By David Futrelle
Donald Trump isn’t the only man who refuses to wear a protective face mask because he thinks it’ll make him look like a wuss. A new study from researchers at Middlesex University and Berkeley reports that men are less likely than women to wear masks because, for too many of them, masks are for sissies.
“Men more than women agree that wearing a face covering is shameful, not cool, a sign of weakness and a stigma,” the researchers write, “and these gender differences also mediate gender differences intentions to wear a face covering.” Men are also less worried than women that they’ll catch the coronavirus themselves — a bit ironic because in fact men have been hit harder than women by the pandemic and they are far more likely than women to die from it.
One man who won’t be wearing a mask any time soon is a Redditor called shmederalreserve333, a conspiracy-minded fellow who thinks that those of the male persuasion are right not to worry about the pandemic. As he sees it, women are too worried about coronavirus, mostly because they’re a bunch of irrational babies desperately in need of a real man to come along and put them in their place.
“To me it seems like mostly women are very afraid,” he writes in a recent post to the Conspiracy subreddit.
Men are generally not concerned but will play along to avoid conflict with the GF. Single dudes like me, are really not concerned and many are not even wearing masks.
So why are women so scared? Good old-fashioned female irrationality, magnified by evil NWO food and the fact that they work outside the home.
I think this unnatural fear of germs comes from being hyper feminized and not being able to think rationally. The extra estrogen in our diet and the other hormone influencing foods. Combined with the fact that historically women have only had a few responsibilities, take care of the kids, cook food, etc. except for the past about 50 years women have slowly gained more and more responsibilities. It’s not insane to think maybe women aren’t ready to have all these responsibilities and are getting overwhelmed.
His proof? The lack of female billionaires.
think about how many women are independently wealthy? not many big names come to mind. Sure actresses and politicians. But thats about it. What about fortune 500 companies founded by women? Any companies at all founded by women that made millions? not many at all.
This goes to show that women just can’t handle jobs.
It’s clear men are more fit for providing for a family, so why are women still trying? Men we need to come together and regain our position as the leaders of the free world. If all men where just Real with women instead of being cuckolds and following whatever the woman does. Thats why I’m single I don’t want to be a follower, and all the women want to be leaders.
I’m not sure that’s why you’re single, dude.
To all my Married dudes out there, try disagreeing with your wife about anything. It’s not going to end well.
It’s just another way the nwo is creating Order out of Chaos.
tl;dr women are already overwhelmed with modern society and for most women understanding germ concepts is too difficult.
Oh, I think most women understand germs a lot better than you do, dude. That’s why they’re wearing masks to protect themselves and others while you’re out there being a potential disease vector.
You are, dude. You’re the vector. And also kind of an idiot.
Indeed, shmederalreserve333’s theory here was so ludicrous that even the regular inhabitants of r/Conspiracy thought it was a bit much — with nealy 70 percent of those voting on it giving it a thumb’s down. Oof. When your conspiracy theory is too far out for even the conspiracy, er, enthusiasts in the conspiracy subreddit, you know you’ve fucked up big time.
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@Some Chick in Texas
From ca. 1820–ca 1950 in Western Europe and the US, middle-class and above women did not generally work for pay. In the U.S specifically, the post WWII economic boom allowed a large portion of working-class whites to pretend they were middle-class, which pretense they’ve been clinging to ever since.
@Naglfar : I have seen green in boreal auroras. Clearly uncommon tho.
I never have seen the sky pink however.
@Naglfar, Moggie:
It’s not entirely exclusive to conservatives, though people who think that way tend to be easily “seduced” over that side of the political divide. Nor is it an issue of object permanence (at least not most of the time), as I was being mildly sarcastic when I said “dematerialize”. Rather, the issue is normally one of agenticity.
“Agenticity” is a mental framework/worldview where, for everything that happens, some “agent” (thinking/acting being) either intended it to happen, or caused it indirectly as a result of their character. Virtually everyone who thinks that way isn’t aware that they think that way, because lack of self-awareness is a large part of the mindset.
They didn’t intend for the bullet they fired upwards to go anywhere, so it didn’t go anywhere – it’s just gone. If the bullet hits someone anyway, it’s because that person’s being punished, or someone close to them is being punished, or some malevolent force is trying to hurt the person who fired the bullet just because it’s malevolent, or God did it because of some greater good, or whatever.
