By David Futrelle
Men’s Rights activists like to pat themselves, and their fellow men, on the back for doing the hard work that keeps civilization going. It’s overwhelmingly men, they point out, who mine the coal, who cut down the trees, who build the houses, who put out these houses when they catch on fire, and who do any number of other Really Manly Man things that the world needs, or thinks it needs, done. (I’m pretty sure that we could do without the coal.)
Men’s jobs are essential, MRAs love to say, while women’s jobs are basically pointless make-work.
You might think that the coronavirus would crack a little hole in this crackpot theory. The people on the real front lines in fighting this deadly virus are healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, and others who are literally risking their lives to treat the exponentially increasing number of victims.
And healthcare workers, as anyone who ever visits a hospital surely notices almost at once, are overwhelmingly female. Indeed, nearly 80 percent of those in healthcare are women, and women make up more than 90 percent of nurses. And while the majority of doctors are men, that’s beginning to change: some 60 percent of doctors under the age of 35 in the US are women.
At this point in my life, for what it’s worth, virtually all the medical care I get comes from women. My primary care physician is a woman. My psychiatrist is a woman. My therapist is a woman. The nurses that check my vitals and draw my blood are almost always women. When I had to go to the emergency room several months back everyone who treated me was a woman.
MRAs would rather celebrate garbagemen than acknowledge that women are out there doing literally lifesaving work. Indeed, a recent post in the Men’s Rights subreddit focuses on a viral tweet by a garbageman who’s proud of the essential work he’s doing in this crisis (as he should be; he is indeed doing vital work that benefits us all, though maybe he shouldn’t be so noisy with the cans).
The trouble is that the OP uses the garbageman’s tweet as some sort of “proof” that “[m]en keep society running, especially in times of crisis.” And most of the discussion involves a lot of jokes about the reluctance of women to enter this particular profession — which is roughly 99% male — without acknowledging that women have been systematically discriminated against in this and in pretty much all of the predominantly male professions that MRAs like to celebrate.
Here are the top comments in this scintillating conversation.
![RT-AC66U 37 points 23 hours ago
Where are the garbage women?
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[–]conneramitch 26 points 22 hours ago
Theyre almost non existant
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[–]unknownuseridboi 39 points 21 hours ago
Oh no, not inequality in the garbage sector too!
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[–]ArrestedDevelopments 6 points 13 hours ago
STEM-G?
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[–]Tmomp 12 points 13 hours ago
Women working as garbage collectors?
Hahahaha, that's a good one.](https://i1.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-03-18_20-58-04.png?fit=600%2C741)
Another fellow had these thoughts about garbage collection and teaching.
Perhaps a teacher could have taught him that “shown” is the proper word here, not “show.”
There are some commenters, thankfully, who point out that women, too, contribute to the world in many ways. There’s even a mention of nurses. So not all MRAs are quite so hermetically sealed off from reality as out OP here. But it’s unfortunate that so many of them are.
I wonder how many of the commenters in this Men’s Rights subreddit thread work as garbagemen, or lumberjacks, or firefighters or indeed at anything that might require them to stand up from time to time. They can’t be doing much in the way of heroic work if they have so much time to peruse the Men’s Rights subreddit. Unless maybe they’re firemen, who do indeed have a lot of down time. But somehow I’m thinking not, because we’d never hear the end of their bragging if they were. Like most MRAs, they’re happy to claim personal credit for anything heroic done by any man in history, while taking blame for nothing. They are the very definition of non-essential.
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Star Trek was prescient here. Nearly the entire medical staff of the NCC-1701-D was female. So was the ship’s counselor.
So was the bartender, for that matter, the unofficial second ship’s counselor. 🙂
A woman invented the gel hand sanitizer that we all love so much right now.
Said garbageman didn’t even bring women into it. He explicitly said that doctors and nurses would keep doctoring and nursing, and that EVERYONE working together would get through this.
Fair enough, garbagemen are unsung heroes. SO ARE NURSES AND CAREGIVERS AND TEACHERS. For people who claim to disdain the Oppression Olympics, these men’s rights doofuses sure love to stretch.
