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:
Women earn more than half of all the accounting degrees in the US. I’m sure even Antsy would notice if he didn’t get paid on time. As would the close to one thousand people I do payroll for biweekly.
And payday is the 17th, so I won’t be joining the strike. Maybe I can get away with a pink hat, though.
@Atom Ant
No one’s gonna tell me
What’s wrong or what’s right
Or tell me who to eat with, sleep with
Or that I’ve won the big fight, big fight
I worked the last census. We had to ask every single person we interviewed “are you male or female?” And we had to ask it about every other member of the household, no matter what their name was and no matter if they were standing there and we had an opinion about what their answer might be. We were not allowed to assume. We had to ask every time. I got one door slammed in my face when I asked this. And we had to fill in the answer that was given by the person we asked.
But it did have to be one or the other. There was no non-binary option.
Kupo,
“Subtle innuendoes follow
There must be something inside”
Every time I see Atom Ant posting here, that’s the song I think of.
5% of the total workforce is un and underemployed men. That’s not nearly enough to fill the necessary jobs “if most women went on strike”
@Axe
Factual high five!
@PeeVee
Me, too. I was going to go off on him but decided to let the music do the talking.
@ Atom Ant, it’s true that sad individuals like yourself, who do not notice the contributions that other people make to their lives, would not be much affected by a one day women’s strike, if that one day was a typical day for them, in which nothing unexpected happened.
I picture you smugly settling in for your day’s work-from-home, your refrigerator full of food you stocked up on yesterday on a planned grocery buying expedition.
I picture you stumbling, falling at just the wrong angle, and fracturing your arm.
I picture you dragging yourself to your phone, and dialling emergency services. Takes a while to get through, because most operators aren’t in today. There are also many less ambulance officers on duty today. When you finally get to your Emergency Dept, the clerical staff who would normally be there to take your insurance details and place you in a queue for triage, aren’t. Most of the triage nurses, aren’t. More than half the doctors who would normally be there, aren’t. Several of the doctors who are there are having to fill in for the clerical staff and nurses, instead of doctoring.
Finally, a doctor examines you. You need Xrays, of course. Half the radiologists aren’t here today either, it will be a long wait. Your doctor is too busy to do a nurse’s job of giving you pain relieving drugs in the meantime.
So you are waiting in a waiting area full of the diarrhoea, vomit, urine and blood of your fellow patients, because the cleaners who would normally take care of these things are also mostly not here today. Your Xrays finally done, you wait some more for a doctor to refer you to the team who will put on your cast. Funny, they are shorthanded today too. You are told to go home and come back next week when things have calmed down. You are prescribed some pain relief, but there is a 5 hour wait at the pharmacy due to short staffing.
Taxis and public transport haven’t been working well today, but you make it home eventually. You find that in your fall your fridge came unplugged, and your food hoard has spoilt in the many hours you were away.
You’ve gone a whole day without food or drink, so you drink a warm Coke and (one-handedly) pick up the phone / go online. Can’t get through to any food delivery services, they are already swamped with more orders than their drastically reduced staff can handle.
Thank god for online grocery delivery! You do some on-line shopping, get to the checkout, find delivery is not available. Doesn’t really matter anyway – turns out your employer’s payroll department was down to 10% staffing today, and those staff were all diverted to the equally understaffed accounts department so the business could keep operating. You didn’t get paid, and it may be months before they prioritise catching up on the backlog and pay you. Can you get through to your bank to organise a credit extension? Of course not!
This is only the beginning of the life without invisible women I picture for you.
Hippodameia,
What do you think the gender breakdown is of people who work in payroll? I think everyone I’ve ever met who does it is a woman. Getting workers paid is definitely a necessary component of a functioning economy! I bet any of those MGTOWs in that thread are getting paid because of a woman working on payroll.
Get it together, US government! If Facebook can provide all sorts of non-binary options, you can provide one!
That was 2010. I’d like to hope with a decent administration they’d do better the next time.
Oh well, nevermind.
And, yes, I do believe every payroll person who has ever paid me was a woman.
Sadly, I don’t think I can participate in the strike on such short notice. I just burned through most of my sick days for the year with a killer cold.
On the bright side, practically my whole department (80% female) were sick at the same time, so I think my company already understands how much it depends on women.
