Yesterday we looked at the ongoing Republican tantrum about single women–who went for Dems nearly 70 percent of the time in the midterms. Now one bold conservative revanchist has a bold plan to eliminate this democratic advantage–by eliminating single women.
In a post on the Federalist, Joy Pullmann declares “that Democrats benefit from increasing women’s misery through increased family chaos.” She hopes to combat this by creating chaos in the world of single women by eliminating the office jobs supporting their deviant single lifestyle.
Pullmann sees the rise of singletons partly as the result of “the Information Age’s dramatically increased remuneration for work that doesn’t involve hard physical labor.” But it’s not just technology driving the increase in office jobs.
It’s government policies that force companies to siphon off money from making legitimately useful things and solving concrete human problems to parasitic forms of “knowledge work” that are also culturally destructive.
Says someone sitting at a desk pounding out a useless post for the fucking Federalist, subsidized by billionaires.
Many, many so-called “knowledge work” jobs are anti-productive. That is, they actually destroy productivity rather than aid, improve, and refine it.
I’d say the “knowledge work” involved in producing this Federalist post is destroying productivity just a teensy bit by being so bloody stupid.
Anyhoo, it turns out that it’s big daddy government that creates the bureaucratic jobs that single women flock to.
Women do most of these jobs. They comprise the vast army of woke state clerks, which is to say the cultural revolution foot soldiers. It’s not a coincidence that women overwhelmingly populate the government jobs that replace the social responsibilities women used to fulfill out of love instead of for a government paycheck.
And what woman wouldn’t prefer it if these jobs were eliminated, forcing them to rely on husbands or charity to stay financially afloat.
These women would be a lot happier doing something more productive for society than working in highly inefficient government-dominated industries, like raising a family or running soup kitchens.
Whatever women do, it’s got to involve a lot of cooking.
Many just don’t feel they have that option. We need to do more to make that option available.
And the best way to increase women’s options, Pullmann argues, is to take some of their options away.
No, that’s literally what she argues.
Part of [providing these options] would entail eliminating jobs that exist to comply with stupid government regulations, by eliminating the regulations themselves. …
Obviously, some knowledge work is societally beneficial. But does every company really need a full complement of lawyers, a full human resources department, a tax compliance officer, accountants, and all the other variations of government compliance officers just to serve people burgers or fix roofs?
Well, Elon Musk has just eliminated a lot of those sorts of jobs at Twitter, along with a huge chunk of the engineers; let’s see how that works out for him.
Anyway, as Pullmann sees it, it’s not just make-work government jobs that are the problem. Even the bureaucratic jobs at burger companies are forced on them by big daddy government.
Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if women just stayed home and took care of the kids?
This reality is a massive drag not only on our economy but also a massive subsidy to the people trained to think that being some rando’s secretary is the epitome of GirlBossery — and desperate enough to believe that because she can’t locate the far-preferable alternate of cultivating a lovely home while someone who truly loves her brings home the bacon and smooches the baby before settling in for a nice warm dinner after a rough day digging other people’s feces out of their clogged pipes. (Now that’s a job that earns its pay!)
Apparently, all men work as plumbers. All working women are secretaries. And no housewives ever encounter anyone else’s feces.
Pullmann then goes on a long tangent suggesting, as far as I can figure it out, that the modern world is turning men into incels that no woman wants to marry and that once again, the culprit here is big daddy government, with its “policies for preferencing and cushioning the family breakdown and economic distortions that degrade potential spouse quality.”
Well, mostly the government.
Yes, we have young women foolishly rejecting both motherhood and marriage because that’s what they’re told to do by our toxic cultural arbiters, and they don’t understand how to encourage men to man up. Yes, we have wife-cucked fathers engendering weak sons en masse and Boomer-controlled institutions tone-policing everyone by setting female-dominated behavior as the baseline for being considered a decent human being.
Whatever the fuck that means.
But we also have government putting its big fat thumb on the scale against marriage by structurally preferencing work that women tend to do and structurally disadvantaging work that men tend to do.
But what big daddy government gives, smaller daddy government can take away.
Unfair government preferences for work that’s easier for women to do, embarrassing for many men to do because of its obvious wastefulness, and that reduces men’s ability to earn a family wage and therefore attract a wife — these can be abolished.
In short: GO FEDERALISTS! SMASH STATE!
I agree with Pullmann on one thing: Hobbling the federal government will definitely mean more people working in soup kitchens.
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@.45:
Eh? I thought Boomers were the good guys to you. I read that wrong?
@GSS ex-noob:
@.45: A whole lot of Boomers aren’t “woke” and don’t favor women, so it’s another GQP argument that contradicts itself.
