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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@numerobis
The thing about MGTOWs (and more broadly the manosphere as a whole) is they love to complain about men doing manual labor jobs or dangerous jobs yet they are vehemently opposed to women entering those jobs. Plus, AFAICT very few of the MGTOWs work manual labor jobs, they all seem to work office jobs.
It’s true, 90% of my job is a useless joke. The 90% where I have to:
– Walk on eggshells so as not to bruise the egos of my male colleagues
– Carefully re-word every bit of written communication 3 times so as not to sound cold, bossy, arrogant, too nice, not assertive enough, too assertive, too cranky, too calm, or whatever the fuck else I might get accused of
– Clean up the little messes my male colleagues leave behind (both physical messes in conference rooms and messy work)
– Sit there and listen to misogynistic jokes and pretend to either not hear, not care, or find it funny
– Do all the documentation because the guys won’t
– Remind my male colleagues repeatedly to do tasks they have due or what meeting they should be in and where
The other 10% is actual programming.
@kupo
I hope your company mandates some sensitivity training and stops hiring privileged and able-bodied cis white men for an extended period of time, and/or firing everyone who is guilty of such offensive behaviors.
I don’t know what state you live in but I hope your company gets sued massively and some legal action is taken from it too. I hope an exposé gets conducted too. If I were in your position, I would do this (assuming that the privacy laws of your state are relatively lax compared to here in the UK and if your state is leftist, or a significant portion of people who live in your state are leftist).
You’re working with entitled children. I’d call them pigs but it’s an insult to pigs, because I doubt they try to give females a bad hand.
Also, are there any decent men in your workplace who condemns the conduct of these employees? Because I am starting to hate men reading from what you’ve described. If not, then I hope you get a job that better aligns with your values. I’m simply lucky to live in a “woke” city so I haven’t really experienced this first hand as much.
@Crip Dyke:
I knew a young woman in University who had done a summer job as a nurse’s assistant at an extended care facility. Which means changing bedpans. I was eating dinner with her at the residence when I saw a couple of the frosh at the next table obviously trying to play ‘gross out the girl’, and just turned to her and said, “They obviously don’t know what you did over the summer, do they?”
As for ballet, I can believe that. Just look at the leg muscles on Karen Kain.
@kupo:
When I took an editing course as part of a technical writing certificate, a good chunk of the course was ‘how to deal with the internal politics of editing someone in love with their own words and willing to go over your head and trash you because you dared criticize them’.
@kupo : that’s a sad state of affair. Half “make the work of the other in their stead”, half “work despite the misogyny”. I have the impression there’s less misogyny where I work, but I am not exactly super perceptive, and since I have basic skill in software engineering, I know I cannot get fired, so rewording written communication or having to accept other people doing degrading joke just isn’t needed. (they might do thoses outside of my earshot tho)
That being said, the big bullshit job problem is that there is thousands after thousands people whose job is entirely useless, and only serve for petty internal politic or as serfs to be abused by higher up. All the guys and gals that make useless reports that aren’t read by anyone. Thoses who delicately craft indicators that look useful but are hollow. And people who litteraly get up to work, stay 10 or more hours to give the impression of working, and return home having done litteraly nothing.
I have seen how badly people can be destroyed by thoses jobs. For some of thoses, it was litteraly more destructive than poverty (disclaimer : poverty in France is probably not the worse poverty in the world, but it’s still pretty fucking hardcore). I don’t think the guy talking in the article is even aware of the problem. He don’t seem aware that a job can be hard in any capacity, to be honest.
@Talonknife
“Why pay someone for a time-wasting job when you could just not and have more money?”
That’s a good question, and David Graeber’s book starts out by merely observing this proliferation of useless jobs and considers it a puzzling phenonenon. Then he explores your question at length.
Graeber is also the author of “Debt: The first 5000 years”, a book that changed my view of the world.
There are three groups of people you ALWAYS need to be on good terms with, because they can make your life living hell if you fuck with them.
1. Janitorial staff
2. Administrative staff
3. Maintenance staff
Also, I’d like to see any of those MGTOWs do my job.
I’m a nuclear engineer. I do radiation protection.
Which isn’t easy or useless, I’d say.
@Jenora Feuer
In a previous life I was a tech writer. So many bruised egos, even over grammatical edits. That at least was in a department with a closer to 50/50 mix of men and women so it wasn’t just all dudes I had to edit. It was good that my boss always shut down any mocking of misspellings and grammar, though, and I had a partner who would back me up and we would help each other find the grammar rules in question in our many grammar books.