@Eli: High five for a fellow 2010 census worker! I did QA stuff before the census inquiries begun. I had to make sure all the houses were in the right spots and people were living/could live in said houses. 😀
I actually got into that job right after I got fucked over super hard by a shitty Subway manager (my old supervisor was there at the job offices too. She told him to “go fuck himself”. She was always my favorite supervisor there.)
@PI
High five right back. They must not have done that kind of work where I was. I had an entire binder that got filled in: flooded, no one lives here.
But no complaints. I got high marks and hired for follow up work based on how many addresses I resolved. lol
@Atom Ant
I’m unemployed, and thus technically a women’s strike wouldn’t affect me, because I could just stay home all day and not interact with anyone. However, even I can think of a whole range of ways a women’s strike would mess up my day.
a) Public transport would break down, as a lot of bus and train drivers are women, meaning gridlock and making it hard for me to drive anywhere.
b) The gym would be either closed or at least most of the group fitness classes would be cancelled, as a lot of the gym’s staff, both trainers and admin people, are women – as well as 75% of the aerobics instructors.
c) I’d make less progress towards getting another job, because all the recruitment agents I’m working with are women.
d) While the local grocery store would still be open (it’s a family-owned store) the owner and his two sons would have a much tougher time handling customers and restocking without the female family members also working.
This is without an event requiring emergency services which would be under huge strain without female medical staff, police officers, firefighters, and support personnel. Or having to deal with anything breaking down – given most call centres are staffed by women.
And all that crap about “infrastructure and landscaping and building” – sure, the physical job is male-dominated. But women do the admin, organise shifts and payroll, deal with resourcing and consents, manage company communications… Basically there are no large infrastructure projects which are done, start-to-finish, by men.
@Rhuu
Regarding “underemployment” – while it can mean “a person is employed but they have qualifications which could see them employed in a job which pays more”, it can also mean “a person is employed but they are working 15 hours a week where they are eager and able to work 40 hours a week.”
The service industry, because of various factors, is more likely than professional industries to hire more people to work fewer hours.
So while “underemployed” can be seen as a grading system on how “important” a job is, the high rate of underemployment in the service industry can also be a measure of yet another way that low-income workers get screwed over.
@CPhazor
Quoting from page 14:
@WWTH, my guess would be at least sixty to seventy-five percent. Come to think of it, I haven’t ever had a job where a man was in charge of payroll. It’s probably not considered exciting enough, even for accountants.
I just asked my father (also an accountant) and he says it’s probably more like ninety-five percent. Whenever he had to advertise for a payroll job, he’d get ten women applicants, and maybe one man.
I’m single and don’t have kids, but if I did it would be much easier to plan around an average payroll schedule than it would be to plan around an audit schedule.
Good evening, everyone.
“over and over”? If I were posting here every day, I could see that. Instead, I’m simply reminding you–every few months–that people with my viewpoint exist.
Also, re: accountants, I get paid once per month, and I’m sure that the relevant accountant already misses at least one day per month, so I don’t think that a one-day strike would hurt me.
Yeah, I definitely worry about that, as I’ve never had health insurance as an adult. I’ve been very fortunate; outside of a few trips to the dentist and eye doctor, I’ve only had to go to a medical doctor once in the last decade and a half. Sad to say, there aren’t exactly a ton of subsidies for single young-ish men with no children. So, my plan for women’s strike day would be the same as my plan for every day: hope that I don’t get sick or hurt, and if I do, try to tough it out.
For the record, I don’t think that I have any “subservient” women in my life, let alone any that I interact with every day. I haven’t even spoken to any women this week, unless this counts. Now, my mom is pretty traditional, and I did speak to her on the phone last week, so I don’t know if that counts.
Well, that’s enough human interaction for one day. I’m going to bed. Night, all!
Misses at least one day a month? Wow. It seems you know as much about payroll as you do about life – which isn’t surprising.
http://i.imgur.com/KyUOwJ4.gif
This blog has been covering people with your viewpoint for about 6 1/2 years now. We already know about the men who will be going their own way any minute now for sure.
Need you be reminded that Atom is a man? By virtue of being a man, he obviously knows more about your profession than you do.
‘ I’m also sure that unemployed and underemployed men would leap at the chance to do their jobs.’
Haha no.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/upshot/why-men-dont-want-the-jobs-done-mostly-by-women.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
I find this extremely frustrating. I think this attitude also feeds into what Naomi Klein was writing about yesterday–I didn’t actually read her piece, because I wasn’t prepared to be even more depressed than I already am, but it’s about ‘big labour’ supporting Trumpism. I suspect jobs mining coal or pumping oil are ‘manly’, and jobs installing windmills or wiring solar panels are not.
