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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@galanx: I remember reading an article in the National Geographic magazine a few years ago where a research team visited a remote area in Ethiopia rarely visited by people with white skin. Did the locals fall over themselves enraptured by their pasty glory? Nah, the first question they asked was, “Are you guys lepers?” ?
(They also visited another remote place where the last white visitors were… Mussolini’s troops when they invaded what was then Abyssinia. The reaction there was, “you fucking assholes back again?” Memories are long)
I’m so sorry for your loss, Lainy.
@galanx
That one is so ridiculous I’m betting even most MRAs could see through it. I mean, where does one even come up with that crap?.
@Johanna
I’ve visited some old, now closed silver and gold mines in Nevada, and those look a lot more like what the MRAs seem to have as an image. I haven’t visited any modern ones, so I’ll take your word on it.
Their ignorance on the mines also probably has something to do with what WWTH said about their complete ignorance of what working class jobs are actually like.
@LollyPop
Well, people have eaten frozen mammoth carcasses in the last century, but the only description of their taste that I can find is “awful”. Which doesn’t surprise me for something that has been frozen for thousands of years.
@Lainy : hope you will get better somehow :/
@Cat Mara : conversely, my great-grand mother actually fled screaming “there’s demons in town !” when she have seen a black people for the first time. It was an american soldier in 1944. As it’s often the case, it’s not the europeans who handle a situation in the most gracious way.
The first though about this post is that, when there is a gold boom, money is in selling shovels. Based on that, in a gold boom city I would indeed take a job of prostitute over a job of miner, but neither are super high in the ladder of actually making money from the gold boom.
(and for actual, modern-day mines ? Dunno. I don’t even have pop culture knowledge of how thoses work)
Well, obviously mining towns are key here, because where else are you going to get the Minerals that you require more of?
I eagerly await this guy’s thoughts on how women can get Vespene Gas without harvesting it themselves.
@Naglfar
The question is, does Dude On Quilette think that “clean coal” is “coal that has been washed” as Trump does?
@Allandrel
Probably. Wait, does Trump actually think that? That’s dumb even for him.
That supposed evolutionary explanation for blond hair is incredibly stupid. We know that pale skin is important for getting enough vitamin D if you a) live far up north, and b) don’t have a ton of vitamin D in the food you eat (I mean, in the days of yore, before vitamin supplements were a thing). So northern-dwelling people who, say, rely on fishing and eat a lot of herring can be darker, but if they’re gonna eat, like, plants, grouse and moose and not much else, they need to be pale.
Presumably, blond hair and blue eyes could arise as a by-product of pale skin. Not everything must have a function. By-products can spread through a population too, unless they’re actually harmful. (Re indigenous people in the Arctic area, there are many blond Sami, but they might be the exception to the rule… I guess the other indigenous peoples far up north tend to have black hair.)
Unlike Johanna, I’ve never been to the big mines up in Kiruna, even though I live up north. 🙂 But I just checked their website, and yeah, they have pics of these huge tunnels that you can drive cars through and stuff. They also write that the deep tunnels, that go over a kilometer down into the ground, are mined by robots, so they don’t have human miners down there (at least not normally). Also, they seem to employ a fair amount of women… Someone should tell those gals that they could just quit and become sexworkers/wives/girlfriends instead, since that’s much easier.
HAHAHAHA this is the site where LKAB, the huge mining company in northern Sweden, announces that they seek new employees: https://www.lkab.com/sv/karriar/jobba-hos-lkab/lediga-tjanster/ They have a picture of a GIRL MINER on the page!!!!! Someone, direct her to the Quillette piece!
In other news, I get really full from eating one frosted strawberry Pop-Tart. Then again, one frosted strawberry Pop-Tart is considered one serving, so my appetite and satiety level can be considered normal. Also, I do toast them, just enough to heat them all the way through, and have them with a cup of four red fruits or blackcurrant tea. I eat the Pop-Tart first because by the time I’m done eating it, the tea is sufficiently cool to drink, thus washing with it any remaining pastry crumbs stuck in one’s teeth. In my house, Pop-Tarts are a Saturday-food. On regular days I’ll have a carrot or an apple for a snack, sometimes with a teaspoon of peanut butter. It’s good restitution after a workout, but hey; treating yourself every once in a while is self-care, too.
… That’s the best I could do. The assertions above make absolutely no sense. The commentary was aces, though. Here’s a Pop-Tart.
Can you put in a link to the Quillette article in question, please, so I can read it and decide for myself if it means what you claim it means?
Thank you!