But oh, the alphabetization wars.
@Talonknife
You’re confusing “a job that needs doing” with “a job that makes profit for capitalists”.
Does society need an employee to stand in a store for minimum wage and sell sweatshop-produced clothes to people? No, but the profits from selling the clothes vastly outweigh the pittance that the employee actually gets paid.
Alternatively, society does need sanitation workers, but it’s hard to turn a profit off of that work, so generally the government has to pay them.
The same reason why employers rally against universal healthcare in the US despite it being able to save them vast amounts of money in terms of the health insurance they need to provide to their employees. Because it’s a way to exert control over the population.
If someone needs a job because otherwise they won’t have health insurance, then they can’t quit and can’t really advocate for better working conditions. If someone needs a job because otherwise they’ll starve, same deal, along with needing to expend 40+ hours of every week and the majority of their energy doing monotonous, soul-sucking work. It strips the lower classes of their ability to organize and rally together because they can’t afford to raise a fuss and their employer can certainly afford to turf them.
I’d say my job is useless because the only reason it’s needed is that the US healthcare system is ridiculous and takes so much extra work to maintain than a single payer system.
But that’s got nothing to do with my gender and a lot of my coworkers are men.
@Knitting Cat Lady
I’d add that one should also try to be on good terms with IT (though that could fall under maintenance).
We always advise aspiring young barristers that the most important person in the court building is the usher.
Annoy the judge and you can always appeal. Annoy the usher and the rest of your career is hearings listed for 10 am that don’t get heard until 4:30 pm.
@KnittingCatLady – as lifelong administrative and executive assistant, I 100% agree with your statement.
Only a few days ago, I got to watch dawning horror creep across a manager’s face as he realized that the admins in different groups talk to each other about the bosses. Even though that particular manager had little to fear, it was fun to watch him rapidly cycle through all the possible consequences to pissing off every admin in the building.
I’ve threatened to route business travel through active war zones when management starts acting up, but I wouldn’t actually do that of course. But I would “accidentally” book egregious asshats into middle seats on the plane and sub-compact cars at the rental agency and smile sweetly with the claim that they were (truthfully) the cheapest options and aren’t we always told to watch the pennies?
@Catalpa : jobs decisions aren’t taken at a high enough level for what you describe. Minimal wage storetenders are a net cost to their employer, that they would cut if they were perfect capitalism decisionmakers. You describe something akin to capitalist corporations tending to common assets of various corporation, and we wish they had that level of foresight.
(and minimal wage storetenders are being cut all across the world in favor of automatization)
What create bullshit jobs is simply that once any group is big enough, it become a bureaucratic nighmare. Nobody have an eagle eye view of the whole group, and manager of bullshit jobs then have various incentive to keep them around – justifying their jobs, keeping people to victimize, showing their importance by number of underling. The higher up of thoses managers can’t see through the bullshit because there is just too many people for them to manage, so they trust managers. And they probably themselves don’t have incentives to look hard and fast to what the people they employ do. As long as profit come up and they look successful, everything else isn’t relevant to them.
That work just as well in big governemental organisation, capitalist firms, or religious groups. It become more common because the current level of automatization leave a lot of ressources to feed thoses jobs.
The thing with big organizations is that managers are all humans, and they are neither rational nor with perfect alignment with their organizations. The goal of a store manager can be simple and objectively measured (“sell 100 phones per day with as few vendors as you can”), so they will be kept “honest” and pressure and fire their vendors hard (which isn’t a good thing but is what capitalism expect).
Meanwhile, the goal of a strategic director in a big firm is pretty much “look useful”, because nobody can objectively measure his contribution to the success or lack of of the firm. Which mean his interest is looking busy, taking credits to any success, and having a lot of busy-looking underling that “give him informations”, or whatever is useful to look successful. One don’t look the part of n°3 of a firm if he only have a secretary and two advisors, even if it’s all he need.
I wonder if the MGTOW of the article have too much time on his hand at work because of that phenomen.
@Talonknife
Corporate operations are a lot more complicated than profit maximisation, because corporations are made up of people with their own goals. Bob the VP of Outside Sales hates Jim the VP of Inside sales, and wants a bigger department for the prestige advantage, so he makes up some bullshit jobs just to have lots of flunkies around. He doesn’t give a shit about overall profits, he gets paid his salary regardless. He just needs to feed the board some line of bullshit about how these other employees are necessary, and they’ll trust him, because he knows what he’s doing, otherwise he wouldn’t be a VP, right? And on and on at every level of management. And then there’s things like Catalpa and WWTH mention, where the job exists because of inherent inefficiencies in the capitalist system, and etc.