@Kat:
What! We do? And it’s Boomers who are doing this? Exactly where is this happening? I need to see this in action, take some pix, document this phenomenon.
Pullmann may have strategic reasons for shitting on Boomers:
(1) A generation is a limited edition; the Boomer supply has been diminishing with increasing rapidity and is not going to be replenished; it’s a demographic Pullmann therefore figures she can afford to abandon. (Mass-marketing has long since come to reflect this: the nostalgia music blaring over the grocery store PA now tends to be from the 80’s and 90’s. If you feel old hearing the music of your youth conscripted into hamburger jingles, wait till you stop hearing it—except in retro-themed venues and period parties; Capitalism is a fickle bitch who doesn’t love us the way she used to.)
(2) Pullmann and her ilk therefore need to recruit fresher blood—and blaming Those Damn Boomers has become a conditioned reflex among a lot of young people. (The exquisite irony is that it was also a conditioned reflex among their great-grandparents, back when it was the Boomers’ turn to be What’s-The-Matter-With Kids Today.)
I’ve never understood the point of this kind of Phyllis Schlafly routine. It’s so blatantly obvious that if she believed a word of what she’s preaching she wouldn’t be preaching it that I can’t imagine anyone taking it seriously.
@ full metal ox
I was looking at the posters of upcoming events at a local nightspot. They had a series of ‘nostalgia’ evenings.
“1950s”. – Yey, I love early rock and roll.
“1960s” – Hmm, Beatles or Stones?
“1970s” – Glam Rock and Punk. What a decade.
“1980s” – Wait, what?
“1990s” – Oh come on, now you’re just taking the piss.
Women would be happier as stay at home housewives? Ah yes, 1950s housewives weren’t at all famously bored and self-medicated to cope.
@Moggie:
Women would be happier as stay at home housewives? Ah yes, 1950s housewives weren’t at all famously bored and self-medicated to cope.
…Speaking of classic rock!
My mum was born in 1934, worked in an office from when she left school til she got married, had three kids. In her own words the 60s saved her life. She got divorced in her early 30s (this wasn’t easy) and started living. Millions of other women in the west followed a similar trajectory. What I’m wondering is, does anyone fall for the nonsense Joy is peddling? Is she just preaching to the converted or do any women read that and think “Hmmm, I never looked at it that way”?
I’ve never understood the point of this kind of Phyllis Schlafly routine
I guess the same way Schlafly said that, yes, her son is gay, but he believes in everything she says, including that he is an abomination before the Lord, she said women should be meek and have no career, even while she had a career. If you have no shame, there’s no contradiction.
@Lakitha Tolbert:
And let me make this absolutely clear for people this hasn’t occurred to yet! (You guys are pretty good so it may have) the only women she is talking about and has in mind are young, conventionally pretty, white women.
Let’s not forget capable of childbearing (and therefore implicitly cis.) Sexual orientation? The two sexual orientations they recognize are straight and We Can Pray (And Correctively Marry) The Devil Out Of You. Or Else.
Im an older, single, black, gender nonconforming woman who has worked an office job for the last 30 years, and always voted Democrat. I’m a kind of librarian who acts as a secretary for librarians. It’s not the most important job in the world but it helps free my co-workers up to do their jobs because I’m taking care of issues they don’t have to.
On the contrary: your job is tremendously important—access to knowledge is a sacred duty, whatever the role you play therein (and I hope it’s a job you’re fulfilled in, and not that you occupy because you’ve been bypassed in favor of less qualified white or male colleagues.)
(I realize the above is likely to sound like the condescending and performative acclaim essential workers received early in the pandemic. Delivery people, retail workers, healthcare workers, and librarians are superheroes? Then where are the billionaire patrons supplying them with spacious and comfortable workplaces, health care, state-of-the-art equipment—and employing enough of them to avoid overwork and burnout? You need that a hell of a lot more than David Bowie’s estate needs the royalties from “Heroes.”) I’m afraid the main thing I’ve been in a position to do is smack the YES button on any and all library levies.