Tangentially, I find it interesting how we (and I very definitely include myself in this ‘we’) have set up our lives so that all the people who do all the things we need to live have been rendered invisible. This does relate to my economic history research—back in the day we would actually see, and know, who cooked our food, made our clothes, cleaned our workplaces—almost all of this work can be made invisible now, if we don’t want to see it. This is something I see over and over when people talk about how the most ‘advanced’ Western countries are becoming ‘service economies’ or ‘information economies’. When I hear people going on about this I have to ask, ‘wait—do you still eat? Do you still wear clothes?’ ‘Um, yes.’ ‘Do you think people now buy more, and more varied and complex, food than they did, say, 20 years ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you think people buy more clothes now than they did 20 years ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you think people generally own and use more stuff than they did 20 years ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you think there are are more people in x country than there were 20 years ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then how the fuck can you stand there and say that we’re now living in an information economy?’ It’s all just plants and rocks, folks.
Re ‘underemployment’—years ago I wanted to test a hypothesis that most ‘underemployment’ was due to women relocating to advance their male partner’s career, and thus being put at a disadvantage for obtaining jobs that optimally matched their own qualifications and skills…but economic disaster intervened; I’m sure this is no longer true of most ‘underemployment’, if it ever was.
Re math as a qualification—this is true of lots of jobs, including my own. I had to study math at a much higher level than I or anyone else in my field ever uses for their actual job in order to obtain my qualification, and it’s pretty clear that requiring such a high level of math achievement for these kinds of qualifications is specifically designed to weed out women, who are not prepared for or encouraged in this kind of study in their early education.
From my own experience of working in shops, I would say that those individuals most likely to say that women cashiers are ‘unimportant’ and not doing ‘real work’, are those people least capable of being able to use a self-scanner and end up stood shouting for help with the red light flashing above their heads. In our local Tesco, the person who goes to help is a woman, nine times out of ten.*
*It must be true, because it’s an anecdote.
Go ahead and strike, extend it for 1 year or more for all I care. In fact go do just that, tell your gynocentric collective to extend the strike. But you are all fucking cowards by biological nature and won’t obviously, those few medical or nursing positions would be filled in and done 100x better by the gentlemen of soft nature in our society the women here in the west along with their “Alpha male” macho bullies/jerks hate and despise so much. We don’t need you and never will for our civilization to function, so fuck off.
You are going to find that one day these same men you have persecuted for so long, and treated like shit will all come to our side. Men are more logical by nature, everything was made by us.
The MGTOW Revolution is on the horizon. You watch what happens when someday all men will unite, strike and refuse to keep being exploited for their money by their wives. Donald Trump has been elected. We are the resistance!
I’m sorry but I cannot call you one of us anymore Debbie. You are a cuck to the highest degree. You are beyond pathetic from deserving to be called a man. After your response last time I’ve lost all respect for you. Just like with all the others someday you will find that whatever partner or wife it is you have cheats on you for an alpha male caveman, and tricks you into raising his kids for her then someday files a divorce in court to take all your money. It always happens to everybody, and the day your turn comes maybe you will learn to be a man again.
@ MGTOWRevolutionary
But the thing is, it demonstrably doesn’t. Even in countries with high divorce rates, most marriages don’t end in divorce. And even when they do it’s a complete myth that judges invariably force the poor bloke to keep funding his ex for the rest of his days.
You seem to have it in your head that straight guys are just itching to get away from women. That’s obviously not true as any observation of society will tell you. And those Trump supporters you use as evidence are even more likely to be in, or seeking, traditional relationships with women.
There isn’t going to be any MGTOW revolution, televised or not, because the MGTOW mindset is shared by only a tiny insignificant portion of straight men.
You’ve declared it at least three times in this thread. GTFO already. You didn’t need to say it even once. We’ve heard it all before.
It’s exactly for people like you, for whom women’s work is invisible, that a women’s strike is important. You may not notice it, but you’re much more likely to notice it acutely the moment you try to get anything accomplished on the day of a strike. Just because women are invisible to you doesn’t mean they are unimportant or don’t affect your life. Taking women’s work for granted is exactly the problem a women’s strike is meant to address.
@MGTOWRevolutionary
Go your own way already. The door is over there. The seagulls await you.
@Atom Ant
No worries. We barely notice you.