By David Futrelle
There’s a famous study (cited here) that suggests both men and women dramatically overestimate the amount that women talk, at least in situations where both men and women speak: in one conversation examined for the study, twice as many men than women spoke — but participants in the conversation were convinced that more women than men had spoken.
Something similar happens when it comes to women wielding any sort of power in society — especially amongst men who aren’t too keen on women having much power at all. Consider, for example, what happened when one Men’s Rights Redditor discovered a news article noting that “there has been some progress in female participation rates in management in Irish business in the past two decades.”
The article pointed out that Irish women had made some strides in the general direction of equality in such professions as Human Resources — where women make up 72% of the managerial staff. But there were other segments of the economy where the percentage of female managers is pretty slim — like IT, where women make up 17% of management, or engineering, where they make up only 6%. And there were some sectors in which the number of women in management was sinking lower, from already low levels.
The Men’s Rights Redditor who ran across this article — a fellow calling himself TuckerMcInnes — posted it to the Men’s Rights subreddit under the alarmist title: “When are people going to realise feminism is going to lead to women taking over everything?”
In the post itself, he declared that
Firstly, I love women and I’m not anti-woman, but I think it’s bad and weird to unquestionably sit by as society does everything it can to make women the dominant sex in everything.
Citing the 72% figure for female HR managers, but conveniently leaving out the references to the tiny percentages of female managers in IT and Engineering, he went on to complain that
At no point does the article stop to ask:
“HR and Personnel, customer services, finance and accounting are being dominated by women – do we need to support more men moving into management in these areas?”
It also doesn’t question what the end goal is. Will society finally be happy when 72% of management in all sectors are women? Why? What’s with the obsession to make women dominant at everything? How is this not obviously a problem?
I swear it seems most people are sleepwalking.
Naturally, other Men’s Rights Redditors were as alarmed as he was — and then some. As one put it:
Everyone knows end goal is giving power to women in a silver platter without them having to do any hard work ever in civilization’s progress. ..
Enjoy the decline is only thing you should know now.
Wrote another:
It’s not ‘women’ that are taking over everything, it’s women with a very specific ideology and goal of pushing their identity politics and social justice bullshit onto everybody. … a bunch of rich white brats who would never qualify for these sorts of positions that are taking over these companies using blackmail and extortion against upper management to get in. …
They work their way into these companies threatening upper management and as upper management capitulates they infiltrate with even more people using their new found power to replace or get rid of anyone who doesn’t go along with their bullshit and then when they finally have enough numbers they go after management itself anyway.
These people are hostile infiltrators and criminals and should be treated as such … .
And yet another commenter literally predicted the end of civilization itself:
The fertility rate had already fallen below replacement long before women started taking over everything. A female dominated society is simply unsustainable and will collapse very fast.
So how close exactly are we to this alleged matriarchal dystopia in the business world? Not very. Despite making up roughly half of the workforce, women account for only 29% of top managers globally (31% in North America). And the higher up the organization chart you go, the less matriarchal it gets: Less than 5 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women.
Not that facts matter to MRAs. They’re oddly happy living in their imaginary upside-down world where women are always the villains and civilization is always on the verge of collapse.
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I’m guessing the name TuckerMcInnes is supposed to be a fusion of Tucker Carlson and Gavin McInnes. So this man is an old style white supremacist and a hipster Nazi all at once, presumably.
This panic that women are taking over everything reminds me of how Hitler tried to stir up anger around Jews supposedly taking over everything. MRA ideas about feminists and women in general resemble Hitler’s ideas about Jews in more ways than one. And I’d imagine plenty of them have similar views about Jews as well.
There’s nothing that shows their fear of women more than the idea that women might get 80% of the jobs they think they deserve — whether or not they’re qualified for them.
Men being the majority — normal.
Women being the majority — panic!
What might happen if women rule? Why, they’ll exterminate all men, or maybe force them to become house husbands. Wouldn’t preventing men from working be DEMEANING?!
nitwits, all of them.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m convinced that most MRAs, for all their supposed affinity with working class male coal miners and soldiers are from upper class backgrounds. Only someone with enough family money to have a one parent household with a mom that doesn’t do much hard work can possibly spew this crap about women not being hard workers and contributing to civilization.
@WWTH
They’re just like other conservatives who are in the 1% and pretend to have some semblance of solidarity with the working class, but really don’t give a fuck. They use them to score political points, then screw them over, then tell them that the only way out is to support the people that fucked them over in the first place through convenient use of scapegoats.
The amount of ignorance required to be an MRA, gives me a headache. To believe that women haven’t worked hard contributing to civilization, you have to ignore the ENTIRE pre-history and history of the human species. Women practically invented the thing when they started planting grain instead of just gathering it.
