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.
Another, though very small, possibly confounding factor in the on-the-job-deaths stats is gender imbalance in compliance with workplace safety policies. As this article notes, “Around 23 per cent of men admitted to failing to follow safety procedures, compared to four per cent of women”.
If we really care about men’s safety and health on the job, then what we need to do is ensure that they have effective workplace safety/health protection measures in place and are required to follow them.
@ Dalillama: I’m not gonna die on this hill or anything, but I meant to use “conceivable” in a pretty weak sense. Like maybe it’s absolutely impossible to get rid of sexism and racism in our world whilst we still have capitalism, but you could, like, write a comprehensible novel which takes place in a capitalist world (which also resembles ours in, like, level of technology, roughly which countries there are etc) with no racism and sexism.
You couldn’t even write a novel that made sense about a capitalist world where workers and capitalists are precisely equal. It’s a contradiction in terms, since capitalists wouldn’t be capitalists unless they controlled the work, wages and so on of the workers, meaning the workers have less influence than the capitalists, meaning they’re not equal.
But, you know, I’m not gonna die on this hill or anything. I agree with LittleLurker that there’s still an important difference between being poor and being black or being a woman; if you’re poor, you’re not only hurt by prejudice. If you’re poor, you’re hurt by the very fact that you’re poor, independently of prejudice. Whereas the very colour of your skin or your very gender identity or your very vagina doesn’t hurt you.
@Fruitloopsie : that being said, engineer seem very likely to engage in conspiracy theory (moreso than scientists at least), which have a lot of common point with MRA thinkings.
@Dalillama : amusingly, you both note that conflating communism with the failure of its implementation caused trouble, then you conflate capitalism with the failure of its implementation. I would note that capitalism don’t have anything to do with classes nor racism, aka it can work with or without it.
@Jenora: I sometimes get the impression from stuff Americans write in articles etc that they believe “class” is this peculiar British thing, when the reality is that Brits probably talk way more about class than Americans do… but not talking about a thing doesn’t make it disappear.
The US has really crap social mobility. Social mobility isn’t great in the Scandinavian countries either, but it’s way higher than in the US. Weirdly, even in Sweden many people believe it’s the other way around (probably brainwashed by consuming so much American culture).
Shit, sorry
https://therationalmale.com/2018/01/10/dangerous-times-part-3/
I guess I hit post without posting the link and I reposted the twitter thread instead of linking to the WHTM post on him. Oh well.
Ohlmann: You can (at least theoretically) have a classless market economy. But if you have capitalism, you have capitalists and workers, which are different classes. How do you figure doing capitalism without capitalists and workers?
weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee
That’s horrible. I hope that person will be ok. Twitter and other social media sites need to do better of taking care of hate speech, etc.
Here’s that thing about how mental health interfaces with the criminal law. I was going to put it on Drive and post a link; but Google hates me. So with CW for metal health issues, here goes…
Mental Health and The Criminal Law
Ok , so as promised here’s a very brief overview of the interface of mental health and the criminal law. This is a subject upon which thousands of words have been written. Of necessity I’ll keep this to the bare minimum. If anyone has any follow up questions; I’ll be happy to expand. The contents apply to most common law countries, it’s an area where there’s a lot of cross fertilisation. But no idea how they do things in civil jurisdictions; sorry Euro-mammoths.
Firstly we need to say something about criminal offences generally. Usually they consist of two major elements; which unfortunately we use Latin terms for; mens rea and actus reus.
To oversimplify, the actus reus is the physical act and the mens era is your state of mind whilst carrying out that act. The mens rea is very important when it comes to establishing what, if any, offence has been committed.
To give an example: say I push a piano from a building and it lands on someone and kills them. The piano causing the fatal injury is the actus reus.
But what about my state of mind? Well I could have intended to drop the piano on you. Intent to cause a death (or serious injury) that actually results in death amounts to murder.
What if I was merely reckless? I was messing around and didn’t care or give much thought to the risk to others. Recklessness that causes death amounts to manslaughter.
