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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@Katamount And then they foment a distrust of “the elites” among the working class, and convince them that they’re the real (fill in the blank – men, Americans, patriots, whatever) so they won’t attempt to cross class lines and join them. It’s an insidious gatekeeping tactic.
@Katamount
From what little I’ve heard of the podcast, they seem to like using various forms of bigotry, then defending themselves by saying that it’s to relate to the working class, which is a classist assumption that the working class is bigoted.
Then there’s this lady, who claims to be in favor of the working class but has a very low opinion of them.
@Naglfar
*shrug* That hasn’t been my experience. I mostly listen for their reading series, where they riff on dumb columns by a cavalcade of usual suspects (Rod Dreher, Megan McArdle, Bari Weiss, etc.).
YMMV.
@Shadowplay
You’re welcome!
Back in the early 1960s, comedy team Mike Nichols and Elaine May had a skit about a boy who wanted to become . . . a nurse. Yeah, it’s pretty funny that a boy would want to save lives.
@ Naglfar
I don’t think that’s an accurate characterisation of Chapo. The bigotry is used to mock the right, and, well, bigotry. It’s an inverse of alt-right pipeline ironic bigotry: instead of normalising nazism, sexual harrassment, pedophilia, transmisia etc. and making it seem subversive and cool, Chapo ironic bigotry serves to make expressions of bigotry that have some degree of mainstream acceptability look embarrassing to people who can’t be convinced bigotry is bad by appealing to progressive values because that whole well has been poisoned by “woke scold” “political correctness” and “cancel culture” rhetoric. This is an inherently risky thing to attempt and there’s a lot of room for legitimate disagreement on how well they succeed and whether it should be done at all.
What Chapo is definitely not doing is advancing the narrative that the working class is bigoted. They’re not denying working class bigotry exists, but they’re not trying to appeal to it. They mostly target bourgie bigotry and very explicitly oppose the idea that bigotry is mainly a problem of the unwashed, unenlightened masses.
I don’t exactly follow the podcast or the hosts’ other projects, but Amber is the only Chapo I’ve heard expressing “contrarian left” views at all.
I agree with Katamount that she isn’t as bad on the podcast as she has been elsewhere. Seems like the worst takes are more promotion than entirely sincerely held opinions, and the audience is already her audience. (Not to diminish the shittiness of using her platform to say those things in any way.)
@dust bunny
This is just my experience, but I believe that ironic bigotry is still bad. It serves to normalize bigotry in subtle ways, and is definitely not harmless. It really can alienate the people who are affected.
Also, I find that attacking other progressives for being PC or socially conscious is counter productive. It’s going to turn away potential allies on the left, and it’s helping the anti-PC right. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot. And once again, it alienates various groups.
Maybe I have mischaracterized the podcast, and if I have I am sorry. However, I still feel that it has some problematic aspects.
Sounds like they might be playing off of the stereotype that Nurses are just the women that hold Mr.Doctors stethoscope for him while he does the actual medical stuff.
Ironic and/or insincere bigotry is still bigotry.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
@WWTH
This. I’m sick of comedians and other artists and public figures explaining away bigoted things they say by saying that it was “ironic.”
If you fucked a chicken ironically, well … you still fucked a chicken.
…and also the chicken is still fucked.
Funny how “ironic” bigots never seems to consider the damage to the targets of their bigotry, just like unironic bigots….
@Gaebolga
And have you noticed how ironic bigots are almost always people in positions of privilege who are bigoted against less privileged people? Much like the unironic bigots.
@Naglfar
I know! It’s such a weird coincidence…
/s
I have a large gash on the back of my throat basically. Part of the reason there was so much blood is i keep making it bleed when I eat something. I got some instruction from care and some throat numbing spray for pain which ironically is part of the reason I got here in the first place.
@Lainy
Wishing you a quick recovery.
Re:being a ironic bigot
Youtuber Though Slime did a pretty good take down of the whole “it’s just a joke” defense
@Lainy that is so totally ironic! Glad you’re ok.
I’ve been trying to figure out what sort of job Boss Lady is actually bossing in the image at the top— she’s examining photos and the man in the background is using what looks like some kind of radio equipment? Is it journalism? Are they a weather station? Googling the title doesn’t help much, as I keep getting slews of recent novels with the same title, as well as “Lady Boss” and “Lady Mob Boss.” The first vintage Boss Lady paperback cover looks to be from the 1960s and she’s apparently running more of a retail operation:
You can’t expect him to sense that, Brenda. That’s what employee training is for.
