So the people who brought us the Women’s March on Washington have another big idea: A general strike of all American women. So far the idea looks to be just that, an idea; they haven’t even picked a date yet.
But if they pull it off, this act of collective resistance could have huge consequences. Ask the people of Iceland, or at least the older ones: That county had its own day-long women’s strike in 1975 which basically rocked the country to its core as a generation of men learned that women play an essential role in the economy, a fact that many of the world’s misogynists still refuse to believe.
Speaking of which, you may wonder what the misogynists of today think of the idea of a Woman’s Strike.
I took a peek into the Men’s Rights subreddit and found that the fellows there are mostly supportive of the idea, though for reasons far different than the strike’s organizers: MRAs, many of whom seem to think that women don’t do anything but gobble bon-bons while watching The View, are fairly confident that no one would even notice if each and every women vanished from the workplace and/or stopped doing unpaid work at home.
In the Men’s Right subreddit, our old friend ImnotMRAbut posted about the proposed ban under a headline written in the form of a question:
Someone called liquid_j asked “is there room for negotiation? Can we call it like a week? Maybe two?”
Another old friend, ThePigmanAgain, offered a similar take, suggesting that
They should make it a whole year, in my view. Let’s face it, apart from the nurses, we really don’t need women for anything.
Meanwhile, factspissyouoff found himself feeling pretty pissed off at all those women who think their lives amount to anything:
It should also be noted that offices tend to be a mess when the assistant or receptionist is out and those are jobs that are usually held by women
@Terrabeau
Thanks 🙂 It’s kind of heavy reading though so, could you help clarify the point about how the aptitude tests served sexist attitudes? Were the tests geared unnecessarily toward percieved masculine attributes (I. E: antisociality when this didn’t work out in group projects) for instance?
Thank you.
@CPphazor:
I would presume the tests were just geared more towards higher education that women were a lot less likely to have access to at the time, whether or not it was at all relevant.
Similar to a lot of the old ‘IQ tests’ that were much more ‘education tests’ to allow claims that black students had lower intelligence rather than fewer chances to use that intelligence, and thus justify continuing to give them even fewer chances.
Dear MRAs, MGTOWS, and all other masculist alphabet soupers:
If you think we’re more useless than you (and face it, you’re pretty damn useless to us, for sure), enjoy the rest of your miserable, hateful life with no sex, no sandwiches, and above all, NO NURSES.
Sincerely,
The Women Who Built Your Whole Goddamn World, Up To And Including Your Unimpressive Arses.
It absolutely amazes me how much MRA’s are willing to spray their feet and shins with an Uzi by saying some of the most sexist shit while claiming to be “egalitarian”.
I was raped in prison. These fuckers once joked about it out loud while wishing ill on Hugo Schwyzer.
I hate them. I really do. I want to fuck them up so badly.
Croosters, I am so, so sorry you went through that. :'(
@PeeVee
I am a queer person. I’m the person who’s most targeted by the thugs that get jailed in the first place because most of them are homophobic as shit and want to take advantage of a skinny AMAB queer person for their own perverse pleasure.
You see, MRA’s don’t care about rape at all. They care about protecting rapists. People who spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about false rape accusations are either people who were falsely accused or people who raped someone and got away with it. According to the statistics, who do you think is most common?
(Given I had a friend who was falsely accused of rape (by a person he never met), I have immense sympathy for those men who were indeed genuine victims of perversions of justice.)
There’s nothing that I crave more than punking these fat, ignominious turds. There’s nothing I crave more than to shove a crowbar down Paul “Victim-Blamer Extraordinaire” Elam’s throat. A movement that could do so much for men only focuses on the perverse misogynistic sexual inferiority complexes of straight cishet white males for a reason: because they despise feminism, they despise equality and the only feminists they’re willing to take seriously are conservative demagogues (Christina Hoff Sommers) or misogynistic “social critics” (Camille Paglia).
Grrr…
All the fields matter, but one in particular would mess the MRA/PUA/misogynist cluster up really good, nursing. I’m a combination of middle school teacher and prison guard in a mental health unit by employment and I interact with a lot of nurses on a daily basis. It’s still mostly female people. Tons of medical support staff are female. Good luck getting a medical anything.