How about of it was pure accident? I merely bumped into the piano and it fell. In that case there may be no criminal liability at all (civil liability may be another matter).
So, unlike social justice where “intent isn’t magic”, in law intent is everything. The theory behind that is that, when establishing culpability, you only consider a person’s voluntary actions (which are within their control) and not the consequences of those actions (which may be completely out of that person’s control or not even forseeable).
As an aside, that’s why attempted murder is a crime, even if no one actually got hurt.
So hopefully that explains, at least a bit, why state of mind is such a factor in criminal law. Now culpability is a question that has taxed the minds of philosophers, psychologists, neuro scientists, and priests. But lawyers have to keep things simple. So generally we assume people know what they’re doing, and are therefore blameworthy unless and until the contrary is established.
Most jurisdictions have three levels of culpability
Normal capacity. You’re a person of sound mind, who makes conscious decisions and knows the difference between right and wrong.
Insanity. There’s an innate fault in your reasoning capacity that means you either don’t know what you’re doing and/or that you genuinely can’t understand the difference between right and wrong
Diminished responsibility (goes by various names). This is like a half way house between normal capacity and insanity. It’s a relatively recent thing in law. This is where you aren’t completely unaware of what you’re doing, or right and wrong, but there is some innate factor that reduces your ability to make moral decisions or understand your actions.
[There’s also something called automatism. That’s where you may not be responsible for your actions; but for an external cause. The classic example is a wasp stings you and you crash your car, but it can include things like effects of chemicals or drugs. It’s an interesting topic, and can overlap with the mental health elements, but probably behind the scope of what we’re doing here]
The definition of insanity is set out in something called the M’Naghtan Rules (after a Mr M’Naghtan who once tried to shoot a prime minister). Those state:
”that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and … that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”
This rule is used all over the common law world, including in a lot of the US. However some states in the US adopted the American Law Institute Model Penal Code rule. That states:
“(1) A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease of defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.
“(2) As used in this Article, the terms “mental disease or defect” do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise antisocial conduct.
As can be seen, this is a little more generous than the original rules as it doesn’t require a total lack of capacity, and is more akin to the idea of dismissed responsibility. However after Reagan got shot, most states went back to the more onerous M’Naghtan rules.
Diminished responsibility. Most jurisdictions have some variation of the following test:
“Arose from a medical condition, and substantially impaired D’s ability”
Oftentimes diminished responsibility only applies to certain offences, like murder.
So that’s the tests. The question then arises as to disposal, ie what should happen to the defendant based on the above. Obviously if a person has full capacity then they can be punished for their actions. A finding of diminished responsibility usually acts as mitigation or can reduce an offence, say murder to manslaughter.
But what about insanity? It would be morally wrong to punish someone for something over which they have no control. So generally all that happens is a hospital order. A person is treated not punished. And of course if the treatment is successful then they must be released. The best explanation for all that is probably just to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Sometimes a person cannot be treated. Then it gets complicated. That’s where civil mental health law comes in. Jurisdictions vary enormously on how they deal with detaining people for public protection. Oftentimes people spend far longer detained in secure hospitals than they would have done in prison for the same offence.
So that’s a very brief, and simplified, summary of how the criminal law takes into account mental health when assessing culpability and disposal. There’s a lot more to it of course, including how the law is applied in practice (which can be somewhat different to the theory). But that perhaps is a discussion for another time.
Hope this helped a bit with the issues and people got some use out of it.
So this is only tangentially related to what Alan Robertshaw writes above, but I’m so tired of social justice people claiming that intent doesn’t matter, only what you actually do matters, because I don’t think a lot of people actually believe this. Real-life example: This immigrant guy who was learning Swedish wanted to wish a happy birthday to a female classmate on Facebook. First he mistakenly thought that you wish someone a happy birthday by writing “hooray!” on their wall, and second he mixed up the words so he wrote “whore!” instead. So obviously she was both surprised and offended at first, but the misunderstanding was quickly resolved.