One person trips over a rock sitting in the middle of a path, it’s because they’re clumsy, and that clumsiness is likely a manifestation of a moral flaw. Several people do, and it’s because someone put the rock there or failed to remove it because hurting people is funny. Also, the first person who they saw tripping over it probably still has that moral flaw, because they don’t have the self-awareness to update their judgments.
There are different degrees of this – a lot of people have a mild to severe, and everthing in between. It’s very common among religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists – though not exclusive to them, and occasionally someone might be either of those things for different reasons entirely.
Even normally self-aware people will unconsciously think like that on occasion, because being biased towards *not* thinking of events as random is a survival instinct. But at least it’s possible self-correct flawed judgments resulting from it… eventually. Sometimes.
@Dalillama
Even then, I’d imagine many working-class women did still have to work for some or most of that time even if wealthier women did not.
@Ohlmann
I’ve never seen the aurora, but I have seen the sky pink. Sometimes during sunsets I’ve seen the sky, or at least the clouds, turn somewhat of a pink color for a short time.
@Snowberry
I feel like people usually only think these kinds of things are moral judgements/punishments when they happen to other people. If it happens to them, they tend to blame it on someone else or assume it’s random, but when it happens to others they will assume it’s that person’s fault.
…I saw clouds thick enough to make it dark in the daytime instead give off an eerie green glow during a dry summer thunderstorm back in… 2000, I think, I forget the exact year, but based on where I lived it had to have been 1998-2001 – and never before or since. I suppose one could call that “the sky is green” even though you technically couldn’t see the sky.
@Snowberry
There’s a related fallacy, which is the “just world.” The just world fallacy is the belief that the world has an inherent justice, and that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. It’s what makes people ask “what did this person do to deserve this” when someone is a victim of a crime, particularly when the victim is a member of an already-marginalized group, such as a woman or a person of color. What was that woman wearing that made a rapist rape her? What was this black man doing that made the cops shoot him? What bad habits made you poor? That’s the just world fallacy in action.
It works the other way, too. Rich, successful people are imbued with an elevated morality, and their ways are looked on with admiration. If they’re rich and successful, after all, they must have done something morally admirable to deserve that. Since white people are more successful, generally, than non-white people, white people must totally deserve it just for being white, and whiteness must correlate with goodness. It can’t possibly be that white people benefit materially from racism; it must be something intrinsic to whiteness.
I find that the just world fallacy is at the bottom of most conservative beliefs. I actually have yet to find one that doesn’t have the just world fallacy underlying it. It’s right in the post featured in this article; the idea that men are superior to women, and therefore don’t need to wear masks the way wimpy women do, has the just world fallacy under it.
@Naglfar:
There are people who constantly, unfairly blame themselves for reasons related to agenticity. You don’t hear them much because they’re not likely to openly speak of it. And usually they’re bullied by the “it’s everyone else’s fault” types.
@Policy of Madness: It’s not just related, agenticity is a major component of Just World Fallacy.
[Edited to add] Biases are a common basis of fallacies, and agenticity is a bias which usually results in Just World, if that’s not clear.
The just world fallacy is rampant these days. A young and outwardly healthy person dies of coronavirus, and the first thing people want to know is whether they had any underlying health conditions.
I know they crave an explanation, a reassurance that “this won’t happen to me, because I don’t smoke/have diabetes/high blood pressure”, but it smacks of victim blaming. “What did this person do wrong, that they had such a severe outcome?”
The alternative, that we don’t know what causes the immune system to go haywire, much less how to prevent it, is terrifying to some people.
@Snowberry, Naglfar and Ohlmann
I’ve seen green clouds too, about 10 years ago during a pre-tornadic period when clouds were doing things that clouds should not be doing. I don’t even know how you get green from grey moisture and blue skies. It’s eerie when it happens.
Plaid skies would worry me. The manosphere probably sees some sort of battle tartan when they gaze upwards.
Note that agenticity is hardwired into our brains. That’s a consequence of having evolved to detect link between events very well. That link detection is a large base of what we call our intelligence, but when it go too far it cause no end of trouble, like here thinking that nothing happen randomly.
(and the problems it cause isn’t limited to that. It’s also part of why people are absolutely horrible at statistic for example)
@Naglfar
Hence why I specified that it was a large portion of working-class whites who had this experience. PoCs have never been included in any period of prosperity in the US, and the ‘white trash’ ethnicities (principally Scots-irish ‘crackers’, but also Irish and sometimes Slavs and other Eastern European ethnicities, when they’re counted as ‘white’) usually get a shorter end of the stick than your proper Anglo-Normans, Anglo-Saxons, Germans and to a lesser extent Scandinavians. The U.S. is an even more deeply caste-ridden society than most people realize.
