widow. She’s also been unmarried for more than twenty years. Coincidence?
NOTE TO MEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: When you find yourself agreeing with Phyllis Schlafly on pretty much anything (beyond, say, the existence of gravity, the need for human beings to breathe air, and other widely accepted beliefs of this sort), this is an indication that perhaps your movement isn’t the progressive, egalitarian movement that you like to pretend that it is, and that in fact it is sort of the opposite.
That said, I should also note that Schlafly’s notion of “hypergamy,” while sexist and silly, is decidedly less obnoxious than the version peddled by PUAs and websites like A Voice for Men — congrats, Men’s Human Rights Activists, you’re actually worse than Phyllis Schlafly!
She just uses the term to indicate a desire to marry up. For many manospherians, by contrast, “hypergamy” doesn’t just mean marrying up; it means that women are fickle, unfaithful monsters who love nothing better than cuckolding beta males in order to jump into bed with whatever alpha male wanders into their field of vision. (I’m guessing Schlafly hasn’t actually been going through the archives at AVFM or Chateau Heartiste looking for column ideas.) While many MRAs love to complain about hypergamy, many of them also seem to think that it’s unfair that “beta” males with good jobs aren’t automatically entitled to hot wives.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual definition of the word “hypergamy” involves none of that. According to Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary, the word means “marriage to a person of a social status higher than one’s own; orig., esp. in India, the custom of allowing a woman to marry only into her own or a higher social group.”
That’s it. It refers to the fact of marrying up, not to the desire to marry up, much less to the alleged desire of all twentysomething women to ride the Alpha Asshole Cock Carousel. The manosphere’s new and not-so-improved definition came from a white nationalist named F. Roger Devlin.
ANOTHER NOTE: Big thanks to the people who emailed me about this story. If you ever see something you think would make for a good Man Boobz post, send me an email at futrelle [at] manboobz.com. I get a lot of ideas from tips!
Omg David spoke to me. I’m star-struck @___@
Way back when I first started reading Manboobz, one of the first questions my husband asked about anti-feminists was, “How can they be against things like equal pay for women? Isn’t it good for them if their wives and girlfriends earn more money?”
Aside from noting that not many MRAs have wives or girlfriends, I didn’t have a good answer for him. I still don’t. Even if pretending to be incompetent to make my husband look better seemed like a remotely good idea for either of us, I can’t imagine being in such a financially comfortable situation that I could actively choose to not make money just to keep up the illusion that I’m not awesome. I’ve got a mortgage here, Phyllis.
:: holds burning feather under rjjspesh’s nose::
Control. Ego. Seeing women as property. A womanthing making more money than the dude not only suggests she’s as smart, educated, worthwhile, etc, etc, as a Real Human Being™, but it means she’s in a better position to dump his sorry arse when she finds out what an oxygen thief he is.
pecunium, per Wiki (in Bokek-Cohen et al., 2007):
“Men express a desire for hypergamy on physical attractiveness; they desire a mate who ranks higher on the physical attractiveness scale than they themselves do.”
There is a reason a young and beautiful second (or third, etc.) wife is called a trophy wife: marrying her elevates his status in the social hierarchy — especially that of other men, but not only.
Since the term is being thrown around with such abandon in assorted discussions related to MRA’s many imagined miseries, it is worth noting that it applies to both sexes.
@Shaenon If their wives or girlfriends earn more money they have less control over them. They want to control women and making them dependent for economic support is a form of control.
I’m a woman. I work for a non-profit. Stats are pretty good that if I marry any man who is employed, he is highly likely to make more money than I do.
Thirty is just around the corner–still single. It’s almost like I think of a marriage partner as a human being I really, really like, and not just a walking checkbook.
The idea that Schlafy or anyone is complaining about eighteen-year-olds not marrying is creepy. They’re barely adult and it’s been pretty well shown, hasn’t it, that early marriage is generally not a good idea?
MRM affinity with Phyllis Schlafly and her kind is probably partly influenced by the MRM’s support of Islamophobia, as she is a well-known Islamophobe and the MRM is decidedly white supremacist in its agenda and in its talking-points.
I wonder what Schlafly would say about people like me (a woman working my way up from undergrad to PhD) and my fiancé (who wants to be a stay at home dad). If I were paid less than a man in my same job, our little hypothetical family would die off. (Probably what people like her want, honestly.)
SCROOGE MCDUCK OMG I LOVE THAT PICTURE OF HIM.
And Scrooge McDuck IS quite a bachelor… Not many ducks out there more badass than him.
http://photos.auctionanything.com/x/9186/p209a.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hiVROMUFIdE/UR8KUtGRzCI/AAAAAAAAO3s/e5qizmiYh4Y/s1600/WhiteAgony.jpg
Anyway, Schlafly is one of those people who makes me scratch my head… Always seems to be the “I’ve got mine, you get yours” approach… These people just lack so much empathy.
Even worse, it’s “I’ve got mine, you get yours, but I’m going to make sure you can’t get yours, then blame you for not having it.”
You know, with the MRAs super-confident philosophy about women being obviously so wet over money and fast cars, I wonder what they think women did to select a partner before those things were invented. I guess whoever killed the most mammoths?
Well it would, wouldn’t it? I’ve yet to find a better argument for desperately wanting to please your partner than “I need this fella to be able to afford to eat“.