I don’t think anyone honestly wants to claim that his intentions didn’t matter, and that what he did was just as bad as if someone had intentionally written “whore!” on her wall as a message of hate.
If you think about it for just a little while, it’s just implausible to claim that intentions don’t matter at all.
I think what people really want to say is that claiming that your intentions are good isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, but that’s a totally different matter. Like, the big intentions-is-everything tradition in moral philosophy is Kantianism, but Kant’s idea of having good intentions is pretty thick: You must truly respect other people, truly listen to them, and hold yourselves to the same standards as you hold them. But that’s a completely different thing from just claiming repeatedly that people shouldn’t be angry with you because you totally have good intentions.
So this was a little bit OT but this is a bit of a pet peeve since I teach Kant a lot.
@Dvärghundspossen:
Yes, that’s the basic problem.
The U.S. has crap social mobility, largely due to generations of not necessarily building safety nets (because COMMUNISM!!) and with people attempting to dismantle the ones that were built. Demonization of poor people makes it socially difficult for them to use what safety nets exist.
While at the same time, the U.S. has ‘the American Dream’, that anybody can make something of themselves. This both keeps people from understanding the fact that it’s false, and helps demonize poor people even more because if they haven’t made something of themselves then obviously they’re just lazy.
None of this is entirely unique to the U.S., of course, but the combination of cultural ideas there have baked in a particularly nasty form of class structure that refuses to publicly admit that it is one, while dangling the possibility of moving up close enough that people can think about reaching it but most won’t get there.
I’ve never seen anyone use the phrase “intent isn’t magic” to literally claim that intent doesn’t ever matter at all. That doesn’t mean it’s never, ever happened, but that’s clearly not well, the intent of the saying. It means what it says. It isn’t magic. When someone has good intent they don’t usually double down when they find out their actions or words have caused harm. They apologize and don’t do it again. If someone never had good intentions they’ll sometimes double down all the while playing the victim and saying they have good intent. That’s where the phrase “intent isn’t magic” comes in. It’s to cut off a particular deflection. I’m not sure what the purpose of objecting to it on the grounds that sometimes well intended people make mistakes when that’s not what the saying is typically used for?
@Dvärghundspossen: the intent thing
The way I always hear it used is ‘intent isn’t magic’.
As in: Intent matters, can be a mitigating circumstance, but is not a get out of jail free card.
@Alan:
I once read an explanation of the M’Naghtan Rule that summed it up as asking the accused “Would you have done this even if a policeman was standing next to you at the time?” If the answer’s yes, they’re insane, if the answer’s no, they’re criminal. Is that about right?
ETA: Using “insane” in the legal context, not to be ableist.
@ rabbi rabbit
Yeah, there’s loads of little tests like that. The ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ is probably the best known. I’m also a fan of the ‘officious bystander’ test (ie, would a passing busy body go ‘hang on a minute…’?)
Apropos of a discussion of class mobility, my family and I had board game Sunday while my brother was doing laundry and we cracked out my mom’s old copy of Parker Brothers’ Careers.
From 1971. And boy, did it ever show.
For those not familiar with the game, the gist is you have a “success formula” of a combination of money, happiness points and fame points that add up to 60, then you go around the board trying to accumulate it through a variety of career tracks. It’s similar to the Game of Life, but with more strategy and nothing related to family. The 1971 game boasted College, Ecology, Big Business, Teaching, Sports, The Arts, Politics and Space as the career options and holy hell, this is probably the most jaded board game I’ve ever seen.
Some highlights of the game:
— Teaching offers happiness when not having to deal with children. The only requirement to become a teacher is $100 for Union Dues. I landed on “Principal is bachelor +4 Happiness” every time I ran the teaching circuit, which was thrice. I only decided to attend college after retiring as a teacher.
— Politics had a square where you got caught with a “mink” and lost 1/2 your fame. Ah, life pre-Watergate was simpler then….
— Big Business offered the most money (of course) and opportunities for upping your salary was “Uncle is Treasurer” and “Let Boss Win At Golf”. Denting the boss’ car does not give you a penalty and apparently rewards you with Experience cards.
