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.
@Dvärghundspossen
I believe the equivalent here is a patient tech. Their job is a lot more physically taxing than nurse or doctor. They also spend way more time with the patients than either of those. It’s a hard job without a lot of pay or recognition.
Maybe they should unionize.
Malmrose Projects is making a series about ‘The Red Pill’.
She’s awesome.
Her series about hegemonic masculinity and gaming is great as well.
I want to add that it’s white women who make 77 cents to a white man’s dollar
Black women make 65 cents
Native and Hispanic women make 56 cents disabled women make around 22 to 33 cents
skinny women make more money than fat women, Etc.
This is a good example of what I believe communists call false consciousness. Workplace fatality statistics are a real problem and are a good example of something that cries out for reform. This can be examined in one of two ways, either by gender or by class:
Gender: Men are hiring men for low wages and driving them to death so that men can make a return on their investment.
Class: Middle-class people are hiring poor people for low wages and driving them to death so that wealthy people can make a return on their investment.
Straightaway, we can see that the gendered perspective on this isn’t nearly as meaningful as the class perspective. Picking it as a lens to see this issue through means that one misses the whole point… which may itself be the point, of course.
(It can also be viewed from a race perspective; in the UK at least, dangerous physical labour is disproportionately done by people of colour. Intersectionality applies, of course.)
Middle-class or upper-class. If you own, say, a bunch of coal mines, you should probably not be labelled “middle-class”…
But yeah you’re obviously right.
Related to this, I think class is talked about way too little. Like, a lot of people seem to think that class is just another axis of oppression like gender, race, sexual orientation etc. But I think class is just more fundamental. It’s at least conceivable to have a society which is just like ours except that there’s no sexism, no racism etc. I mean I grant that the absence of these oppressions would be a really big difference! But as big as that difference would be, it pales in comparison to how different a classless society would be. You can’t have equality between classes unless you remove them altogether. And with no class differences, well, we’d live in communist utopia, and that’s way more different from our current society than a non-sexist and non-racist capitalism would be.
My impression is that lots of people just don’t grasp this. When they do talk about class, they focus on things like how people from the working-class don’t know high brow culture the way people from the middle-class do, how middle-class people might look down on working-class people and so on (and the upper-class is typically forgotten altogether). I’m not saying these things are unimportant, but they pale in comparison to the purely material disadvantages and economic exploitation that working-class people face.
One thing that gets my goat about that whole ‘women live longer than men’ thing?
That only works in places where women have access to modern medical care.
Sure, if a woman survived childbearing age she had a chance of getting old.
We still see the old statistics in many places of the world:
1 in 10 births: Child dies
1 in 100 births: Mother dies.
Without c-section I would have died. And my mum too.
People may (or may not, I offer no guarantees) find this interesting. There’s a journal I have to read about health and safety, and they did an article exactly on the issues raised in this thread.
http://www.hazards.org/vulnerableworkers/ituc28april.htm
Completely agree. I’m not a humanities person by training, so I lack a lot of the vocabulary to talk about these things; but I think you’re right.
I’ll write a longer reply later when I have more time; I think a lot of it has to do with the way our society sees power. I’ve read Foucault but not really studied him, so please excuse any superficialities or wheel-reinventions.
@Dvärghundspossen
This is absolutely true. (I think that this is largely one of the many crimes that can be laid at the feet of the USSR; for the last few generations, any talk of class issues is immediately shut down with fallacious references to gulags)
For all my watchword is ‘No war but the class war’, I think you’re wrong. See below.
I really don’t think it is; classism and other bigotries are inextricably linked on both a conceptual and a practical level.* Racism especially has been a bulwark of capitalism since the early mercantilist days, and before that in feudal societies (‘blood will tell’ is a very old concept)
*Here’s a decent quick overview of how this works
“A real man would never let his women…”
Errrr….wait, what? A real man…so I guess that means only fake men believe in the autonomy of women and the actual men think controlling women is what they are supposed to be doing?
NO. Just no.
I wonder how these geniuses explain the results of the recent wage gap publication in the UK, which showed in a lot of cases that companies that were equally split or female-dominated in the lower half of the wage bracket were hugely male-dominated in the upper half and especially the upper quartile?
Also that almost no companies had an equal or negative male:female base pay ratio, and the only negative ratios were in bonus accruement in some companies (suggesting that the base pay is actually in spite of equal or improved performance?)
I highly recommend going through the figures if you have a spare hour or two, by the way, they make for a very interesting read.
(And yes, I’m well aware that none of the people denying the wage gap are likely to read those figures. Oh, well.)
I think DawnPurityseeker is snarking.
