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!
Go do your homework, Pinky.
Pinky: A SAVE publication from four years ago with a most recent citation from 6 years ago (which means the most recent actual data is from not less than seven years ago).
So you contend that shows a law reauthorised last year, with changes added after that report was written is is discredited by material which is facially irrelevant (in that it cannot address issues related to the actual law as it exists, only to what may have happened prior to 2008.
So far your ability to logic seems less than fully developed, since the report shows that it’s harder for men to find services if they’ve been abused; but it doesn’t show this is a direct effect of discriminatory aspects of the law.
Pinky: That was the only way I knew how to post a link to the PDF on my mobile device. I am actually 15 and it is I who am disappointed in adults being that I am attempting a discussion and have received childish insults from adults.
You’ve been making childish arguments. You might, just might, have gotten some slack if you’d said you were fifteen up front. But really, the arguments you’ve been making are, at best, facile.
The fact of the matter is you made stupid arguments, and you got called on it. That you were mocked, is what happens; “Misogyny, I mock it”.
That’s what it says on the package, and that’s what you get when you come in playing the fool.
Seriously, Pinky, this isn’t a good place to start doing 101 research on feminism. I know some very bright 15 yr olds, but their still kids. I’ll cut you some slack for your age, but I still expect you to do you due diligence.
If you want, I’m sure we can suggest some links.
My kids are still up. I can come back later. (Maybe tomorrow) But for now, all I can think is, check out Citizen Radio and Bell Hooks.
Anybody wanna be a saint and suggest some reading/listening material for Pinky?
I really hope I didn’t sound as clueless as Pinky does when I was 15.
He could just google Feminism 101 and do his own work.
Well, doing it himself versus assuming a bunch of random women will do it for him is pretty much “will be a decent man some day” versus “little misogynist in training”, isn’t it?
One can always hope.
I’m certainly not going to give him links. He’s fifteen, he’s pissfarting around with his phone, he should know how to google ferchrissakes.
I’ve been glued to reports about the ferry disaster for the past couple of days. After seeing a bunch of teenagers (half of whom are boys) trying to rescue friends and spending their last minutes sending sweet messages to friends and family, and realizing that most of them aren’t going to survive, I’m not really in the mood to indulge a selfish little brat who’s too lazy to use Google.
So this is a site literally for bafoonery right? I’ve read other feminist sites and like you, they love to put false words in the mouths of others. I never said she was protecting women. I said that this was the perspective she was coming from. I made no judgement on her perspective, but rather showed how different her goals are from MRAs. MRAs want women judged exclusively on merits with no lowered standards including physical standards and no quotas. No one claims discrimination because only six percent of nurses are men.
MRAs want honesty. Unlike female nurses, 90% of male nurses are degreed and male nurses tend to go into specialized nursing fields. This is why they make more money, but feminists will cry gender discrimination. Yes, I do my research and even as a teen, I don’t relish bafoonery.
I also like accuracy. Schlafly did not say it is OK to rape your wife. She said she doesn’t believe that a man can rape his wife,and vis versa. These are two different statements and her opinion is one based on past schools of thought. A wife would have to file assault charges under such circumstances if physical force was used. That, again shows her traditionalist views and I am not a traditionalist. I hope you adults can understand this.
What’s a bafoon? Is it like a baboon, but without the bright red ass?
(You should probably stop showing yours, btw.)
The rest of the comment is officially too stupid to read.
Also, Storm from has a “White Nationalist 101” section. Should I read that for unbiased info? Feminist claim the desire for equality, but don’t show it in practice.
Buffoonery. Pardon me, I am typing on phone. The desktop I have access to blocks this site for sexual content (I guess due to the name).
Yep.
I don’t think anyone wants qoutas. The only one who brought that up is you, yet by doing so, you make it seem as if anyone here argue for discrimination, different standards for women and quotas.
What was that about false words?
