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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I think you can support a system even if you yourself know you personally will never benefit from it. Especially when there’s the ‘American Dream’ mythos, or just some sort of soft just world fallacy prevalent.
So I can see how people might be attracted to a culture that, purportedly, allows rags to riches stories to come true. Just because they like the idea that someone might benefit, even if not them.
Like you could support the idea of free tertiary education even if you had no desire/chance to go to university yourself.
In a way it’s quite selfless.
Although I suspect a lot of Musk fans are just waiting for the moment their own cryptocurrency dabbling pays off big time!
http://images.esellerpro.com/2486/I/356/3/lrgscalemagnet-only-fools-and-horses-this-time-next-year.jpg
Just to segue back to pandemics and wars for a moment, I like this little bit from a Duffelblog article on the efficacy of aircraft carriers.
A libertarian told me:
“While I don’t know anything about your case, I’m sure your diet and lifestyle choices played a causative factor in your kidney failure.”
As for guns being manly protection but masks being cowering in fear, I think that it comes down to the conservative view of “toughness.”
Instead of defining toughness as the ability to endure hardship, conservatives seem to define it as the ability to inflict hardship.
It’s a bully’s view of the world, and it explains why they view petulant, thin-skinned Trump as tough but stoic, resilient Obama as weak.
@ allandrel
Not that you have to justify yourself to such people, but you could point out that kidney damage is especially prevalent in some athletes. Especially bodybuilders and ballet dancers; which seems a pretty wide cross section in itself. And that’s even with the totally ‘clean’ living ones doing all the ‘right’ exercise and diet.
https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article/16/1/163/1833875
@Alan Robertshaw
I feel like that’s giving them a bit much credit. I think the biggest reason they support the system isn’t because they want others to have opportunities or because they think they’ll strike it rich, but because they want to keep other people down. As someone once said to me, a conservative will be happy in a cardboard box on the street so long as a PoC or LGBT person is in the street without a box. So long as people they don’t like are doing worse, they’ll support things that hurt them as well.
Thank you to everyone for welcoming me.
Add “implied threat of violence” to the filled bingo squares.
Also, is he saying the women in China should be allowed to run the country?
@ naglfar
Oh yeah; I suspect that is a primary motive for the more vocal proponents.
Nice anti-semitism there.
@Dalillama:
In what way was it a pretense? They were, in fact, upwardly mobile and did, in fact, end up owning land, even if they are now downwardly mobile and increasily losing the ability to own land (and their millennial-and-younger descendants have been shut out of land ownership entirely). Seems like they did rise into the middle class, but did not manage to stay there (or their descendants in a generation or two were excluded from it, at least).
@various:
Green sky before a serious storm is not an uncommon thing, and I’ve seen it a time or two myself. It’s thought to be caused by the effect larger hailstones have on scattering the light inside the clouds. So, if you see it, the storm is definitely capable of dropping large hail, and that in turn correlates with an increased risk of it dropping a tornado. You WILL want to seek shelter indoors if you see such a sky.
So, apparently Alex Jones has now kidnapped his children
https://twitter.com/RealKellyJones/status/1261456133765636102?s=20
How the fuck does he have custody though? When did that happen?
@Surplus
Social class is about more than economics. Middle-class people don’t work for wages. They’re professionals (lawyers and the like), or petit bourgeois (small businesses). They’re people who have a significant amount of capital, social or monetary. They’re still doing fine, unlike the deluded working class.
Land ownership is a form of capital. You can derive a passive income from it by renting it out — perhaps this is why there’s been such an explosion in AirBnB and similar services recently. And the first thing all these elevated working-class people did was ensure their kids got degrees.
The key thing here doesn’t seem to be the land, or the degrees, though, but being part of some existing good-old-boys network or something akin to that. The kids whose degrees didn’t get them a professional job are mostly the ones with parents in the working class. The landowners having to supplement their work incomes with short-term rental income, likewise. Seems it’s not what you know or even own, but who you know, and how those people categorize you.
Same thing at a higher rung of the ladder with Trump being treated as an outsider by the socialites of New York even after amassing a sum of money comparable to many of theirs, and his ongoing resentment of them, leading to his becoming what one studier of societal collapse calls a “counter-elite”. Counter-elites amass elite levels of wealth and power, but are outsiders to the existing elite group. In stabler times such a person will be absorbed into the elite fold as a nouveau riche but when intraelite competition heats up they are treated as part of the riffraff, and respond by trying to establish rival power centers and undermine the existing ones. Trump’s denouncement of “liberal elites” and of establishment Republicans alike, and his “deep state” rhetoric, smacks of this pattern.
In the worst cases, a counter-elite will become the leader of a rival faction to the traditional elite in a civil war. Jefferson Davis did so, though his predecessor counter-elite Andrew Johnson failed to take things that far. But which is Trump, a latter-day Johnson or a latter-day Davis?
This is excellent news, if it holds up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/11/republicans-have-already-decided-trump-is-going-lose/
Alan Robertshaw says:
No, I didn’t. I’ll have to see if I can find a way to watch it. Thanks for the heads up.