The MRA paradox: they love to ramble about “male disposability” yet none of them do any of the ultra-manly jobs they love to talk about. And none of them ever think that maybe the reason women aren’t in those fields has to do with toxic masculinity, and that maybe there would be more female lumberjacks or firefighters if that were reduced. I don’t know any lumberjacks (not much logging in my area), but I’ve met a few female firefighters who seemed just as competent as any man in the job.
My current primary care doctor is a woman of color. I don’t think I’d trust an MRA doctor.
@KindaSortaHarmless
The garbageman in question sounds like he probably wouldn’t be all too happy about how MRAs are twisting his words.
Even more unsung heroes are women in waste disposal. I’m sure there are women involved who get very little acknowledgement.
They only dislike it when they’re losing (which is generally the case). The Oppression Olympics isn’t a good game, but these men are just epically bad at it.
I don’t know about where those specific MRAs live, but in my neck of the woods garbage collection is done by one driver in a truck. The truck uses a mechanical grip to pick up the garbage can and dump the contents into the truck. The days of a couple of people running behind the truck dumping garbage in the back are long gone.
@Naglfar
A very large portion of the cleaning staff, just for a start.
In the early days of “The Walking Dead” comment sections were full of manly men talking about “muh guns” and how they didn’t need no women around except for you-know-what. I pointed out that the most valuable member of society was the female character who knew how to can, pickle, and otherwise preserve food.
I have discussed zombie apocalypse survival skills at length with a friend. I have NO useful skills. She said she’d save me, which is jolly good of her. And my job is certainly not essential to the running of society (and if it didn’t get done for a few weeks, if the country shut down, that would be fine). But neither, therefore, are the jobs of all the women and MEN I work with. How selective does your vision have to be?
I’m not trying to downplay garbage collectors here. But most cleaners are women. The people actually cleaning up the world are women. All the garbage collectors do is come pick up the neatly packaged result of all the cleaners’ hard work and move it to a storage area. This is just a situation of women’s low paid extremely hard work being completely erased and all the credit given to the much higher paid men who did maybe 5% of it.
Meanwhile, we have…this.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/18/refusal-pelosi-consider-universal-cash-payments-response-coronavirus-pandemic
Is this what the Democrat leadership has been reduced to? Moving to the right of TRUMP of all people? Seeing that Sanders’ chances of nomination are looking increasingly low, we had better make sure that Pelosi at least doesn’t get re-elected.
I can’t find it now, but two or three years ago I read an article about people who sorted materials at a recycling center in San Francisco. It’s hard work, you have to be very careful to avoid dangerous materials (sharp objects, chemicals, and so on), and it pays poorly. The workers at this particular center were largely people of color, and, judging from the photos, largely women.
Garbage collectors are great; we couldn’t live in cities without them. But so are the workers at recycling centers, who do dirty, dangerous work for little pay.
In summary, MRAs are vicious idiots.
I presume the reason they think schools can close without any major effects on society is that they either don’t have children, or are relying on their wives/girlfriends/exes to deal with home/online-schooling the kids.
Grocery store staff are also essential. As are hospital cleaners and cleaners in general.
I’m a tour guide. I’m not essential. I make my customers happy, but I’m a luxury, totally unnecessary for survival. Which is why it doesn’t matter that I’m in lockdown in Spain. I’m still more useful than people than people who spend their days spreading negativity.
#StompThatCurve
I get the feeling most MRAs wouldn’t care about garbage collectors if they couldn’t use them as a gotcha. That’s exactly why they can turn a blind eye on the essential work that’s predominantly done by women. Maybe there’s some convenient “biology” to explain that nurses who are women are just doing what comes naturally to women, while garbage collectors are doing something no human wants to do, so it’s more heroic or something.
In the places where I’ve worked, I’ve tried to always be nice to the cleaning staff, greeting them and helping them when I could (especially in that one place where the cleaning staff didn’t have keys for our office door) even though I’m socially awkward and I can’t discuss football no matter how hard I try, because their work is hard, they’re underappreciated and not matter what they do, people complain about them. I’ve always been worried I’d annoy them, but I’ve kept at it because I want them to know they’re appreciated.
@Anonymous
I mean I agree she should just pass it for a variety of reasons different to the article, but this argument in that article, “[why wait] when you can simply disburse the funds *now* and collect from high-income recipients *later*?” is disingenuous at best. That will never ever happen in the era of Trump, and it is either mind-boggling stupidity or incredibly insulting for the author to pretend that it would. I don’t even know why “she’s right, but do it later” is an argument that that person wants to make for other reasons.
