By David Futrelle
Now I know you ladies like to complain about that pesky pay gap. But there’s no need to worry your pretty little heads (or bodies) about it, because some dude on Quillette has some great ideas on how to extract all the money you need from hapless cash-rich, sex-poor men. Even if — especially if — you live in a mining town, as so many of you gals do these days.
Take it away, Jerry Barnett, self-described “technologist, author, and campaigner.”
On the surface, in a mining town, the gender pay gap is huge, with the vast majority of money officially going to men.
“Officially.”
And yet, by Saturday morning, much of the cash has been transferred to bar owners, prostitutes, girlfriends, and wives.
But Jerry doesn’t seem to mind about the money going to bar owners. He’s more concerned about the money “transferred” to the latter three groups because of all the sex.
While most fair-minded people would no doubt agree that women should be free to take mining jobs if they choose, it’s unlikely that many women want such gruelling, dangerous, and unhealthy work when being a bar prostitute, a girlfriend, or a wife to a miner is available as an alternative.
I’m sure there’s nothing grueling or dangerous about being a sex worker in a testosterone-heavy mining town in the middle of nowhere.
Later on in the same post, Mr. Barnett tries to prove that men are “the low-value sex,” biologically speaking. As partial evidence for this claim, he cites … marijuana plants.
Even in plants (at least those species that produce separate male and female flowers), the females are forced to invest more. It is no coincidence that marijuana farmers destroy male plants, and retain the females for their big, resin-heavy flowers. Females are more valuable, almost everywhere.
Even later, he talks about cave men hunting the “largest mammals” to extinction so they could give the cave ladies meat for sex, thus making these big beasts “an early casualty of the human sex trade.” (Never mind that there’s no actual evidence of the meat-for-sex hypothesis; it’s just an evo psych “just so” story.)
Now, technically, Barnett didn’t mention mammoths by name. But “largest mammals?” Come on. I think this is close enough to count as a “we hunted the mammoth to feed you have sex with you” moment caught in the wild.
Really a lot of innovative thinking going on over on the Quillette there.
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There is literally nothing and nobody stopping ol’ Jerry from becoming a sex working in a mining town bar, if he’s truly certain it’s such a luxurious, easy money-making scheme.
@magnesium:
Word.
If it’s so desirable a job, why don’t they desire the job? Hmmmm.
@Magnesium
Depends on the mining town. A lotta them are in places where sex work is illegal.
@dalillama
Quillette is based in Australia, where prostitution is legal, so Jerry could probably get into sex work without too much difficultly…don’t know if there are still many mining towns in Australia, though.
They have gemstone mines at the very least; particularly opal is a big one there.
Largely FIFO mining camps these days I think. Maybe some gems still mined in towns.
Again my theory that reactionaries are largely from upper class backgrounds holds. This fucking obsession with mining is ridiculous. It’s literally the only blue collar job they can think of. At least the only they can pretend to view as noble because mining towns in the US, Europe and Australia are largely white. Presumably they don’t have pretend solidarity with miners in say, Madagascar or Bolivia. Fast food, PCA, and custodial work on the other hand, lots of black and Latinx workers. Lots of women. No good for pretend solidarity.
And then officially being transferred back to (largely) male shop owners, farmers, doctors, and landlords, when wives and girlfriends use the money to buy food, clothing, and so on.
Who’s really got the power here: the sex worker, or the company store that has a monopoly on the things people need to stay alive?
Not to mention the fact that the husbands also partake of the food and shelter that this money buys. Nope, the money just goes to sex workers, who coil up around it like a dragon.
“Even in plants (at least those species that produce separate male and female flowers), the females are forced to invest more. It is no coincidence that marijuana farmers destroy male plants, and retain the females for their big, resin-heavy flowers. Females are more valuable, almost everywhere.”
giggles loudly
This is so not the pitch for male supremacy that he thinks it is.
@WWTH
Yup. The rhetoric here sounds pretty similar to Trump’s thoughts on coal. For the same reasons.
@Cyborgette
It misses the mark so far, I’m almost curious what he was thinking it meant. I’m guessing he was going for a “male disposability” argument, but still misses the mark.
Australia has a huge extraction industry. It’s not just gems (like opal, of which they do have quite a lot) but the biggest iron mines on the planet are in Australia, IIRC (certainly very, very big ones), coal extraction is huge, and other important metals & minerals you’d recognize are being mined extensively in Australia.
Wikipedia sites the 2002 Treasurer of Australia (Peter Costello) for this information:
@Crip Dyke
So there’s clearly no shortage of potential customers for Jerry. What’s he waiting for?
Just for accuracy, I looked it up.
The 7th, 8th, and 10th largest iron mines in the world are all in Australia, but not the biggest.
The top 4 are actually all in Brazil, even though in total Australia produces more iron than Brazil does.
Australia does have the largest mineable deposits, but not the largest mines – nor does it actually produce the most per year. That’s China, which is responsible for 44% of global iron production according to worldatlas.com
/nerdout
I had to put Jessie to sleep today. He was 16 years old and a life long friend. He’s with his sister now in heaven and that’s the only comfort I have right now
@Lainy
My most earnest sympathies.
🙁 what happened?
@Lainy
I am so sorry for your loss. My condolences.
Lainy, I am so sorry.
@Lainy
I am very sorry for your loss.
On the meat-for-sex theory, my favorite was the (non-credentialed) ev-psych guy who used it to explain the origin of white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. You see, in warmer climes women could gather or grow their own plant food, and thus make an economic contribution to the family. In more northern places they couldn’t, and had to evolve the aforesaid traits so they could stand out from the crowd of females who were begging meat from the hunters. Why the hunters didn’t run screaming “ghost” he didn’t explain- I guess in his mind these attributes are just so naturally attractive that it didn’t need reasons.
I’m just so amused by these MRAs from Europe/North America/Australia who talk about mining as though mines still look the way they did in the 1800s. They really don’t (I know that mines in countries with poor labour protection laws like the US can be quite bad still). It’s not men with pickaxes crawling through tight tunnels with the help of a lantern anymore. I’ve been in a modern mine in Sweden. It’s large, well-lit tunnels (often paved) wide enough to drive massive machines through. There’s usually electricity and air conditioning and frequently even proper rails in the main tunnels for trains to bring out the ore. It’s certainly skilled work, and more physical than a white collar job, but it’s not even close to what these people seem to imagine. Most of the hard physical work is done by machines.
A female dominated job like nursing is far harder on the body and more likely to end in injury (whether from repetitive strain or from being attacked by a patient) than any job in a mine. But of course that doesn’t fit with the MRA talking point of men doing all the hard work and women sitting around eating bonbons.
If only we girls were clever enough to realise that life for us could be just so simple! I for one am heading straight to the first mining town that Maggie Thatcher didn’t destroy and signing up for a life of stress-free leeching. I can finally try a bit of that fried Mammoth they’ve all been raving about!
@galanx:
This is a fascinating bit of asspull. I wonder how he’d square that with the fact that the human communities that live in the coldest, northern-most climes, and that traditionally would rely the most on hunting and fishing for meat and the least on gathering plant matter (especially in winter) are the arctic circle indigenous peoples. Not a lot of blue-eyed blondes in those, and yet they still manage to reproduce!
What I get from that is that evo-psych fans are dimwits who don’t understand bottlenecking or genetic drift and won’t do five minutes of research before they start making shit up.
I think we can all be glad that the money was transferred to people who can handle it responsibly, rather than just spending all of it on booze and sex.