But even then, working class women participated directly and a lot of charities relied on women’s unpaid labor. To say nothing of nurses and teachers and all sorts of jobs that needed to be done but weren’t considered high status because they were mainly held by women.
As far as men not caring about their health, isn’t that because they relied (historically) on the women in their lives to tend to their health as well?
Re: Sky color, I think Buttercup is right. It’s probably plaid. Though, I’ve seen green skies. They usually happen right before a tornado or hail storms. So it could be green. That’s a pretty ominous color for a sky.
Kind of ironic that these dudes see protection as a man’s job, yet protecting yourself and others from viral infection by wearing a mask is unmanly.
I admit I would find a plaid sky a bit ominous, if only because I’ve never seen one before. I haven’t seen a green sky myself, but it appears it’s happened enough that others have seen it, so I’ll take their word for it.
Or maybe night and day are reversed in the manosphere world and the sky is dark blue to black in the day and light blue at night.
@Talonknife
I’m almost certain someone’s tried shooting at the virus.
@Talonknife
Yeah, protection is not ‘manly’ if it doesn’t require lots of weapons and ammo. /s
So true.
Some of the worst jackasess claim to be woke progressives while they gaslight, talk over or outright lie about the experiences of people targeted by police for racist reasons.
And they never apologize…
I have a suspicion this may also have racist reasons too, because prior to COVID-19, it’s generally been only East Asians who wore masks in public. I think such men (I’m not sure for anyone who isn’t men) may want to avoid being associated with them.
Thanks for all the Ghost Map recommends everyone!
@ big titty demon
As the French anarchists used to say “Well yes it works in practice; but will it work in theory?”
@ epitome
You might ‘enjoy’ this ( I really like this guy’s stuff)
@Dalillama:
I was a working-class kid in the UK in the 1960s. My father was a bricklayer, my mother was a stay-at-home housewife. In my extended family, all the men worked in blue-collar trades, and almost all the women of my parents’ generation stayed home. Given social housing, a manual wage was enough to raise a family on (though without much to spare). And the middle-class pretence didn’t happen on a large scale until Thatcherism: certainly, all my extended family were aware that we were working class, and in fact were proud of it, and looked down on the middle class (cue Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, albeit with Sussex accents instead).
I’ve noticed that not only is the sky green before a big storm sometimes, but it’s also yellow after a storm sometimes. Especially if the storm is near dusk.
I love thunderstorms and hope we get a good one soon. There’s only been one all spring so far where I am.
@Moggie
It’s the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” phenomenon. Yanks like to pretend that we don’t have social classes, just economic ones, and barely those. It’s total bullshit, of course, but it’s a huge part of the mythology of the US.
@Nagfljar about bullet as COVID solution : on herds of domestic animal, shooting diseased beasts work as epidemic control. I am pretty sure that solution would please the MRAs considering they think it’s a chinese disease.
In humans, I believe this will fail because people will start dissimulating illness which will make the epidemic worse. That’s in addition of being the least ethical way to solve the problem, of course.
@Alan Robertshaw : that being said, it’s not a general rule that practical results not backed by theory are useful. A typical example is that there is a practical correlation between being black and doing crimes, and it’s erroneous to use it to police black people more.
Of course, for Semmelweis it was correct to use thoses results even before understanding why it worked, and his detractors didn’t exactly had good reasons to refuse his results.
@Dalillama: Post WWII, when the myth took off, quite a lot of people (mostly white men) had opportunities like never before, so even though it was still delusional back then, from the point of view of those whom benefited, there was little reason not to believe it was true.
It became gradually less reasonable over time, and then ten¹ years of Reaganomics destroyed it utterly – while paradoxically turning a small subset of believers who were shut out of prosperity into the myth’s most devoted fanatics. And today, it’s among the most obviously wrong things one can believe in. Doesn’t make it go away, of course.
¹A large part of why Bush Senior was only a one-termer: A lot of conservatives disliked that he eventually ended Reaganomics, and a lot of centrists disliked that he didn’t end it soon enough. Liberals didn’t care much for him regardless, even if a lot of them considered him a slight improvement over Reagan.
@Snowberry
There was actually quite a lot of reason, but recognizing that would have required them to not be massively racist, so they didn’t.
It’s particularly annoying to see those temporarily embarrassed millionaires stanning for actual billionaires. Criticise some mega-rich anti-union fuck like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and you get pushback from people who are one paycheck away from bankruptcy.