Bernie argued much more strongly for all of his measures than this article has for anything by saying all Americans must be treated the same, including free education, healthcare, etc.
Where I live there are women working in garbage disposal. Traditionally not – yes – but I see more and more young women working in that field, also in other menial jobs, its very noticable with chimney sweeps for example.
Also when I had to have an emergency operation the lead doctor and surgeon where both men, but I was very glad for the very empathetic female anesthetist and the female nurse who was there the whole night for my sorry self with my post-anaesthesiatic daze. She took much more time to explain everything to me and care for me than the doctor who just handed me a letter with the procedures. Also as the son of a kinder garden nurse it’s really outrageous for me how people disregard the important work, that those people (mor than 90% of them women) are doing for the whole of society is disregarded and still really poorly paid.
@Tim Gueguen
Where I live we still have one person driving the truck and a couple people standing on the back to throw stuff in, so maybe where he lives that’s how it works.
@Johanna
Or because they believe schools are some sort of “left wing indoctrination” that supposedly brainwash students, which many conservatives actually think. Or they just hate education, as conservatives have been slashing education budgets for decades.
For years they’ve been whinging about how come the apocalypse, we’ll all be flocking to them for protection.
Well, this is looking like an apocalyptic situation (in the original meaning of “reveal”), and what we’re seeing is a lack of a need/desire for “manly men” with their BFGs running around. What we’re seeing is people finding new ways to connect with each other, trading tips for how to get through this, sustaining their communities, building new networks of support where they can, etc.
It’s an imperfect set of solutions so far, but still nothing that could be fixed by a buncha idjits strutting around looking all heavily armed.
Not surprising that viciously ignorant, learning-averse people think closing the schools has no effect on society. These are the same guys who chafe at “being told what to do” by female teachers.
How many of these garbage-collector-worshipping guys wash dishes, change diapers and bedpans, pick up toys, clean windows, sweep crumbs, mop up spills, disinfect counters, vacuum rugs, and empty wastebaskets themselves, versus having it done for them by women? These tasks don’t stop existing just because they cover their eyes and don’t see them.
While they’re explaining How The World Works to each other, maybe they could use this quarantine time to master object permanence.
I used to work for the County Council environmental services. Only for a season. We did grass cutting, litter collection, etc. and as part of that we occasionally checked on the elderly people living in shelted housing. Of the 50 people in the department, there were 3 women, and the men, apart from two or three older guys who were very respectful, were quite crude. No wonder women don’t want to work in those services.
Many of my close women relatives and a few friends have over the years worked in cleaning and nursing. Cleaning is one of those jobs you get when you have kids or caring responsibilities and need to work around them in my experience. It’s hard work, under paid and utterly essential. Businesses don’t work without them, schools and hospitals need them just to be able to open.
Most domestic care is done by women. The world would fall apart with the free care women do. Carer’s allowance is £66/week. And that’s only if you do more than 35 hours a week in a formal capacity of some kind, like my mum who is carer for her partner. She was also carer for my grandad before he died, she looks after my gran, she does a lot of caring for me, when they were younger she cared for my sister’s kids. None of it paid, but just because that’s what you do. Also, she was working full time at the time. Repeat all over the world. Do the MRAs think that this stuff wouldn’t cost a fortune if it was paid for?
That’s just the ‘traditional women’s roles’ stuff people assume you have to do. What about everything else?
*head desk*
Do they live under rocks?
Our rubbish collection hasn’t happened today, so…
Nanny Oggs Bosom:
It’s willful ignorance. The cruelty IS the point.
Grace
@Anonymous
I’m finding it really hard not to just be glib about the Democratic establishment and their political instincts. Way to read the moment, folks!
Ah, I’m sure they’ve got things under control with that Joe Biden guy. (Ah dang, there I go again!)
I wonder how many of them unwittingly rely on clothes, electronics or anything else manufactured in China, where women make up anywhere from thirty to eighty percent of the factory workforce.
Lots of women working typically low-paying jobs in grocery stores (edit: as Sheila Crosby said above) and pharmacies putting their own health at risk in order to keep feeding people. I’m grateful to all the people of all genders that are out there doing crucial and underappreciated work.