By David Futrelle
Men’s Rights Activists generally respond to discussions of the wage gap between men and women by snidely dismissing it as a long-disproven myth. (It’s very definitely not.)
But there are a few brave MRAs willing to accept the fact of the wage gap. One Men’s Rights Redditor I wrote about a few years back called MrWhibbley acknowledged that yes, men earn more than women. But in his mind the problem wasn’t discrimination. It was actually the result of women being a bunch of nasty bitches.
Now another Men’s Rights Redditor has stepped forward with an even bolder theory: the wage gap exists – but it’s actually a sign that men are the truly oppressed ones.
Yes, that’s right: Men are oppressed by earning more than women.
In other words, men are the victims of a vast female conspiracy designed to ensure that women can get free meals from their dates.
I should point out that in addition to being very silly, Neo2Trinity’s tweet is packed with utter bullshit. So let me take a few minutes to rebut some of the claims.
Neo2Trinity gets one thing right: more than 90 percent of workplace fatalities are male.
But this is not an issue that affects anyone but a tiny percentage of a percentage of working men. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,190 US workers died on the job in 2016 (the most recent year they have complete data for); 4,803 of them were men (92.5 percent). In that same year, there were 151 million people in the US work force (not counting unemployed people); 80 million of those were men (53 percent).
That means that the average working man had only a 0.006 percent chance of dying in a workplace accident in 2016, which was actually a pretty bad year, accident-wise.
That said, it’s appalling that as many as 5000 people die each year in workplace accidents, especially since many of these accidents are preventable, the result of employers skimping on safety to save money.
Thing is, for all the rhetorical attention MRAs devote to this issue, I have yet to see even a single MRA lift a finger to actually do something to improve job safety. Indeed, MRAs are arguably making things worse, given how many of them are Hillary-hating Trump voters who helped to elect a man who is doing his best to gut workplace safety protections.
As for the idea that men take dangerous jobs to earn more to spend on women, well, it turns out that dangerous jobs do not, on average, pay more than less dangerous ones, as cartoonist/blogger Barry Deutsch noted in a blog post some years ago. Sure, coal mining is dangerous, as Men’s Rights Activists never tire of pointing out, and it pays relatively well. But agriculture is actually MORE dangerous — and farm workers earn shit. If you want to make the big bucks, Deutsch notes, you’d do better to skip the dangerous jobs and go into a field that require specialized knowledge, assuming you have the necessary education.
As for Neo2Trinity’s claim that women are wealthier than men? Just plain wrong. In fact, the wealth gap is considerably larger than the wage gap; for every dollar of wealth owned by men, women own only 32 cents. Divorced women find it even harder to accumulate wealth; the median net worth of divorced women is only 25 percent of the median net worth of divorced men.
I will, however, grant that widows are generally better off financially than their dead husbands — though dead men don’t really have much in the way of expenses. So amidst all the rest of the bullshit in the comment, Neo2Trinity actually gets two things factually correct — but in each case completely misses the point. Which is pretty much the MRA in a nutshell: on the rare occasions they get something right, they’re still completely wrong.
Mwah Haha. I knew being widowed early would let me rake in the cash! I didn’t spend all that sweet cash on therapy or lawyers or bills or his funeral. Nope, it went to lots of hats. So many hats.
Hail katie.
Hail the matriarchy.
They don’t count if they don’t have feathers on them.
Considering how decidedly anti-union and social organizing the MRAs are, they really have no leg to stand on in regards to their self-proclaimed championing of the working man…
Here’s a swedish song about those who die working.
https://youtu.be/_-EEZxIDLmc
This is the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard. It takes work to become this stupid and reach such an ass backwards conclusion.
I would love to be more oppressed by earning more money. Please, oppress me!
Apart from being utterly wrong in multiple ways, it’s yet another variation of the “white man’s burden” fallacy that MRAs/alt right like to go for.
Sorry for your loss. My grandparents took care of all of that before my grandfather ended up passing so there was very little money that needed to go out at the time of his death or afterwards. Good to be prepared ahead of time and have it all paid off. For anyone else reading this.
I care. I do.
So please, let me, help you, by taking this horrible oppressive money off your hands.
Let me help. I care. I can help.
I think it’s important to note whenever this topic comes up that workplace death statistics do not include sex workers who are at a very high risk of job related violence up to and including death and sex workers are mostly female.
Also, Google tells me the US maternal death rate is 28/100,00 which at .00028 is pretty close to the .0006 death rate in the workplace. Globally, however it is 216 per 100,000.
Anyway, if earning good money is such a terrible burden compared to being either a stay at home mom or working a low wage job, then why in the fuck have men fought so hard to keep women out of good paying jobs, including the ones that are dangerous?
I don’t know what either this misinformed Matrix watcher or the lady in the poster are smoking, but I know who I’m going to ask.
What’s the wealth and pay gap of widowed men compared to widowed women, I wonder?
And yeah, cornychips, funeral expenses are ridiculous. Though my wealth only increased after becoming widowed because I was only supporting one instead of two people. Though I’m sure my being the sole wage earner was somehow misandry.
There was a time when I thought these kinds of posts were parodies by bored men and women wanting to “gets the lolz” then the truth reared its ugly misogynistic head. I at one point had hope men like this were just throwaway gags in movies and on TV. I’m only 24 andwas worried every post these guys write make humanity slightly stupider then I saw David’s awesome sense filled blog and gained hope again.
I can’t find logic or reason in this reddit post by any means
So wait, the rat race is a conspiracy all crafted to shave seven years off my life, so my hypothetical wife can take my money that we were probably sharing anyways to…
…try to enjoy the last seven years of her life??
…uhhhm that sounds pretty legitimate, actually.