@Cats In Shiny Hats
Apologies for the Kipling, and the gender, but appropriate:
“Is the torrent in spate? He must ford it or swim.
Has the rain wrecked the road? He must climb by the cliff.
Does the tempest cry halt? What are tempests to him?
The service admits not a “but” or an “if.”
While the breath’s in his mouth, he must bear without fail,
In the Name of the Empress, the Overland Mail.”
So, when this guy needs emergency surgery he will refuse it when he learns that the surgeon is a woman, right?
Mr. Parasol’s mother was in charge of travel arrangements for a group of scientists at NASA. The smart ones called her “Mom” and were content to tell her, “I need to be in this city for these dates.” The doofusheads would try to micromanage their airline and hotel reservations. Generally the doofusheads would only try that ONCE.
BTW, it’s now official: I’m going to be interviewing for a new job on Tuesday. Wish me luck!
@nathantyree
Knowing how fanatical these people are, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he’d refuse it.
@Victorious Parasol
Good luck at your interview!
@Victorious Parasol
Good luck!
@ Vicky P
You won’t need it because you’re brilliant anyway; but Good Luck!!!
I always have a handy dandy anecdote for these types of dudes. I work in a police station (in the IT department). Most of them seem to agree that a police station is pretty fundamental civilization 101 type of institution. It’s true that the vast bulk of the officers are male. However, if all the women in the building decided to not show up to work tomorrow, all police activity would effectively grind to a halt. Why? 100% of the dispatchers are women. So the police would be here but they would have 0 idea where to go, what to do, what they were walking into, or how best to respond. Likewise, any citations issued or arrests made would become pointless because everybody who works for the court department (other than the 2 marshalls) is female and they would be gone. There would be 0 way for people to pay fines, show up in court to plead their case, or otherwise have any resolution for their cases at all. They would either rot in jail indefinitely or no longer have to be held accountable for any crimes they commit. Also, most of the records department is comprised of women. There goes all of your ability to document pretty much anything as well.
That without even getting into the 20% or so of officers who are female. So on top of all that other chaos the police would be severely understaffed with 1 out of 5 officers missing.
A friend of mine, back in the 1990s when working odd jobs, used to say: “Never piss off the person who runs the mailroom at a company. They have a thousand ways to make your life miserable, most of them with plausible deniability.”
Really, it’s a specific case of how the best way to see what a person is really like is to watch how they treat the ‘hired help’. And yet there never seems to be any shortage of people who just do not get that.
@nathantyree, Naglfar:
NotAlwaysRight has a few stories of people doing pretty much exactly that, refusing a doctor because the doctor was a woman.
@Johanna:
That works in other fields as well, of course… as anybody who’s tried to book any hotel in an area after their event trashed a previous hotel will find out.
@ Cats In Shiny Hats
I sympathize, was a postie longer ago than I care to remember. A heavily loaded Royal Mail bicycle in snow was…interesting.
@ crip dyke
My feet are basically just on gaint callus so I believe it. As for my girls. Most of them dance at this point because they love it. They love putting in the hard work and the athlete diets and long hours of practice because they have a passion for it and love the friends that they make. There are a couple who are there because their parents make them dance. Those parents, it’s like being on the cast of that show toddlers in tiaras. There is no joy in it for them and their miserable. But their parent as this fantasy that they will be the next big thing so they force them to come to class and practice and perform.
LOL seriously when you’re dealing with that level of utterly un-self-aware stupid then anything else they say should be considered suspect in the extreme.
Also, while there is currently only one woman at my workplace (it’s a machining/assembly/miscellaneous mostly-metal factory shop), she’s kinda the accountant? Pretty sure her job is non-bullshit…
Also, while my official title is document technician, I’m basically the guy in charge of the phone, email, and shifting/classifying old paperwork, so basically kind secretary/administrative assistant – and in any case all those types of jobs are typically female-dominated, and last I checked I was non-bullshit enough at it to get a raise (must be my ALMIGHTY Y-CHROMOSOME at work to make even a woman’s job MANLY!/s) so I’m guessing the job itself is also non-bullshit.
And that’s not even getting into my mother (retired grade school teacher then principal – in public school though (in the North American sense of the word) so I’ve heard some right-wing knuckledraggers call that useless) or my sister (labour law attorney working for a trade union center – again, probably not right-wingers’ favorite type of job…).