Lakitha Tolbert: Yep. Poor women, no matter their color, had to work. I come from a long line of white blue-collar/brute labor workers. The only one of my ancestors who didn’t work for money was a my paternal grandmother, who was “just” a farm wife, which meant that she still worked her ass off but never made money. ALL the others worked for pay, from my maternal grandmother who started working at a bomb factory during WWII, ran a series of failing businesses that my grandfather started and then abandoned, and then worked as a secretary until about a year before she died in her early 80s, to my mother who was a printer who started work when they still used hot lead type. Mu aunts worked, my great aunts worked, and so did all the women in my husband’s family, including his grandmother who married young, was widowed young, and the spent the next 40 years making a living by mending fishing nets. The traditional “acceptable” feminine jobs such as nurse, teacher, or librarian were closed to them because they couldn’t afford the education required. So they waited tables, worked retail, worked in factories, took in laundry, and did whatever they had to do to keep food on the table. I utterly despise the people who have some rose-colored vision of a past that never really existed. I’d be willing to leave them to their fantasies if they weren’t so intent on trying to make the rest of us live in them.
@Full Metal Ox
Yeah, the Baby Boom generation was absolutely vilified by the older generation, mostly because of the boys, some of whom had long hair and “looked like girls” and some of whom didn’t want to fight in Vietnam. Sometimes these were the same people: long-haired draft dodgers and draft resisters.
This is a popular spoken-word record from 1967:
An Open Letter to My Teenage Son
Song by Victor Lundberg
Lyrics
Dear son
You ask my reaction to long hair or beards on young people
Some great men have worn long hair and beards
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
If to you long hair or a beard is a symbol of Independence
If you believe in your heart that the principles of this country
Our heritage, is worthy of this display of pride
That all men shall remain free
That free men at all times will not inflict their personal limitations of achievement on others
That demands your own rights as well as the rights of others
And be willing to fight for this right, you have my blessing
You ask that I not judge you merely as a teenager
To judge you on your own personal habits, abilities and goals
This is a fair request
And I promise that I will not judge any person only as a teenager
If you will constantly remind yourself that some of my generation
Judge people by their race, their belief or the color of their skin
And that this is no more right
Than saying all teenagers are drunken dope addicts or glue sniffers
If you will judge every human being on his own individual potential
I will do the same
You ask me if God is dead
This is a question each individual
Must answer within himself
But a warm summer day with all it’s brightness
All it’s sound, all it’s exhilarating breathiness
Just happened?
God is love
Remember that God is a guide and not a storm trooper
Realize that many of the past and present generation
Because of a well intended but unjustifiable misconception
Have attempted to legislate morality
This created part of the basis for your generations need
To rebel against our society
With this knowledge perhaps your children will never ask
Is God dead?
I sometimes think much of mankind is attempting to work Him to death
You ask my opinion of draft card burners
I would answer this way
All past wars have been dirty, unfair, immoral, bloody and second-guessed
However, history has shown most of them necessary
If you doubt that our free enterprise system in the United States is worth protecting
If you doubt the principles upon which this country was founded
That we remain free
To choose our religion, our individual endeavors our method of Government
If you doubt that each free individual in this great country
Should reap rewards commensurate only with his own efforts
Than it is Doubtful you belong here
If you doubt that people who govern us should be selected
By their desire to allow us to strive for any goal we feel capable of obtaining
Than it’s doubtful you should participate in their selection
If you are not grateful to a country that gave your father
The opportunity to work for his family to give you the things you have
And you do not feel pride enough to fight for your right to continue in this manner
Than I assume the blame for your failure to recognize the true value of our birthright
And I will remind you that your mother will love you no matter what you do
Because she is a woman
And I love you too, son
But I also love our country and the principles for which we stand
And if you decide to burn your draft card
Then burn your birth certificate at the same time
From that moment on, I have no son!
PS: I’m fascinated by the fact that no right-wingers that I’ve heard of are still exercised about the existence of Vietnam, a communist country. It’s almost as if Vietnam were never an actual threat to the United States.
@Kat:
A zany music blog’s post on “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son” drew comment from Lundberg’s daughter Terri; here’s her $0.02 on her father’s character:
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190325223339/http://www.unpleasant.org/2005/12/03/victor-lundberg-an-open-letter/
One positive thing to come out of the discussion was that other Lundberg relatives, some of whom had never met, started popping up in the comments and working out the Six Degrees of Separation—leading, six years after the original post, to a 100-year family reunion and genealogical contact with relatives in Sweden.
Well, Joy, I don’t know. I’m a geologist. I waded through more mud than you likely ever saw in your life, carried around heavy buckets filled with rocks and dirt, assembled heavy drilling equipment… you get the idea. And I’m not a man. Finished with honors, too. I was also told by different male family members, friends, and love interests that I’m besting them in “typically male” occupations such as carpentry. Or anything related to computers. My (more than ten years older) boyfriend (who works in the computer industry for 20 years now) told his parents that I’m more competent with computers than him, both in the technical and software areas. Same for my dad who worked as a server administrator for almost his entire career. Actually, I think my competency and smarts is what attracts my boyfriend (who, let’s be clear here, tends to undersell himself a lot) to me; he doesn’t want a parter who cannot care for herself, and neither do I. Despite what some people told me (“don’t sound so smart, men don’t like women who are smart than themselves!”). I see no issue with women working either desk jobs or physically taxing jobs (which, btw, also includes nurses and such. Old or infirm people can’t always move or clean themselves), and let’s be frank here, society would completely collapse without administrative workers (that, in the past, were most often male btw…).