And here I was thinking, for half a moment, that the argument was going to be “Earning more makes you more liable to paying taxes.” Which would have a faint touch of actual logic to it: if you’re a good little libertarian and believe that all taxation is inherently evil and oppressive, then yes, given a situation where the wage gap kept women under the level at which you have to pay taxes while men in the same job earned enough to owe the government money, the wage gap would be oppressive to the poor tax-paying men.
It would be a completely fucked-up way of looking at it, of course, but by libertarian standards it would be a coherent argument.
But no. Instead it’s just the old “Only men do dangerous jobs” argument. After all the years I’ve been following this blog, you’d think I’d have learned not to hope for occasional bouts of actual ingenuity on these tomfools’ part…
@WWTH I was thinking the exact same thing about sex work not being counted when I was reading this. Thing is, as some have suggested, these jerks don’t really care about those who have lost their lives in workplace incidents – they only want to use them to prop up their misogynistic world views.
While I agree with most of your assessment here, I don’t believe Hillary Clinton would have been any better on workplace safety. The Democratic and Republican party donors wouldn’t have allowed her to be. Trump is terrible on such issues, but no more or less than Hillary would have been.
Darn dead people, moochers, get a job why don’t they?
Funeral expenses. That’s one of the reasons why I’m donating my corpse to a body farm.
@Joy
What the fresh hell does Clinton have to do with anything? Can anyone ever point out anything Trump does terribly without someone saying “BUT CLINTON WOULD HAVE BEEN TERRIBLE, TOO”?
I’ve kept aside a couple thermite grenades, but same concept. 😛
Especially since hovering over the links reveal that Trump is actively making worker protections worse. Whether Clinton would have made improvements, we’ll never know. But it’s doubtful that her department of labor would’ve gone out of its way to make it worse. So it’s really like saying Clinton not being perfect is exactly the same as Trump being terrible.
Anyway, we’re almost a year and a half into Trump’s presidency. It’s time to stop bringing up Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama every time the administration is criticized. The election is long over. Obama’s terms are long over. Let’s evaluate Trump’s administration on its own merits. I seem to recall Republicans doing the same thing during George W Bush’s presidency. Every problem was blamed on Bill Clinton. Because despite the Republican party supposedly the party of personal responsibility, Republicans are never ever, ever responsible for anything bad and if they are than Democrats must be equally bad because…reasons, okay? It’s a deflection tactic. The bad policies can never be discussed because first we address their little “nuh-uh, you are!” bullshit.
@WWTH
“then why in the fuck have men fought so hard to keep women out of good paying jobs, including the ones that are dangerous?”
Because no real man would ever let his women put themselves into any kind of danger.
Of couse, the fake imaginary kind of danger that the ladies like to cook up about “childbirth” or “workplace sexual harassment” or “hemmorage from ovarian cysts” is a-ok, because if it was REAL danger it would happen to men, and only men.
Because men are just so nice to take all that, and then the extra weath, on so that ladies just don’t have to worry their pretty little heads.
/LAWGIK
Funeral expenses,
My mom’s estate lawyer lectures me on paperwork. There is not huge money involved here either.
And if I get any flak about the urn I chose….
It was $85. I shopped online. I did the “move in” myself too.
If this jackass gives me one bit of flak over this…
I will remind him that there’s all sorts of other paperwork he can lecture me about.
I (and enough of people) are well aware of various bureaucracies, as well as mark ups on things.
I found something nice for my mom. IMO that’s all that matters.
Don’t start with me.
There is a huge irony every time any of these MRAlt-Right types claims anything from The Matrix as their own (e.g. “Neo2Trinity” above; “Red Pillers”; etc.) …
And that is that the Wachowskis are trans, and the Matrix itself, “the world that has been pulled over your eyes, a prison for your mind”, is metaphor for the gender-identity boxes and intersecting class and other oppressions that most of us live in. It’s no coincidence that the Agents are all white males that combine “perfect businessman” looks with super-combat abilities, while the big Zion party in Reloaded is full of mostly brownish people of both sexes being sensual!
If you read that article someone recently linked to about gender boxes it’s especially clear how this connects to the concept of the Matrix, and the fact that the Wachowskis came out as trans not long after makes it extraordinarily unlikely that this is coincidence.
Which means the Matrix is all about how wrong and fucked up the MRAlt-Right worldview is. Whatever they may claim, they’re not the red pills, they’re the ones “so inured to the system they’re not ready to be unplugged” who will fight tooth and claw to avoid it.
It’s probably why surprisingly many of them got reputations as at least somewhat woke first, then went full-Nazi farther down the line. Several people (though I forget the names) have been mentioned here as having been sensible once, feminist or etc., then become toxic later on. Well, they’re like Cypher: they woke part-way, were horrified at the world they saw, and took the ostrich’s way out. They are now intentionally burrowing themselves in deeper, gobbling down blue pills like they were candy! The opposite of what they, and the rest of the Alt-Reich, claim to be doing.
The Matrix has them.
That!^ All that!^
Perfectly said Surplus.
Also, I used to work in nursing for years before I switched tracks and became a philosopher. Although nurses rarely drop dead on the job, it’s common to develop chronic injuries from all the heavy lifting. Now, I don’t think nurse titles translate perfectly between Swedish and English… We have nurses who’ve done three years in med school, but I was an uneducated nurse who only did non-medical stuff, like helping patients out with a lot of stuff they were unable to do themselves, as well as wash them, clothe them, help them use the bath room and stuff. That’s heavy when patients are more or less lame. Sure, you have lifting equipment to help you with them, but just getting a both heavyset and lame person into the lift is really fucking heavy, no matter how you do it. And uneducated nurses are paid shit money.