I can’t find anyone here talking about nurses either. I don’t follow your train of thought either. People with specialized degrees in specialized fields make more money, and this is a sign of discrimination? Because those in those fields are men, so… wait I just got it – the assumption here terrible feminists find it terrible that men with, admittedly, specialize degrees earn more money than those who don’t have them.
wait no that’s fucking dumb
Does an example from a single sector of a single industry and a single job designation (“nurse”) invalidate the larger concept of a wage difference?
So the argument is it’s okay to rape your wife, because raping your wife is impossible, so nothing that is done to your wife can be classified as rape, so you go right ahead and rape that wife, because what you are doing categorically cannot be rape.
As it very often the case, because someone believe something and argue for it does not change the actual defintion of those terms and those events, but it often carries implicit moral judgements that allow people to slide reprehensible stuff through.
I say “Stealing is wrong”
You say “Yes, I agree, stealing things is wrong”
I say “So will you give me back my collection of stamps”
You say “I did not steal that, we are friends, and friends cannot steal from friends”
I say “What”
You say “I declared my apartment a sovereign state, and have nationalized your stamp collection.”
I say “That amounts to stealing it”
You say “Hah! No ! This is politics. But you can petition the UN for the return of your stamp ressources”
I like accuracy. It is accurate to surmise that statements mean things, and that subjective preferences of those things have only relevance between people who agree to let those subjective preferences be the rule, but in all other cases, situations are assumed to be a common ground thing. If you say it is impossible to rape your wife or your husband, because marriage makes a holy matrimony, then you are, factually, arguing that raping your wife or husband is okay. The reason for this, and I’m spelling this out because it’s pretty important, is that if you claim something is an impossibility, then all the people who are doing it get to go right ahead and keep doing it. Because they are doing an impossible thing, and impossible things are best done before breakfast, but have no legislative impact.
Saying: “Oh, but you can file a physical assault thing if forced was used” amounts to appending:
I say: “But you busted down my door, broke my dinner table and destroyed my cupboards while taking my stamp collection. That’s clearly breaking and entering”
You say: “Shit, you’re right, I doubt the UN will be displeased that I used aggressive force when nationalizing your stamps”
I say: “What about my stolen fucking stamps?”
You say: “No, those were still nationalized. But I think I might be in trouble with that breaking down your door thing. Will you accept a transfer of goods to repair your door?”
I say: “No, I want my stolen things back!”
You say. “Hey now you’re being fussy, at least I’m letting you file a petition for material reimbursement.”
to the above example.
Someone was still fucking raped. Someone still had their fucking stuff stolen. “Assault charges”? What about the fucking rape charges given the actual rape than in this situation actually happened? That’s not “She can file for assault!” that’s “She can file for assault and rape“.
I mean, logic and law here. That’s the charge you wanna file. And until you grasp that, I’m not even going to touch your “quotas” and your “false words” and your “Nurses” because you prove you have very little grasp of logic. You can’t annul things by wanting them to be annuled, because I can’t fly just by wanting to.
Now excuse me, I have to go increase the budget for my Stamp Defense Force.
Nevermind, this shit for brains wet fart isn’t worth the time. I’m sorry I asked anyone to do him a favor. He’s committed to earning his Jr. Shitlord badge. Let him have it.
It just makes me appreciate the teens I get to be around all the more.
What, you don’t like the kid’s non-sequiturs? They are after all the most accurate way of communicating intent.
Yeah, I may have to suggest to Mr C that we buy his nephew another football jersey for not being a toolbag in training.
Pinky: First off, all nurses have degrees, at least here in the US. You have to have graduated from a nursing program before you can take the NCLEX, which is the licensure exam for RNs. And if you’re going to throw around numbers, you have to cite your source for those numbers.
Second:
Well, you’ve not really shown this. When asked for proof, you bring up one person’s comment on an article and cited a source that doesn’t really say what you think it says. And now here you are, bringing up Schlafly’s views on marital rape and Stormfront. You change the subject when your views are challenged.
No, actually, this is saying the same thing. If Schlafly doesn’t believe that husbands can rape their wives, then when a husband forces his wife into having unwanted sex, either by force or threat of force, then Schlafly would say that is not rape. Schlafly sees nothing wrong with that scenario.