@MHC
Which is exactly what conservatives do. To them, history is irrelevant, only their manipulated version is correct. To quote George Orwell (I seem to be a quoting mood today):
Can I ask you guys a kind of tmi sexual health question because I’m concerned about something?
What’s up, Lainy?
So I was doing oral sex on my husband last night and his hips jerked up pretty hard and he got the back of my throat and when I pulled back his penis was just covered in my blood from the back of my throat. And my throat has still been bleeding all day to day, I keep spitting up blood. My throat doesn’t hurt but I’m very concerned with this. I can’t really see where the bleeding is coming from because every time I try to look my tonsils just keep filling up with blood. I thought it would just stop on it’s own and nothing hurts so I wasn’t to concerned but I’m pretty sure it should have stopped by now.
Yeah, I’d have to say I’d be going to a doctor at this point. 🙁
@Lainy – Sounds like maybe a throat abrasion? The tissues back there are pretty delicate and easily wounded (but also heal quickly in most cases). Definitely get it checked out by a doctor. Does it hurt to eat or drink? Maybe a glass of ice water would help stop the bleeding and any swelling.
Sure, that’s why you’re having a tuna meltdown over WOMZ R IN MY MANAGEMENT MANAGING ME
Why isn’t it bad and weird to sit by and unquestioningly (not unquestionably) let men dominate everything, though? These diatribes always collapse into circular reasoning. “Men should dominate, because men are dominant, which is true because they dominate.”
I mean, doesn’t this
perfectly describe privileged white male mediocrity? So many competent women never get a chance because the Brett Kavanaughs of the world get groomed, pardoned, and elevated by other Brett Kavanaughs. It’s a hard cycle to break.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
This reminds me of RBG: “When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, ‘When there are nine,’ people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
If “civilization“ as they imagine it to be is, indeed, going to collapse, all I can say is, “Good. The sooner the better.”
Lainy – best see a doctor as soon as possible. Its probably not at all serious in itself (some of the smallest abrasions in the ear/nose/mouth can bleed profusely – think of nose bleeds or tooth extractions) but its almost certainly not a good idea to fall asleep while its still bleeding, in case you aspirate blood. Fluids + Lungs – not good!
@BQS
Nice turn of phrase.
Does anyone else think, “I love women,” in this context means not, “I respect and support women,” but, “I am heterosexual”?
Completely O/T, but I thought people might find this marginally amusing. Chap annoyed Buzzfeed suggested he’d hacked the DMC. Love how they pleaded their claim.
@Otrame
I agree. The kind of “civilization” (read: white supremacist patriarchy) these folks want is not one I want to live in.
@Citerior Motive
I think it means “I like women as objects, but never as independent people.”
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
It hurts a lot when I eat something and swallow
@WWTH
Seconding this bigtime. Goes well beyond MRAs too. Look to any right-wing political leader and you’ll find that odious working-class affect. It’s an insulting caricature of what they think working-class people look and act like from people born with a silver spoon shoved up their ass (looking your way, Douglas Ford Jr.).
@Katamount
Sadly, it’s not just the right. Look at skidmarxists like Aimee Terese and Crapo Trap House who claim to be pro-working class but have extremely classist views of them.
@Lainy
Go see the doctor. If it is still bleeding, this is none negotiable, OK?
If you absolutely 100% can’t (money reasons or whatever) gargle with warm salt water (2 tsp salt in a cup of warm water) to reduce the swelling and clean the wound. Rinse with cold. Be warned, it tastes like shit.
ETA: @kupo – Thank you! 🙂 Your trick worked to get it to show up with the edit button!
@Naglfar
As a regular Chapo listener, I’m going to disagree a little. Amber A’Lee Frost has some absolute shit takes in written form, this is true; on the podcast itself, she’s not quite as bad, but has a habit of making obnoxious generalizations. Aimee Terese sounds more like somebody who just heard a bunch of leftist buzzwords for the first time and is deploying them against those whom she has an axe to grind.
Overall, I don’t think the Chapo folks adopt any airs of faux-working-classness. They’re remarkably up front with how loser-y they are.
Lainy, like everybody else has said, please see a doctor. I’ve had a similar thing happen to me – they gave me this solution of maalox and a couple other things to keep it clean and soothed so it can heal.
@Citerior Motive, @Naglfar
I’ve encountered this a lot too. I tend to summarise it like this: “I’m not a misogynist! Sure, I think women are sex objects, but I really like sex objects! I can’t possibly hate women.” They don’t realise (or pretend not to realise) that thinking of women as sex objects is precisely the kind of thing we mean by misogyny.
I think, if anything, it’s a vocabulary mismatch with how we talk about bigotry. A lot of people seem to have the (perhaps intuitive, but wrong) idea that hatred and prejudice have to be conscious to matter, while in social justice conversations etc we’re a lot more used to talking about unconscious bias and systemic oppression.