By David Futrelle
Misogynists really seem to think there’s some kind of vast worldwide conspiracy to give women cushy jobs they still can’t do properly, because, you know, women are all incompetent and lazy. Consider this lovely little screed posted recently in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit:
Chance that this guy is doing a job that involves physical labor: 0%.
Chance that this guy spends his days at work sitting in a chair: 100%.
Chance that he’s writing this post while ostensibly at work: 110%.
Naturally, CocotheClown5000’s peers in the MGTOW subreddit agreed wholeheartedly with his thesis. My favorite response in the bunch came from this dude, who is evidently mad that women aren’t all being forced to make him shoes:
Make yourself useful, dude, and shut the fuck up.
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Well, the MGTOW subreddit is definitely a curse.
This guy is breaking with MGTOW orthodoxy quite a bit. Usually they’re big fans of technology because they think it will help them replace women.
Another break of tradition. I thought shoes were supposed to be frivolous things women spent too much money on, now he’s asking for a pair?
I’ll admit to checking WHTM at work before, but at least I get work done. Compared to this fellow. If I were an employer, I would never hire a manospherian. He’d get no work done and spend all his time complaining about women.
How much of women’s productivity is sabotaged by misogynists refusing to treat them as equals or respect them as people?
The 10 year old girls I teach ballet to are far tougher, smarter, more creative, and more driven then any MGTOW will ever be and could ever be. My job is full of broken toes, deformed feet, sprains and ligament tears, I have the physical work out of that of a foot ball player and yet I’m light and graceful as a feather drifting on wind. My body is a temple for a craft that I have been honing since I was five years old and have been at for well over a decade. I like to see any of these pathetic fucks do anything with that much dedication, drive and skill that I do while going through all the physically tasking things along with the strict diet.
You mean like women doctors and judges and teachers and pilots and astronauts?
Those “joke” jobs?
Ah, the useless, non-physical, sit-down labor of a nurse’s aid. Obviously the least taxing job in the universe, with no value whatsoever to society. If only the women doing this make-work job would abandon their careers and do something that actually improves quality of life for someone, somewhere.
The men which openly exhibited that kind of attitude that I have personally met were chronic underperformers who resented it whenever women got pay raises or promotions when they were eternally stuck at the bottom.
The one dude who said it right to my face happened when I had to explain to him for the umpteenth time how to deal with issues with the printer network – it was kind of buggy, but there were things you could do which would usually fix it if problems came up – and I was sorely tempted to tell him that he was the one who was too stupid to remember how to use computers. I just gave him a quick death glare and moved on.
But on the other hand, I’ve also seen women doing much the same – chronic underperformers, resenting other women for getting pay raises or promotions before them, and never noticed them being similarly resentful towards men… though instead of “women can’t do work and should go back to the kitchen”, it was malicious gossiping.
Usual disclaimer about personal anecdotes not being data.
Just had another student sign up for ESL tutoring. She’s studying to be a medic in her 3rd country, lol! She already has the knowledge but needs accredation for written papers in English. I’m very tired of men who think women’s work is easy. My sister has studied how to calm folks without injuries in a psyc hospital. I teach ESL to folks including manufacturing execs who bring alot of jobs to America. My work is sort of easy because I love it, lol! I doubt the guys bit ching could do my job.
I mean my sis has learned how to restrain violent folks without hurting them or getting hurt.
@Lainy:
I can’t find the quote right now, but one of my favorite things EVER was that Michelle Yeoh – yes, THAT Michelle Yeoh – said that she now makes martial arts movies because ballet was harder on the body than martial arts, and that she now kicks people and gets kicked because she couldn’t handle a lifetime of ballet.
So if your ballet students are ever worried that they might wash out of ballet, they can always fall back on a career of being one of the greatest movie fighters in the history of the world. Because being Tom Cruise being blown up every third scene is literally easier than dancing Prokofiev says the woman who has done both.
I lobe these kinds of arguments because female-dominated fields tend to be both crucial to the successful function of society and chronically underpaid, like teaching and nursing. For all its flaws, the one thing I do like about capitalism is that if a job doesn’t need doing, it stops existing.
@Lainy
I stand by the notion that ballet dancers are, broadly; unappreciated badasses in their art. I have nothing but respect and admiration for dancers in general and ballet dancers in particular.
Even though admittedly I’m not a dancer of any sort myself and my only remote experience with anything ballet related is the time I watched Princess Tutu (which I gotta say; very fascinating and engaging series even though I’m admittedly outside the intended target demographic).
I always wonder what sort of work dudes like this are in. Do their job descriptions boil down to “maximize profit for the CEO and shareholders?” Are they essentially replaceable by a semi-trained chimpanzee? Is their raison d’etre to feed into the ever-widening gulf of wealth disparity in the world?
And no offense to people who work those kinds of jobs – those are most jobs in the capitalist US, and we all gotta get by how we can. But what job do you have when you hop on Reddit and complain that other jobs are useless?