(She needs and desires him to do warehouse inventory— the last manager left it in a shambles)
@Moon Custafer
It is indeed journalism. That is Rosellen Callahan, NEA News Editor, looking at pictures hot off the telephoto machine to decide what’s going to press. According to the advertisement that picture is from, she owes her confidence to the use of Du Barry Cosmetics.
Even just looking at her pose makes my back hurt.
The MRA never cared about the working class man or average everyday men. They really hate men who disabled.
I use to be MGTOW for several years, but got out of it.
They’re toxic. Oh and don’t be a minority man who likes White women. You will get nothing but death threats.
Oh, but they swear up and down to care about men.
They’re jokes.
re: still bigotry
Yeah, sure. I fall more on the end of the spectrum of reasonable (ymmv) opinion on this that what the joke assumes about the world, who the butt of the joke is, who laughs, and what the effect on the world is matter more for categorising a joke as bigoted or not than whether actual bigoted statements are being quoted. I would never argue ironic bigotry is not problematic regardless, and evaluating these factors is always going to be subjective. I don’t listen to Chapo nearly enough to say they consistently succeed by my estimation, or even that they’re never just outright ableist etc. and my defense of them is limited in scope.
I didn’t mean to restart the conversation on ironic bigotry and should have explained why I was making the distinction between ironic ironic bigotry and ironic bigotry in the first place. It was not to say one of them is fine or even less bad (I do believe the latter, but this is so rarely of any consequence that the argument is almost never worth making and only helps the Bill Mahers and Nazis of this world). It was to justify my claim that Chapo don’t subscribe to or promote the view of the working class as white and bigoted, and to resolve the apparent contradiction between this claim and the fact that they are quite plainly using bigotry while trying to appeal to the working class. Intent doesn’t make harmful jokes harmless. Here it was relevant because I was making a point about what they believe and advocate for.
You can say their beliefs fall under intent and don’t matter either because they are bigots in denial and aligning with the working class as their bigoted selves and therefore making the assumption the working class is bigoted implicitly, and also inevitably advocate for bigotry and the view of the working class as bigoted. I wouldn’t, but it’s nonetheless 100% compatible with the point I am making. They do not look down on the working class, they are not hypocritical in their attitudes toward it, and they are bona fide leftists.
I am not of the Chapo faction of the left. I wouldn’t want to hang out with their dirtbags (many individual dirtbags are fine, but overall god no) or have my lefty spaces be invaded by Chapo influences. However I think they are very unfairly maligned by some people for things they are not doing and for views they don’t support, and I believe this is extremely harmful to the broad left (leftists and true progressives) as a whole. It’s fueling a rejection of class analysis by some who favour an intersectional approach. The two approaches are naturally united and don’t require reconciliation and the fight over emphasis is wholly unconstructive. (Here I feel like I need to point out that even Chapo’s actual substantive positions on minority rights are still properly leftist and hence on the whole extremely good compared to woke liberals.) To the intersectional left it may appear like the class left initiated hostilities. What the class left has actually done is simply distinguish themselves as a separate group, reject the alliance with liberal centrists who use wokeness to appear progressive, and attack them. I fully support those attacks and really wish no one with actual progressive views identified with the liberals. Sadly some people choose the wrong side and the liberals succeed in keeping the left divided.
(Googles Rosellen Callahan) Not sure what she and “radio quizmaster Bob Hawk” are doing. Fixing the wires, maybe:
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/radio-quizmaster-bob-hawk-and-rosellen-callahan-cbs-fashion-editor-picture-id495655290?s=2048×2048
When literal genocide (family seperation/Trump camps) is being committed and 1/4 of the federal courts are made of Trump appointees, what the actual fuck good do you think it is doing to spend all of one’s time attacking the center-left? And it’s not just the US where the fascists have gained ground. It’s a global problem. Hating people slightly less leftist on a few issues while swallowing Kremlin propaganda is not going to advance any class justice ever.
Also, fuck off with dismissing policy aimed at racial, gender or LGBTQ as “wokeness to appear progressive.” Doing these things is actually progressive and you can not advance class justice without intersectionality.
I have issues with a lot of the things that the center and center-left do too, but handing the planet over to actual fucking Nazis in the hope that it will spark a socialist revolution someday is not the way and to think it is takes enormous privilege, which is why you tend to mostly see this attitude from boatshoe socialists.