These weak fuckers just can’t stand to see a female person in a position of authority and as a result have damaged imagination in addition to everything else. I treat female people as respected authority figures on a daily basis because they know thier shit in one way or another. One older, literally scarred mother of three is someone who I will drop for when I hear “duck”. She knows so much about instrumental aggression and children and I am in awe of her. Her general knowledge helps keep my unit functional.
I think that PUAs are ridiculous, actually, and I don’t think that I’ve ever used any of their tactics in my life. My (gender-neutral!) position is “invest as little effort into other people as possible,” not “put one gender on a pedestal and spend all your time and money trying to win them over.”
I’m sure that, if most women went on strike, I’d eventually notice. I’m also sure that unemployed and underemployed men would leap at the chance to do their jobs. So it’s not “one gender is indispensable,” it’s “somebody does need to do those jobs.” I feel the same way about the stereotypically-masculine jobs that the more political/traditional MGTOWs go on about, as well. As we saw in WWII, women were capable of doing the harder, more physical jobs.
One final note: every time I read “cishet” (a term I just discovered on here), I think it says “fishnet” and am very confused.
@Brony
Most of them are indeed weak fuckers. I met some in public. Motst of them are intellectually crippled people with inferiority complexes that are usually sexual in nature.
Some of them are just stupid people with an over-blown tough guy image and a belief in some made-up fantasy version of “liberalism”
(I’m looking at you, TJ and Carl)
That position tends to not be very successful among social animals who depend upon one another for survival. But apparently you have no such needs, so – good for you?
Elsewhere: regarding nurses being very noticeable if they don’t show up to work. I do wholeheartedly believe that, but…I would hate for someone to need emergency services and find no one there, or the backlog/overload to be insurmountable to receive care. If, for example, my son (or anyone’s child) had a life-threatening accident, or what have you – I am not really willing to sacrifice him to help prove a feminist point, and I doubt any parent would be.
@Atom Ant
You talk out of your ass like all of the others. You literally have nothing but insults from your imagination. And you are childish to boot.
You are only rhetorically confused. That’s a version of the “I’m not touching you” game where you get to disrespect language customs here by feigning ignorance.
The childishness extends to your assumptions as you seen to think a strike appealing to the common experience of 50% based on sex plus gender variant experiences that mesh with segments of that. Sure, not all would strike. But I doubt a sexist like yourself could live without a subservient female person somewhere in your life. I say you notice on day one.
@dreemr
You have a good point. I was sacrificing sensitivity for rhetoric. I’ll try to spin something more effective.
I found some interesting statistics. Women made up 46.8% of the American workforce as of 2015. Black women have a higher rate of workforce participation than white women.
It’s super cute when the trolls try to be edgy.
Yeah, I am concerned about taking the day off. I have my (unpaid) internship that day, but I have to have at least fifteen hours a week, and if I only work the two other days I work there, I’d have to take my one day off to make up the hours beforehand. And even then, it’s a Friday, and we have mandatory meetings on Fridays to assess where all the interns are on their work that week.
I’d be even worse off if it was my newly aquired pizza job day. I can’t just take a day off two weeks after I got the job, unfortunately. : / Especially since it’s across the street from the university and I can easily be replaced by a college student (not that it’s a bad place to work, mind you, it’s great and the people I work with are super nice, it’s just they have a high turnover because of college student labor, and thus I am easily replaceable).
<3 Croosters
@Croosters
I hope we see thier political effectiveness rendered harmless. I am savage with words for the sake of people like you.
@Atom Ant,
Well, that makes it clear. You’ve got yours, so fuck everyone else, amirite?
(Before you get all “that’s not what I meant!” on me, it’s literally the implication you’re making. If you’re unwilling to invest time into other people, you’re being selfish by definition.)
Unlikely. Don’t see a whole lot of men bending over backwards to run day cares or take care of the elderly. Just like saying “illegal immigrants are taking our jobs!” is bullshit ’cause they’re doing jobs other people will literally refuse to do, saying “men will happily take women’s jobs!” is bullshit ’cause men will refuse to do them as well.
Welcome to technical jargon! cis = cis-sexual; het=heterosexual. It’s far quicker to just type “cishet.”
