By David Futrelle
Found this meme on Twitter, posted by Lauren Southern, the horrendous alt-right islamophobe antifeminist who may not technically be an MRA (I don’t know if she’s ever called herself one) but is certainly MRA adjacent. I’ve seen numerous MRAs, including some who complain endlessly that there are more women than men in college, making essentially the same argument.
This is the song that never ends
Yes it loops on and on my friends
Some jerkass started singing it
not caring what it was
And he just goes on and on just because
this is the song that never ends [ad infinitum]
In good job news though, I have an interview at a temp agency on Monday! It’s a small step, and it’s not really a promise of a job in my field, but it’s a start!
I also applied to the state university since they needed a designer.
Can we add “nautical murder enthusiast” to Southern’s credentials? She was one of the bigger names behind the alt-right murderboat, at least until she got kicked off Patreon for it. Not sure if she’s still backing it.
Conservatives tend to argue that career/vocational education is better because you’re learning actual job skills. That’s true that you’re learning job skills, but you’re typically learning a limited set of skills that apply only in a specific field. Once that skill set becomes obsolete though, you can end up in a bad situation and it can get really hard to switch careers. Lots of people went into educational programs focused entirely on magnetic tape data storage or other electronics systems that nobody uses nowadays. Plus, many career/vocational programs don’t give accurate employment statistics, they might not track whether people get placed in skilled or unskilled positions, often there’s little data on whether graduates advance or stay employed in their fields, etc.
Another issue is that there’s more of a focus on bootcamps and various “alternatives to college” that you can complete in just a few months. Traditionally, people were told to be very skeptical of any program you can complete in just a few months unless it’s advertised as a few courses. Even if you can get through all the work in a 4 year program in a few months, you’re going to get less out of it than if you took more time. Your brain needs time to learn something.
A liberal arts degree can be better for improving your ability to learn new skills if you challenge yourself to learn the theoretical foundations while you’re in college, and many employers only care that you graduated and have a bachelor’s degree. You don’t necessarily need to find work in your major field for college to help you in your career. Though I wouldn’t say that whether you go to college somehow determines your worth or that everyone needs a 4 year degree.
Juniper posted: “Last week we had our district meeting, and one of the things discussed was how 61% of our students are female and 49% are male.”
I take it there were no math professors on the panel?
Maybe 10% were nonbinary and identified as both?
@Axe – Obviously Mark is fixing Megan’s toilet, because she flushed feminine products down, ignoring all the warnings, and is too helpless to use a plunger (LOL DEGREE IN COMPARATIVE FEMOIDOLOGY AND SHE CAN’T EVEN HANDLE BASIC HOUSEHOLD TASKS).
While Mark was tinkering with the pipes, they got to comparing their income, student loans, and educational attainment levels.
As one does.
@Buttercup
Then, cos she can’t find a job and is in so much loan debt, she’ll tell him she can’t afford to pay the bill, and yadda yadda boom goes the dynamite. I mean, this is all MRA wank material anyway, right?
Axecalibur:
I thought “Mark” was a stand-in for less academically educated people generally. “Megan” is the snotty intellectual who goes to college in part for status reasons. She dismisses non-academic people generally, despite possibly even not knowing any.
Although it’s not really clear who is being mocked in this poster.
People who study academically?
People who study “something stupid”?
Women because they study more than men?
Women because they study stupid fields?
Women because they can’t compete in real jobs?
I think some STEM bro MRA’s might be in the “academic danger zone,” which is unfortunately a bit too easy to describe with bullet points:
– You’ve proven to yourself that you’re capable of highly difficult and complex academic tasks, like acing a really difficult programming project or math exam.
– You might mistake your above-average intellectual socialization with other aspects of your personality, like your level of dark triad personality traits and ability to compartmentalize whether you act morally or immorally around different people. Lots of smart people get through life with low levels of dark triad traits and lots of compassion and concern for others.
– Expertise in one area makes you think you’re an expert in every area. The “every academic field is really just a branch of physics” syndrome.
– You might realize that certain subjects are easy for you, so you put in the work to get an A or B but not the work to really learn something substantial.
– You think being smart means other people need to treat you like they exist to serve people like you, not in the To Serve Man cookbook sense. You think your 4.0 GPA in computer science means you deserve an elite tech job regardless of how you behave.
@wwth:
No argument here 🙂
@Paradoxical – That’s great! Wishing you luck!
@ Virgin Mary
Calls the Canadian PM a F****t, yet still expects him to do him a favor. Expects him to enslave people and hand them out like belongings despite being a SJW. Calls the actual refugees rapefugees (more than implying he’s against allowing them in), yet still expects Canada to open its borders to incels. Pfft, wow.
The 61% and 49% might be the means of each percentage over a number of years. People can have a bad habit of citing descriptive statistics as though they’re the “true” values. What if, for instance, you had one or two years with significantly more women than men and that’s enough to make the means an unreliable summary of trends?
I saw this posted on facebook recently, and it’s quite an eye opener. Computer programming used to be considered a female preserve because it was considered an extension of clerical work and languages. Then, in the early eighties, they concerted the effort into marketing computers to boys and masculinising the products.
https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2014/11/did-computer-science-gender-gap-begin-1984
I actually remember most of these ads from when I was a child!! No wonder they drove girls away from computing with this kind of propaganda.
http://www.funstockretro.co.uk/news/20-of-the-most-sexist-gaming-adverts/
Ah, MRAs, as inconsistent as they are wrong. It’s almost amusing, in a morbid fashion, to see how they say completely contrary things with all sincerity.
Nice, a flame war. *eats popcorn*
Edit: or maybe not? Welp, I’m still gonna eat my popcorn
Various factors affect the number of women and men in colleges: a period of time, trends, specialty, etc. When I was in college and studied marketing and working with advertisement copy examples, then naturally the number of women we had was small. Also, if you take into account philology or teaching, where they were more. And I think that this situation should not concern MRAs, as there are more important problems.
Thanks!