Not only do women get paid less then men, they also have to pay more for basic services. A woman’s haircut costs about 50% more than a man’s where I live. Women’s clothing likewise. Womens’ razors are the same due to legislation here – but womens’ shaving cream is typically about 20% more expensive for the same product. Womens’ hair products are more expensive (hair products designed for hair textures which are typically non-white – tightly curled, kinky, etc – being even more expensive than people with hair textures typically coded white – straight, wavy, and gently curled), womens’ deodorants are more expensive, women have a whole class of mandatory-for-the-majority-of-cis-women hygiene products that men don’t have to use that will typically cost at least $40 more a month.
That’s without even getting into makeup which ostensibly is optional but in reality female-perceived workers’ performance reviews depend as much on how made up they are as they do on their actual capabilities, so makeup may as well be considered mandatory too and makeup is fucking pricey. Like, even for a basic look (assuming you don’t have super-clear skin naturally, which is purely a genetic lottery), you’ll need foundation ($30ish), concealer ($20ish), eye liner ($15) mascara ($15), eye shadow ($20), and lip stuff ($20-$40 depending on whether or not you use lip liner and how spendy a brand you want to go with), not to mention blush if you aren’t super rosy in your complexion ($20) (prices in CAD not USD) (I am trans but closeted so I know this shit). You need to replace your makeup products every 3mo for hygiene reasons, so that adds up. And that assumes you go with the same look every day – women who vary that shit up will have loads more costs, and women who do more advanced looks (contouring etc) will have more costs, as well. Finally, women who are not white often have additional costs because their skin tones aren’t represented in the standard types available in stores (I don’t have that issue as I am so pale often the palest shade is actually darker than my skin, but I know people who do – most stores in North America have like 40 varieties of white and maybe 3 that are darker than a typical Northern Italian complexion) so they might have to buy from premium brands or even import their shit. Hell, some stores around here don’t stock anything for non-white people at all, and many that do have it isolated in its own section under – and I am not making this up – “Ethnic Hair” and “Ethnic Make-Up.” Ethnic. Really. I swear to god, “Ethnic” is becoming the latest racist dog-whistle. ANYWAY MOVING ON.
Women get charged more at car repair shops, more to buy a car, more in loans, more damn near everywhere. Not to mention that as a woman, you just can’t take risks the way a dude can – you can’t join your boss for a beer alone (even if your boss is gay and you know he is) because if you do, your coworkers will talk. You can’t ever join anyone in their hotel room alone to talk business, just in case they’ve got something other than business planned (plus, if anyone finds out, they’ll talk and you might get fired). And so on and so forth.
And to be charged more, they often get shittier service. Many public buildings treat womens’ rest rooms as an afterthought (case in point, when I went to uni, my program had gender parity among undergrads… but there was 1 womens’ bathroom to every 3 mens’ and every time the uni tried to change it there was such a tantrum from male faculty that they backed down). And then dudes laugh at women for taking so long in the bathroom without realizing that 75% of their time in the bathroom is waiting for a fucking toilet to free up. It’s well known, as well, that serving staff at restaurants will be less diligent for female customers compared with male. Women pay more for health insurance, but doctors don’t take them as seriously. I could go on.
So women get hit every way possible: Not only are they paid less, but their mandatory minimum living expenses are higher – and to make matters worse, they often get less or worse service even though they’re paying more.
But sure, that’s totally a secret plus for women. *eyeroll*
I too read it as sarcasm.
My understanding is that at least some of the lifespan disparity between sexes is caused by the disproportionate number of young men who die in combat, fatal accidents (including workplace accidents), or through acts of violence. Which is to say that toxic masculinity plays a direct role in lowering the average male lifespan. I read somewhere (quite a while ago) that while women still do, on average, out live men, if we control so that we are only comparing men and women who live past age 35 then the gap narrows.
If the OP were actually concerned about diminished male lifespan, more feminism would be the ideal solution. Funny how these guys never seem to be worried about racial or class longevity disparities, even they even know such things exist.
One thing I can’t help but notice is that most of these MRA types are privileged white men with STEM degrees who feel extremely put upon by any attempt to touch their privilege.
I have the extreme displeasure of working with many of them.
The fact these yobs literally believe that men earning more than women is oppression is testament to how disconnected from reality they are.
These by the way are the guys that do anything in their unholy power to prevent women from accessing these jobs.
ahhhh… “the movies”…
where men are men and women are… “girls”
E.T.A. @ Dawnpurityseeker, it’s wise to put a “/s” sarcasm flag on posts containing such… we get lots of folks here who advance those very arguments in all sincerity!!!
@ischemgeek;
Thanx for the cost analysis… wow, that “female privilege” is pricey!
@Dali and Dvärghundspossen
Thanks for the article, a very interesting read.
I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding something because of language or cultural barriers and you two can probably articulate all of this much better (you clearly have thought a lot about it!), but I see two issues with comparing class too closely with the other axes of oppression we talk about here.