RE: plaid sky
This reminds me of a thing I’d already forgotten. As a child, I was out at nighttime, and saw a black-grey sky covered in tattered, dark grey clouds so evenly distributed it looked like the whole sky was slightly unevenly striped. That was the most ominous thing I’d ever seen.
We dubbed it the “end of the world sky”, it was that impressive.
@Dalilama : the politic between 1950 and 2000 or so clearly make me think the guys you call “deluded working classes” did have a lot of capital. They just didn’t work to preserve it, which is more necessary for lower capital people.
Also, the distinction you make between professionals, small business owner, and working class is largely pedantic. There’s plenty of lawyer and small business owners who are paid wages, and plenty of small business owner in the poorer class. Conversely, workers whoses skills are perceived as rare like IT workers certainly are middle class.
The real question, as Surplus said, is whether they have actionable capital.
(all of that said as a privilegied IT worker. Part of my family possess farms, and in France farmers are in that peculiar position where they are objectively poor and overall disliked by the general population, but have a ton of politic capital that they use and abuse, partially because they need to abuse it to survive)
@WWTH
IIRC he was able to convince the court that he was an entertainer and wasn’t serious about his beliefs. I’m rather surprised it worked, even if he wasn’t serious he is the literal embodiment of toxic masculinity and abuse.
I thought Jones lost custody, but may have retained visitation rights?
@Surplus
Which is why I specified “significant amounts”. There’s a great distinction between owning a box made of ticky-tacky in Levittown and owning a successful auto-repair shop, say.
Yes, that’s the social capital I mentioned. Degree of access to old-boy networks is a large part of social class.
@Ohlmann
No, they had effectively no capital whatsoever, inasmuch as none of their possessions could be leveraged into the accumulation of more wealth. Which is why it all went poof when wages quit rising in the 1970s.
Sorry to burst your bubble, mate, but you’re as deluded as an auto-plant worker with a ranch house in the ‘burbs. If you could get yourself into consulting, you could maybe get there, you’d be working for yourself and maybe make it, but wage-earners are the very definition of the working class. As I said, there’s been a big push through much of the 20th century to drive wedges between different segments of the working class, one of which is convincing significant parts of the said class that they’re not members of it and their interests are directly aligned with those of the capitalist classes.
@Dalilama : sorry to burst your bubble, but you delude yourself being too theoritical here. In particular, the leap of faith between “being middle class” and “being aligned with the capitalists” is stupid. Plenty of peoples aren’t wage earners and yet fight for the poor.
As a side note, a portion of the people you said had no capital used it and got the ball rolling to more riches. Not all, however, because most though they were secure. (a bit like Trump, except that Trump *is* secure ; it’s a bit part of the WASP anger in the US, a lot of people thinking they were somewhere stable)
As another side note, remember that trying to put every worker in the same class and trying to reduce them all to the same problem is both one of the big problem of marxism, and one of the reasons a lot of far left seem out of touch. No, my problems aren’t the same as the farmers in my family, and aren’t the same as the one of poor worker. For one, big firms talk to me on my terms and behave in entirely a different way than with the cashier.
As a last side note, I do consulting at time (it’s really common in IT). Which is part of why you’re deluded : plenty of people are between the categories regardless of how you define them.
*sigh*
Just trying something here
@An Impish Pepper:
That fails because puting all POC in the same label is a problem with some white people that consider themselves anti-racist; the concept of White Feminism comes to mind. Furthermore, black people truly don’t experience racism in the same way as South Asian people do; just for starters the stereotypes are completely different. There are “model minorities” and their opposites, among others, and their problems don’t have the same solutions.
@Ohlmann
“Being Middle Class” means being a member of a capitalist* social class. People who do not control the necessary means to secure their income on a long-term basis by definition do not fall into this category, however comfortable a wage they may earn, and regardless of how secure they believe their position to be. And yes, this means that the middle class is actually quite small. It always has been.
Name two. To meet this definition, they must be people whose families held no property prior to the GI Bill, do not come from political dynasties, and are not otherwise plugged into one or more old-boy networks.
Exactly: They were fooling themselves that they were middle class, and believed that their prefab Levittown home with a yard and a white picket fence was actually a meaningful investment that would keep them in control of their futures.
Yeah, you’ve got bonus privilege and shit, I’m not denying that. But the bottom line is that you don’t have the leverage or power that the firms do, or even a measurable fraction thereof. You have more leverage than a random cashier, but if you rock the boat too hard you’ll be cut loose with no more thought than they’d give that same cashier. If you don’t believe me, try organizing a union and see what happens.
*Here used in the original literal meaning, “Person who controls meaningful amounts of capital”. Said capital may include cash and financial instruments, buildings and physical plant, access to nepotism/cronyism, political influence, etc.
Addendum: this is purely a discussion of class. Caste is a whole other matter, but just as intractable with the same subset of the population under discussion.