Well, kid, are you saying that white nationalists deserve full consideration of their views as a matter of equality? Is that what you’re trying to say here?
Pinky: I’ve read other feminist sites and like you, they love to put false words in the mouths of others
Ah… weasel words, which try to distance you from the content of your words, and so pretend that what you said isn’t what you said.
Let’s try a bit of this “wording” you allege means something different from what we saw you say.
You are coming at this from the perspective that feminists want special privileges for women.
But that doesn’t mean you want to take away women’s rights, just that your persepctive is that men ought not be forced to accept that society will pay women the same wages for the same work.
MRAs want honesty. Unlike female nurses, 90% of male nurses are degreed and male nurses tend to go into specialized nursing fields. This is why they make more money, but feminists will cry gender discrimination. Yes, I do my research and even as a teen, I don’t relish bafoonery.
So, even as a teen you are willing to cite your sources, right?
What do you mean, BTW, by degreed? Do you mean a bachelors degree? Because an RN is a degree, and a PRN is a degree, and I’ve yet to see any explanation why someone with a BA ought to be paid more money when engaged in a techical field (e.g. nursing) where specialised expertise is the skill for which recompense is being rendered.
Moreover, you fail to account for the ways in which specialities (as with secretaries, or with things like pediatrics) into which women start to become employed, the wages drop, and the presige goes away. Or (as with computer programming), when men come in, and the pay starts to go up, women start to be excluded.
I also like accuracy. Schlafly did not say it is OK to rape your wife. She said she doesn’t believe that a man can rape his wife,and vis versa. These are two different statements and her opinion
Again, you have a failure of simple logic, and an utter failure of argument. If Schafly doesn’t think it’s possible for someone to rape their wife; then she, by extention, thinks it’s ok.
To expand a bit, with a parallel example, i.e. statutory rape. If I were to say that didn’t think statutory rape is possible, then I am saying it’s ok for someone to have sex with 14 year old children.
If we define rape as, “sex without consent” (and we do), and Schafly alleges that rape isn’t possible in marriage, and we know that a partner has not consented to sex, than either Schafly is wrong, and rape is possible in marriage, or marriage is a special case in which consent doesn’t apply.
If one doesn’t accept that consent doesn’t apply, and one presents that argument; and has it dismissed (which is what happened with Schafly), then one is quite correct to say that she (and those who agree with her) think that rape in marriage is ok.
Since the core of, “you can’t rape your wife” is that “I do” removes the ability to refuse consent to sex, and I reject the idea that the right to choose to consent can ever be taken away, it is correct for me to say that Schafly thinks it’s ok to rape in marriage.
Furthermore, the law agrees. Rape is sex without consent, and it not negated by being married. So for a person to argue that rape is impossible in marriage is to say the law stops applying once someone says, “I do”, which means that person is saying marriage = freedom to rape. If that person is also saying, “women ought to get married” (and you are daft if you think you can argue Schafly isn’t saying that), then at person is saying that women ought to be stripped of the right to consent to sex; in short, she thinks rape is just fine, and to be encouraged.
You may not like it but it’s what her words mean.
That you are choosing to retrench your defense of her words, to try and strip them of the actual meaning they contain is pathetic. I can understand why you might want to do that; since you are defending someone who thinks raping women is just fine as well as stealing from them, whether they marry or not (i.e. she thinks women can’t be raped in marriage; in which she is both morally, and legally incorrect: and she thinks society needs to be structured so as to force women to get married by penalising them if they are not, in the form of not paying the what their labor is worth).
So yes, I see a buffoon here, but it’s not us.
Unfortunately, the First Bank of Fibin just told me that the stagflation is getting out of hand and the Stamp Defense Force actually needs to be actively down-sized because of terrible budget constraints. It turns out investing all your gold reserves bitcoins to invest in MRA quote mines is a terrible business, and that the larger investures in tautologies, rumpology, SPINSTERS, scented candles and the ellipses extraction firms hounding to get at the punctuation reserves of Fibin has driven the economy into a terrible macroeconomic hellhole for which I think there will be little return.