Dvärghundspossen:
AFAIK, pretty much all northern hunter-gatherers are basically hunter-fishermen as far as their traditional diets go. Meanwhile, a mostly agricultural diet might actually provide insufficient vitamin D. Incidentally, Europe is pretty much the only region where prehistoric agriculture was well-established above 50 degrees north. Also, IIRC, one recent gene study suggested that European characteristic paleness evolved only a few thousand years ago (that is, after agriculture was introduced).
Indeed, in small populations there’s often random genetic drift, and I think random cultural trends might also affect sexual selection.
I don’t know how often the Sami are actually blonde, but stereotypically they are somewhat darker than nearby agricultural peoples. And of course there’s been extensive interbreeding.
@Dvärghundspossen
They’ve been living in close proximity to blond Scandinavians for a few thousand years. People being as they are, a certain amount of genetic mixing is inevitable.
I know that there’s this stereotype of what a Sami is supposed to look like: High, wide cheekbones and black hair. But in reality, although some Sami look like that, there are also lots of blond ones, like, it’s not unusual at all, and lots of Sami who’s more inbetween when it comes to hair colour etc.
Dalillama’s comment makes sense: Since southern Swedes and the Sami lived on the same peninsula for literal millenia before the north was actually colonized, we’re probably really mixed up genetically. I think the idea that Sami, in general, has a distinct and different look might be a product of the racist propaganda of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when colonization was rationalized by claiming the Sami were a different and inferiour race.
I think it was actually like this: The first inhabitants of southern Scandinavia were dark-skinned fishermen. Then, like five thousand years ago or so, agricultural people from continental Europe invaded, and wiped them all out.
Some of my latest comments seem to have been eaten. Is this one coming out?
Certainly, there are exceptions to rules.
As for some major population displacement in relation to the introduction of agriculture, such thing is now thought to have happened in Britain (and perhaps other parts of Europe?) but I suspect paleness evolved after that.
I still can’t post comments with links here, apparently, because Mammoth never forgets the sins of my male ancestors.
I’d imagine white supremacists wouldn’t exactly be pleased to learn that their ancestors had dark skin and later evolved lighter skin.
Especially since white supremacists fetishize Northern Europeans and Vikings in particular as living in some sort of racially homogenous era. The Viking sagas would differ on that, describing a large number of different ethnic groups that Vikings encountered in their travels.
Speaking of hunting ice age supermegafauna,
I’ve been lately reading a Finnish book on ice age ecosystems (Mammutin aika by Tom Björklund and Seppo Vuokko), with magnificent painted illustrations by artist Tom Björklund.
I wish I could show you folks one particular illustration, a painting of three male human hunters quietly paying respect to a mammoth they’ve just killed. It’s a very solemn and emotional image, not the least because the dead animal is rather photorealistic.
The illustration relates to a hypothesis presented in the book, that humans went on to kill the last mammoths (an other large animals that went extinct) in part because killing them was so culturally prestigious, and so significant as a cultural tradition. In a hunter-gatherer culture traditionally dealing with a lot of large game, killing a large animal would be likely codified as a necessary rite of passage for young men to enter adulthood. As large animals became rare, people were able to rely on smaller game, fish and plants, but they still went out of their way to kill large game whenever possible. Kind of tragic, if true.
In the painting, the three men’s faces seem weary, unfathomable. I can just imagine them feeling quiet joy of achievement, thinking “We hunted the mammoth, too”.
@ Jeffrey Deutsch:
Dave always links to his sources. In this case and as usual, it’s in the first paragraph, hyperlinked to the words, “some great ideas.”
You should check your browser preferences to show hyperlinks in a different color from normal text so that in future you can easily find these for yourself.
sniff sniff
Hmmmmmmmm. Dude name handle, check. Obtuseness, check. “Subtly” implying bad faith, check. Hmmmm.
I mean, it’s Quillette. What more does one need to know?
Thank you everyone for the kind words. The vet thinks Jessie had diabetes because there was this awful smell coming from him for the last couple of day. It was like he was already rotting. His system started shutting down and he wasn’t able to walk. He probably would have died on his own in a day or two but we couldn’t let him suffer. The vet a light sedative to help him relax and then gave the dosage. it was very peaceful and he was in our arms. With me telling him how much I loved him and that it was okay for him to go. That he was going to be with his sister so don’t be afraid. We’ve had him since I was 5 and I don’t know what to do without them both in my life now.
Prith kDar:
Thanks for the tip. I didn’t see the link when I first read the post, but it stands out quite clearly now. I don’t know whether I just missed it or Mr. Futrelle made a change later on.