— Space squares include “First woman in space +6 fame” but also “Meet Mars Lady +10 Happiness”. Papa Katamount landed on both. Draw your own conclusions.
— In Sports, being tackled by 8 men apparently is worthy of an Experience Card.
— In The Arts, marrying your ballet partner apparently makes you lose all Happiness (???).
— The Taxes hazard square had a 90% top tax rate for those making more than $10K a lap. How’s that for a sign of the times?
So yeah, more than a few examples of casual misogyny and cynicism about certain fields of work.
I highly recommend getting your hands on it if you like board games, it’s really fun. This is what the box looks like:
Pop art had flair back then.
@ Rabid Rabbit
^
Put another way: the perps in pretty much all mystery fiction, even when their disassociation from reality is a major plot point, would probably *not* be able to use the insanity plea in real life, because there’d be no story if they were caught immediately; and so they must be written as having enough awareness that society is likely to frown on what they’re doing that they try to avoid detection.
Intent also doesn’t erase harm. That my mother doesn’t intend to hurt me with her fat shaming doesn’t undo decades of harm, for example.
Yeah it was a bit pointless of me to bring the intent stuff up here since I haven’t seen anyone on Mammoth say this but… I’ve seen several social justice people post on Facebook, as independent declarations rather than in the middle of a heated discussion, that intent doesn’t matter, because all that matters is what you did. And it frustrates me because no one seriously believes this, not if you think about it for a while.
But whatever, people here tend to be sensible. 🙂
@Katamount:
That box art is giving me Yellow Submarine flashbacks.
I agree with Jenora– That box is very reminiscent of the sort of aesthetic that’s present in Yellow Submarine.
Looks like Willie Rushton’s art style.
Yellow Submarine, with a little dash of Schoolhouse Rock and Time for Timer.
Talk about missing the point! This is the second time in less than a week where I have been astounded by people missing the point. Oppressed by higher wages because they are buying stuff for women. Why is it that I see so little of this in real life? Because the few women I know who are financially dependent on a man are trapped rather than living the life of Riley.
The other dumbfounding case of missing the point? My son told me that amazon has installed suicide nets in their warehouses. It seems that the workers are so miserable that they are throwing themselves off of the high shelves. Not only am I rethinking my amazon purchases but I am wondering about the brains of the people who run amazon.
A couple of years ago, I wrote to amazon after hearing that they had an ambulance standing by at their warehouses because workers had issues with heat and cold bad enough to require an emergency room. I suggested that the price on the $4 used books be raised – that I was willing to pay a couple of dollars more as long as the extra went to having decent wages and working conditions. I didn’t get a reply to my letter, but the suicide net thing really shocked me. I get all of my cat food delivered among other things and I am disabled so this is no small thing but I am looking at alternatives. I’ve already boycotted Walmart so I’m not sure what I am going to do.
Does anyone else find it ironic that these MRAs and incels complaining about supporting women probably have never paid for anything for a woman in their life? I know, just another addition to their endless list of doublethink and stupidity. These guys would be funny if they weren’t in deadly earnest. I wish they would just say what they meant which is that every man should be issued a female sex, breeding and work slave and that the slaves should talk about how happy they are to be slaves because that seems to be their basic gist. Oh and that anything less is oppression of men because women don’t need any rights or freedom or self-determination – that stuff is all for menz. Makes me want to go back to bed.
@Buttercup:
Oh lord, Time for Timer. I hanker for a hunk of cheese!
Or ‘The Magical Mystery Trip Through Little Red’s Head’.
Why do I waste brain cells remembering things like this?
@Alan
I’m curious, how does this intersect with “ignorance of the law is not an excuse”? If someone is sane, but merely ignorant, is there any mitigating factor considered? Or is the diminished capacity only a consideration for those who are mentally unwell, and sane people are expected to know the law? Doesn’t not knowing about a prohibition against certain behavior affect the intent behind the action?