Therefore, I have decided to do several drastic steps in order to curtail this wanton destruction of my imagined, grandiose delusions of sovereign nationality, and I have done the following:
I have elected to grant Pinky. a citizenship of Fibin.
I have nationalized Citizen Pinky. stores of baffonery, willful ignorance, ineptitude, casual disregard for precedent and his vast stores of Unrelated Tangents.
I have amended the Fibin constitution (well, in an emergency session of the cabinet we have written a constitution on the back of a napkin) to declare that nationalization of citizens ressources is impossible by law, so ipso facto what just transpired is not nationalization, and all of citizen Pinky. former solipsistic resources now belong to the glorious State.
By investing all of these unrelated tangents, ignorance, ineptitude and casual disregard whole holding on to the baffonery until the market improves (based on readings of Charteu Heartise, the outlook looks grim) it is my hope that Fibin will once again reach the glorious economic high of last week when we could afford cake for the first time in three years.
Further, the MRA quote mining business and the ellipses extraction firms have been allowed a short term lease to set up shop in Fibin, where it is my hope that we can harness their natural rage, ire and disregard for reality to power our ongoing research into anti-gravity technology, cloning and persistent rage boner syndrome.
Now, I have to go attend a diplomatic meeting with the envoys from the fungal growth in the basement.
Too fucking right I can understand it you horrible little shit. I’m old enough to be your grandmother. What that means is that I was married at the time that disgusting woman made those statements about rape in marriage. So what “past school of thought” would have applied if my then husband had raped me? Oh, that’s right. It’s just a traditional view, it doesn’t count.
Do you apply the same logic to the treatment of slaves or to the application of the Jim Crow laws after abolition? It was just the “view” of the time? No. It was just as wrong then as it would be now.
And the same thing applies to rape in marriage. And equal pay. And access to bank accounts or credit cards or being able to rent a house or take out a mortgage without a man to co-sign or guarantee. And to being able to buy a car without a father’s or husband’s “permission”.
It was always wrong to deny those things to people on the basis of being the wrong colour and/or the wrong sex. It’s wrong now. It’s also wrong now to say it was OK then because it was the “traditionalist” approach. The reason those things were changed was … wait for it …
… because they were wrong and it was well past time to make them right.
Kiddo is just lucky that everyone here is too decent to invoke traditional ideas about how adults are allowed to treat badly behaved children, and that we will therefore limit ourselves to sending him to his room without supper.
Pinky: Also, Storm from has a “White Nationalist 101″ section. Should I read that for unbiased info? Feminist claim the desire for equality, but don’t show it in practice.
I see you have decided to give up on the “feminists think raping boys in prison is ok”. You’ve also stopped defending the “VAWA discriminates against men” trope. The last, in particular, was your big stick on the “feminists don’t want equality” front.
If you expect to convince us (and if you aren’t trying to convince us, you are either trying to convince yourself, or having a wank in public, I’m not sure which is the more pathetic; the first because this isn’t going to be an easy place to do the former; unless you are engaging in, “the people I insult don’t praise me, so I must be right”, which is self-delusional, and the second because we see it so often), you are going to have to do better. Slapdash accusations; in the hope we will forget earlier failures as you flail from one to the other in the hopes one of them will prove persuasive isn’t going to work.
First, because we won’t forget the things you said before. Second, because you are working from a significant disadvantage; the people you are listening to are lying to to you, and we know it; because we are the people they are lying about. Third, because you aren’t the first to come in here spouting this nonsense (in this style).
And, so long as you continue to let them lie to you, and accept their lies at face value, you are going to get short shrift, because falsehood doesn’t deserve patience. Someone who isn’t willing to support arguments doesn’t deserve to have them entertained; This is what Schafly glossed, got wrong, or just flat out chose to ignore
She is, and has always been, dishonest in her words, hypocritical in her actions, and evil in her motives (i.e. she want’s to prevent half the population from being treated fairly).
You are defending her. You’re gonna get pushback.
So far I don’t think we’ve found any form of bigotry that they’re not guilty of.
Let’s judge cis men based on how well they lactate.