@Atom Ant
No they wouldn’t, or they would already be doing them. It doesn’t matter that it is cheaper to hire a woman, or a POC, or a woman POC, people still prefer white men for most jobs.
Plus, many many of these jobs are in the service industry, which can sound like someone is ‘underemployed’. (Not knocking it! Whatever people need to do to put food on the table, honestly. But by using this term, I feel like there is a grading system here for jobs that employ someone to their fullest extent being used, and typically service jobs are not regarded as those. STEM jobs, now…)
Looking at these statistics from statscan from 2016, you can see that healthcare and education are pretty overwhelmingly female*. Wholesale and retail trade are nearly evenly split. Food services are more than 50% female.
These jobs *aren’t* ones that unemployed and underemployed men want. Or they would already be training for them.
*I’m assuming this info comes from the census, and I don’t think there is an option to specify genders other than the binary. I’m also not sure how trans people can specify their genders, so this might be AFAB and not those who identify as female.
Also this:
No one is trying to win an entire gender over. I’m not sure how you would even do that, as a gender is made up of multiple individuals who have different tastes. For example, I quite like pineapple on pizza. I have heard this is a contentious thing to say, and that not all people who share my gender like it. (But it’s super good!!)
Edit: Ninja-d by Scildfreja! Hahaha.
@Croosters: I’m sorry for what you went through. Thank you for sharing.
http://img08.deviantart.net/cfc7/i/2014/105/8/3/flutterspy_by_ghandiddi-d5n0x7p.png
@Scildfreya
Ty 🙂
@Brony
Paul Elam’s “Men’s Human Rights Movement” has been almost completely destroyed and the only people that follow him are sexually repressed creeps (with the notable exception of Phillip Davies who, strangely enough, isn’t really that bad given he’s kept his bigotry down low). Roosh V is largely a pariah who won’t be able to gain new followers (hence why he branched out into white supremacism; these goons hate him, but many buy his books).
The only two anti-feminist people I am truly, genuinely terrified about are Christina Hoff Sommers, that stupid faux-feminist and her little sidekick Caroline Kitchens over at the AEI. These two women have done more to undermine feminism that anything that dipshit Paul Elam or rapist Roosh could ever dream of doing in their wildest fantasies.
Most of Sommers’ stupid talking points are repeated ad nauseam by genuinely well-meaning (and genuinely kind people who’ve helped me and sympathized with me in the past) conservatives I meet every day, to the point I have to relentlessly fight to keep her stupid opinions about rape culture from infecting them. David does a great job monitoring the misogynists here, but we need to realize that conservative think-tanks do a phenomenal job infecting the minds of policymakers and everymen and still maintain a veneer. Many of these people are not evil, misogynistic pricks unlike many leftists think. They’re very warm people who could easily be convinced to believe feminism if it could be explained to them in a way they oculd understand.
Sommers and Kitchens are both very common tropes in conservative circles. Their strategy is to find a minority with some cred (Sommers is ideal for this, as she was at some point genuinely feminist) and let them say whatever stupid shit comes past their heads. Since most right-leaning people who listen are uneducated and believe whatever sources they trust tell them, they accept it immediately and reject any alternative as “undermining due process” or “reducing freedom” which are sacrosanct in the conservative/libertarian mind.
Another great example of this is S.E. Cupp, the token atheist on the right. Though there are many areligious conservatives (most notably David Horowitz), S.E. Cupp takes the cake for her absolute inane defense of the religious right’s intrusion into politics which she, as many of her kin, label as “religious liberty”.
What is Adam Ant actually contributing here? “I don’t care about any of you” is a simple sentence that doesn’t need to be repeated, and yet here he is yet again.
If you don’t want to engage, Adam, then by all means do not engage, but standing back telling us over and over how you’re not interested in engagement is noise, not signal. You communicate nothing by that, so why don’t you save everyone time and just stfu.
Wasn’t one of the main reasons the great recession of a decade ago (wow, I’m old!) hit men harder than women is because a lot of men refused to even apply for the jobs that were available in customer service and retail? You know, women’s work.
@weirwoodtreehugger
Shhh… don’t mention that to the MRA’s. It pops their delusions.