Sometimes it seems that the concepts of class and classism are not kept distinct enough. Classism is – if I understand the term correctly – prejudice and disadvantaging people based on their class (like racism disadvantages based on race and sexism based on gender). Class as such on the other hand is – different from race, sex, gender identity, etc – a division that is not intrinsic to someone in that it can’t be changed but is imposed from the outside by the class-system and current/past economies. But class as such is not an -ism. It’s at most a category of identity like race, gender and others are. So classism and class really need to be kept distinct.
And class in itself is oppressive. Race and gender are not oppressive in themselves but because there are prejudices backed by power against people who belong to that category. But if no one had these prejudices against poor people (i.e. no classism) they would still be poor. Being poor would still disadvantage them in itself in a society where for opportunity wealth is often required.
This leads to another difference between class and the other categories such as race and sex. No one will tell you that they want to abolish races or genders to abolish racism or sexism. Class is different in that the end of it includes it’s abolishing. Of class not of classism. Classism as a prejudice can probably be ended without abolishing classes (I have heard people say that “all we need to do” is respect the identity of the poor as being poor – sometimes going so far as to insist wanting to stop poverty is a form of discrimination). Of course we need to do that and society needs to stop being prejudiced against poor people. But even then, they would still be oppressed and disadvantaged by the very category of (lower) class to which they belong, which is one imposed by the outside and not an inherent part of a person.
I don’t mean to argue with the intersectionality you mentioned or to deny that the other -isms are deeply bound up in many ways with the capitalist/feudalist system. I think that’s completely right. I just wanted to point out that – to me – in some respects class and classism do seem different from the others and to a greater degree than the other -isms and identity categories differ among themselves.
I also don’t think we could manage a world without racism and sexism with only class distinctions still existing, because by now at the very least – as Dali said much better – we seem far too used to conceptualizing and justifying differences in class on the basis of pretended “natural” differences in race, sex and gender among others.
I hope I wasn’t too confusing. It’s possible that I’m misunderstanding some terms, too, so feel free to correct me if you want to.
ETA: And I really don’t know which word to use when talking about the “target category” of sexism, as you can see above. Is it “sex” or is that too essentialist and it’s better to say “gender” or “gender identity”. There’s only one word for it in German, so I’m always unsure.
But…but…but…women are better off because they have so many more choices than men! They can wear so many more colors than men! Men are oppressed by the expectations of what they wear! /s
In all seriousness, I heard this argument within the past couple of months from a young (male) friend of mine. When I was trying to explain to him why women find it oppressive to be expected to “dress pretty” or “be feminine”, he launched that argument. The worst of it is, he leans very much toward liberal in his political views, but has stated quite loudly to anyone that will listen that #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, while worthy causes, have “gone too far” and trivialized the cause by considering things like workplace touching to be infringements of their rights. (He made no specifications of what was “gone too far” in BLM, so I give no examples here. He just made the statement in one of our union meetings, without elucidation. I decided after my experience trying to explain #MeToo to him that there was little to be gained in finding out what he thought was “too far” in BLM, because he is a smug, privileged mansplainer, and I’m tired of him).
And as David and the Mammotheers (band name sense tingling) have pointed out over and over again on this site, this same logic is applied to everything else MRA: men’s shelters, male suicide prevention, men on the battlefield etc. It’s not that they actually want to solve these things in good faith, it’s that they want to lean on them for outrage clicks and donations. You can tell because of the lack of things getting done; ineptitude goes a long way, but even rank incompetence doesn’t hire disbarred lawyers to sue a Comics convention.
Because, as @Surplus said:
The irony is that this is exactly what they accuse “SJWs” of doing every time they pull out the “virtue signalling” talking point. It’s a guilty tell, the kind that says “Come on, I know you’re just using social activism for money and self-glorification. After all, I do it, and without me, who would you have to agitate and raise money against?”
Don’t flatter yourselves, guys; if you were to vanish tomorrow, we’d all move on to passing legislation and fundraising for groups that have been in place for the better part of a century.
@wwth
Ah, but Forensic Files taught us the solution to that is just not to become a sex worker, ladies. Problem solved! /gallowshumour
There’s actually women, black men, a MRA movement in India and South Korea; I don’t know where else but yeah, we live in a stupid world.
@Dvärghundspossen, Dalillama:
I’ve heard it said that one of the greatest cruelties of the ‘American Dream’ is the delusion that the U.S. is a ‘classless’ society.
Because, of course, if you don’t believe there are actually classes, then you don’t have any way to focus on class issues. And that blind spot is very useful to the people in the upper classes.
You know how I said Tony Robbins went full MRA? Well he got MRA support for bullying an abuse survivor. That is, until he apologized.
https://twitter.com/RationalMale/status/983100636743913472
This guy has been featured here before
https://twitter.com/RationalMale/status/983100636743913472
Here he is in more recent days wanking about how evil consent is because it denies beta males “breeding rights” to women.