Ah, the lovely Phyllis, believing that in the USA (which is, of course, the whole world to our Phyl) women must be forced to marry before 30 and be prevented from divorcing, by ensuring they are unable to support themselves (or anyone who depends on them), and men must have their egos continuously massaged. Total financial dependence on one side, complete power & narcissism on the other – truly the recipe for a happy marriage. /snark
Next time anyone wants to know the definition of “misanthrope”, I shall know at whom to point them.
@leocigale
Have you seen this? It is music inspired by “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” 🙂
There were a few anecdotal stories I read from women explaining why they “have more respect for a man with money”.
And from what I’ve seen, women with money don’t Not marry, they tend to stick to men with money. They’re inherently classist like that.
Oh, good old Phyllis, opinion on everything, and knowledge of nothing.
Let’s say it was true, her little thought experiment. Women can only be with men who earn more, and we institute equal pay.
At that means is that the highest paid woman in the world will not have a mate. Because the man who earns the same amount as her will be with the second highest-paid woman in the world. The 2nd highest paid man in the world will be with the third highest paid woman. And so forth, down to the poorest woman. And that richest woman? Poor her. She’s got billions of dollars. I sincerely doubt there wouldn’t be at least one man willing to put up with a higher earning wife if it was billions of dollars.
Fortunately, we don’t pair up according to income and weird rules invented by older busybodies with a column, like that makes their opinion special.
As for why MRAs are against equal pay?
I don’t think they can fathom that a woman actually does equal work. Most ‘studies’ demonstrate women don’t do equal ‘work’, quotes used because the methods favour assumptions that introduce bias favouring men as to what ‘work’ is, such as hours put in at the office, or time spent focused on one particular task, or number of patients seen or any other metric that doesn’t actually take into account the quality of the finished product or service. Then, to top it off, they treat it like a zero-sum game, where a woman being paid more is taking away from the rightful amount owed to a man, sort of like how the anti-affirmative-action crowd believes that hired minorities are ‘taking’ jobs from equally qualified white men.
My wife and I both work similar hours, but she earns three to four times as much as I do.
But that’s because she’s a highly experienced medical professional, and while I love being able to write for a living, I can’t pretend that what I do is anywhere close to being as immediately valuable to society as a whole. But because I can work from home and she can’t, I add value by combining work with childcare, with the result that she’s very happy to subsidise me.
Which from my perspective is about as close to a win-win scenario as it’s possible to imagine (it’s great for our kids too, as they get quality time with both parents every day) – so I genuinely can’t fathom why anyone would reject a setup like this for ideological reasons.
Random, but current and I don’t know which other thread to put it on. You know that whole MRA thing about how it’s only men who sacrifice themselves to save others?
http://www.straitstimes.com/news/asia/east-asia/story/south-korea-ferry-disaster-some-heroes-who-risked-their-lives-save-others-?movideo_m=804120
So far it looks like of the 30 crew member 28 made it out alive (and the captain is going to be prosecuted for getting his crew out and leaving the mostly teenage passengers to die). The two crew members who died trying to save the passengers? Both women.
There was also a 17 year old boy who was a passenger who died trying to save his friends, and at least one middle aged guy who survived who also went back to help others (your daily reminder that most men and boys are nothing like MRAs). I wonder if we’re going to see the MRM praising the captain for his lack of altruism. I also wonder how much jail time he’ll get if the reports that he had his staff lock some of the kids in their cabins so that the crew could escape more easily are true.
If traditional marriage has to be preserved by means of force and coercion and social shaming and artificial wage caps, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of traditional marriage.
It’s amazing how a woman like Schlafly has made so many advances that she’d never get without women’s rights (especially almost becoming the first female supreme court judge) wants to destroys them so badly.
Ah, yes, “female hypergamy”. Totally a real thing, for realz. That’s why my SO, a woman with a steady job and income chooses to live with a grad student who scrapes by on temporary job assignments while trying to get his degree.
Right, I forgot, it’s preemptive action. Beloved is totes riding the cock carousel with a no-good penniless grad student bad boy who lets her support him while he keeps doing all the stereotypically irresponsible stuff, like playing the guitar, dabbling in visual arts and wearing a leather jacket. In a few more years she will hit 30, but that’s okay since by that time, I will have my degree and a well-paid job (hopefully, unless the economy keeps going down the drain), so she’ll have it made with a hard-working beta who supports her and brings home bonbons and scented fucking candles while she continues to bring home her own paycheck and… err… I lost my train of thought.
Personally, I’d suspect we’re just another couple in love. But what do I know, I’m not an expert in social sciences and the Lovecraftingly non-euclidean depths of the antediluvian female mind, like Phyllis Schlafly and the manospherians apparently are.
I wish she’d stop bringing shame to the name of Schafly. It’s also the name of a delicious brand of beer.
I like the Dry Hopped APA. Hubby likes the Bourbon Barrel Ale.
She’s suing them to change their name. So, support pissing off Phyllis Schafly by drinking beer.
If your going to read her sexism screeds, you gonna want one anyway.
So? Schlafly got a point, many females hope to marry (not same as dating) THE ONE, and this fantasy male must be taller, richer, darker, stronger,… etc. than they are, basically, a “prince”.