The idiocy of people truly is amazing. Also the delusions they throw themselves into.
@Another Laura
Amen. I come from a long line of seamstresses and a couple farmwifes, and by long I mean “can be traced back to the 15th century and beyond”. They also weren’t particularly poor, either, seeing how the male members of my family were predominantly mayors, so high-status people in our hometown. That was simply how things were for commoners in Europe. Only after the great inflation and WWII was my family truly poor… and that’s when my grandfather did, gasp, administrative work to keep the family afloat! How scandalous. All my aunts and uncles are teachers or other government employees, too, plus my oldest cousin. The rest of my generation are engineers (said cousin’s sister), judges (another female cousin) architects, etc. Administrative work is by no means only for women, nor superfluous.
Thank you, Lakitha. I’m a crone now, but even in my beautiful, sexual prime, I was infertile. What about the women who can’t do what they think women should do? Is it just running soup kitchens for us, or picking through radioactive waste?
@Full Metal Ox
Wow! Victor Lundberg sounds a lot like once-prominent MRA Paul Elam, whose daughter spilled the beans about her own deadbeat, absentee, emotionally manipulative father.
I clicked through and took a (nonpsychedelic) trip down Memory Lane.
@litlady
Okay, you made me laugh.
Soup kitchens AND radioactive waste. Pretty infertile women make soup; non-pretty by RW standard women get to glow in the dark.
Not that the Federalist supports soup kitchens either. Those lazy takers need to work, not get free soup! (Unless they can make poor people listen to their MAGA/Jesus rants and properly tug their forelock and grovel.)
@Lakitha Tolbert:
And when you get right down to it, this is the primary purpose of any sort of administrative assistant/secretary/what have you…to deal with all the little stuff that needs to be done so the gears of industry don’t get gummed up and the ‘important’ people can do their jobs without having to care. In a way Kipling was wrong: Administrative Assistants probably have a better claim to be ‘Sons of Martha’ then Engineers do.
(Back in University, one of my friends noted that the people you never piss off in any organization are the admin assistant and whoever runs the mailroom. Because they are the ones who can make your life hell purely by malicious compliance.)
The Right have for a generation flirted with a feature of what’s been called ‘vulgar Marxism’, basically Hard Dirty Work Goood, all others Not Real Work. Transparently a tactic resorted-to once they’d soured on educated people because we tend not to believe their nonsense, it would be funny if it didn’t resonate so well with so many people.
It’s also basically saying that women can not do Real Work, which in our society means they’ll never be people worth listening-to, as bad as beggars and scholars and scientists.
[…]the social responsibilities women used to fulfill out of love instead of for a government paycheck.
…thereby meaning that a woman to keep her means of support must not only do their work but feel a certain way and make sure that a man feel a certain way about her. True, a man can be fired for having a ‘bad attitude’, but he generally has a right not to love his employer.
Note also the sleight-of-hand whereby all work of which the author disapproves becomes ‘a government paycheck[sic]’. Presumably this doesn’t apply to pay-cheques derived from factory-floor work for defence contractors….
The envoy from The Culture (who lives in my head) suggests that her programme could be saved if she merely extended it to eliminating all other jobs…that is, if she really believed in Freedom.
@Gerald Fnord: I can see your name, I must be special!
One of the things people should learn is never piss off the Great Man’s secretary/AA/whatever. Because they hold the power. Same with don’t be rude to the servers and cooks, because they hold your food and, well.
I can’t even reread Culture books nowadays, because damn I wanna live on one of their ships and not have waves at everything.
I legit LOL’ed at “And no housewives ever encounter anyone else’s feces.” I could tell you a story about a kid who puked so hard he gave himself a nosebleed, and then got it all over the unpainted wall behind the toilet, but I wouldn’t, because clearly that could only happen to a man.
Well, conservatives always says that “it’s natural for men seek women under her 30s, they prefer the young ones and stuff”. So, marriage and having kids by this logic would be a obvious lose of time, money and health. Thank you, conservatives, to freely give me one of the biggest motives for me never get married or have kids. It’s one of the best things that ever have happened in my life.