Here’s a useless one: working for an oil company trying to exploit as many natural resources as the earth can handle. Or working for Raytheon building bombs that (somehow) won’t bring peace to the Middle East. Those are VERY male-dominated fields.
@Talonknife
If only. And that’s not even mentioning the sinecures handed out to the boss’ family and the like.
I just love how these idiots think that companies, who are overwhelmingly run by men, would cut their profits by paying women a collective hundreds of billions of dollars in wages to do nothing.
Then you’d better logout!
Every job I’ve had, I’ve worked alongside women doing the same jobs as men, not bullshit jobs. But I guess this guy would describe that as “women taking jobs from men”.
@Talonknife:
Oh you sweet summer child!
If Coco wants to pay me a living wage not to work, I will happily take him up on his offer. I am lucky enough to generally enjoy my job, but I mostly do it because I need food to survive. You know, like a person? Any children I have will very likely also be human beings and will also need food, and my husband’s salary cannot support him + me + sproglet(s) long term.
If Clowndude needs a way to earn the extra scratch, he is welcome to do my job. It doesn’t involve swinging a pickaxe, so he would probably not consider it physical. It still manages to tear your body right up, though, despite being a silly girl job for ladies. I suggest you budget for massages, Coco.
Edit: I forgot to mention that it would probably be better for us if Coco actually paid my husband the living wage to stay home, since he gets less pleasure out of his job than I do mine and he would be happier taking on the unpaid labour in the house. I’m guessing that offer isn’t on the table, though.
Urf, my shallowness pains me, but i have difficulties to take the blabla from someone called “CocotheClown” seriously. Anyway, what he says is the usual bovine dejection, so i am not too sad at this point.
Out of Topic but i have read (in le Canard Enchaîné, which mean, at least in my opinion, that the information is sure and real) that, at least in France and maybe in EU, EU imposes a reform about how insurances have to calculate life insurance pensions.
Before that reform, there have been two scales, depending on the gender of the customer : for a man, the calculation was made according to statistics made among man population, and in a same way for women with statistics made among woman population. Women tending to live longer than men, this was bringing a negative disparity for women, as, for an equivalent insurance worth, their pension was lower.
So, the reform began positively by asking to stop to use two distinct abacus, but it was something half done because it is not imposing a specific way to calculate. Insurances were say to use only one abacus : were they going to use the one made with only men, the ones who said they are the pillar of the economy and of the workforce (/sarcasm) ? Were they going to use a new abacus made with a ratio of women and men established according to the country demographic, making it closer of the idea of egality the reform was thinked ? Well, no, you guess it (it was not that hard, admit it), they, of course, are going to use the one established from the woman only statistics, thus leveling the worth of the pension by the bottom.
So, dear liberal masculinists who believe capitalism is natural and is going to make men great again, well… no. (cue evil laugh)
I was mostly thinking about how even crucial jobs get cut and rolled up into other jobs when I wrote my original comment. This is kind of a weird concept to me because it seems at odds with the profit maximization drive. Why pay someone for a time-wasting job when you could just not and have more money? Nepotistic bullshit jobs I understand, though.
Women – especially WOC – already do the bulk of our cleaning and assembly-line work. If he had ever done either, he would know that it’s literally back-breaking work.
Our (white, “western”) quality of life relies on menial work done primarily by the people he thinks should leave the work force. If they stopped working, we would be done for.
Anecdote: I remember when the rubbish collection service in Amsterdam went on strike for a month. I will never understand how we avoided a cholera outbreak.
Because ThirstySasquatch never bothered with the e-z girlie stuff, he can’t spell memorization or at. And he still hasn’t grasped when to use ellipses or the fact that there are only three ellipses, not four, in the middle of a sentence. No matter. He has loftier pursuits, creative ones, unspecified ones.
@Snowberry
I’ve seen the same. It’s always the ones who do the worst who think they’re the best. Maybe a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
And of course once you learn those things, they’re absolutely useless. Nobody ever makes new discoveries is biology or psychology. /s
@Dalillama : the bullshit jobs have nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with basic human psyche. They existed just as well under communist and basically any other regime. Anarchy is probably the one most hostile to thoses, but I suspect life and bullshit would find a way.
That being said, I would said “90% of all jobs are a useless joke” to only be *slightly* exagerated.
If robots became advanced enough, then being a delivery driver and/or a cleaner would become useless – those jobs are dominated by men, at least in my experience.
I wouldn’t put it nearly so high.
Unemployment is pretty low, but it’s not zero.
I would explode this man’s brain. I work outside, ten hour days, alone, carrying mail. Some days my satchel of parcels weighs over 35lbs. I walk around 9 miles everyday just delivering letters and magazines, which can also weigh a lot.
And the mail must be delivered. If that means that sometimes I have 12 hours days instead so be it. The mail must go through.