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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counterexample: i’m married and i work an office job
married to a woman
And who’s cooking her meals, cleaning her house, washing her clothes, and looking after her six kids while she pounds out those authoritarian screeds?
(And who’s cooking their meals, cleaning their houses, washing their clothes, and looking after their kids? Or does that assume that The Help™ count as humans?)
Someone has to tell her parents that they chose the wrong name for her. Joy? More like Grouch Pullman. Am I right?
also, i’m a software engineer. my work not only produces value but makes the production of further value easier. it requires a great deal of specialized knowledge that took me years to develop and put me in tens of thousands of dollars of debt to prove.
Well this might drive away more women voting GOP.
LOL at “accountants” being a useless expense for a business. What business needs to know how much money they’re making, amirite
Republican Boomer rhetoric is filled with lots of walking contradictions.
Like will the late stage capitalist economy function if millions of people are forced into unemployment because of their gender?
And no housewives ever encounter anyone else’s feces.
I thought housewives were supposed to change diapers and clean toliets? Eons ago, I would take chunks of time off to take care of my kids (my choice). And I thought the feces thing was a part of that line of work.
@Ada Christine
That’s a good job, but it’s not as good as a manly job like plumbing or turnip farming or writing for The Federalist.
Hmmm… this reminds me of bro-dudes who think our military could be streamlined by simply eliminating all the officers. They don’t actually serve a purpose or do anything, right?
Eh? I thought Boomers were the good guys to you. I read that wrong?
She better be cooking dinner while changing a baby and sucking her husband member while doing this or she’s a hypocrite.
Sooo… single women what Democrats because the Democrats are making them miserable? Sure, sounds legit.
All this conservative harping on the supposed misery of unmarried (and childless) women is the definition of sour grapes, isn’t it?
I’m married and I used to work in an office, and still organized the food. But it turns out my husband, even after a full day’s work, could still vacuum and wash dishes and clothes, because he’d been doing it for himself for years.
And? So? This contradicts her entire idea — because it makes people think, “Huh. Maybe stereotypical male behavior ISN’T conducive to being decent human beings.”
@FM Ox: You know “The Help” aren’t actual people to them, just appliances which they underpay and abuse.
@.45: A whole lot of Boomers aren’t “woke” and don’t favor women, so it’s another GQP argument that contradicts itself.
@Elaine: She’s a Repub. Of course she’s a hypocrite. And in her “perfect” world, sex is only missionary with lights out. Her rules don’t apply to herself.
The picture reminds me that woe betide anyone who hassles the office kitty Joan (friend of Jorts the Cat). You know she runs the place as well as doing things for Jorts since he’s not too bright. The softest paw can be a claw, as the song says.
(honestly, a startling amount of the organized labor history I know has been taught to me by those two cats and their person)
I love how none of the conservative commentariat’s responses to the midterm wipeout involve self-reflection or maybe, say, changing GOP policy to address the actual needs of their constituents.
Say what now?
I know we can share examples all day long about what complete bullshit this is, but I do wonder which world the writer lives in because it sure isn’t mine. Admittedly, most of the women I know these days are married, but they all still work. They worked before they were married, so at one time they were indeed single working women. And – surprise – all these married women I know still vote Democrat. We’re not stupid. (As far as women working “unnecessary” administrative jobs – who do those bozos think keep the world running? If you need something from any bureaucracy, look around for an administrative assistant in her 50s, and go to her, not her boss. She knows how to get stuff done.)
Well, I guess once you’ve eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs (minimum) there’s going to be a huge increase in demand for soup kitchens so it’s kind of a self-solving problem.
I notice a teensy flaw in that argument. For the vast majority of jobs, there has never been any sort of law against women working them… if women weren’t doing those jobs, it’s because most people wouldn’t have taken a woman working those jobs (or a business who hired them) seriously. It’s a matter of culture, not legality. If you eliminated most of the office work, most businesses aren’t going to suddenly stop hiring women. That would take a few generations of cultural change the other way, first.
This reminds me of the people who told me, during the Civil Rights movement in the USA, that black people would be happier doing [blah, blah, blah] than working on racial integration This Joy person omitted the phrase “outside agitators.” Why not revive that one, Joy?
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.
Certainly not, Joy. It’s self-evident that we need a partial complement of these professionals.
Yes, so many, many men are embarrassed by wastefulness. That’s the mantra of the patriarchy: Don’t waste (resources, money, or lives).
Very well, Joy. Let’s start by getting rid of the wasteful payroll department at the Federalist.
Hey Cane Toad, hating a group for when they were born is a form of bigotry.
Speaking of women dealing with feces…
@ Dave
I could go back to my old job of moving 50lb boxes for 8 hours a day, but it paid 1/3 as much and permanently damaged the part of my brain that allows me to remain cool while being harassed by management.
Snowberry
I don’t know about the USA but there most certainly laws excluding women from various jobs in the UK. I was heartened to see a report that a group of high minded citizens had rapidly organised laws excluding women from underground mining after visiting several sites.
Ha ha, more fool me. They weren’t horrified at the ghastly dangerous and wildly unsafe working conditions.
What they were outraged about was that the women did as the men did. To cope with the hellishly hot conditions underground they took off their shirts and worked topless. The solution was to deprive the women and their families from the income and the food and shelter they then provided.
There were restrictions in many other jobs, especially in highly unionised occupations and industries.
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.
If it’s one thing I’ve learned the vast majority of white women whether they’re like her or not, feminist or not, do not give a hot flying sht about women of color, disabled women, queer women who don’t want a man, senior women, etc. She’s not thinking about women who don’t want or need a man to take care of them. (And how does that work anyway? A woman just automatically loses all sense of who she is and what she wants when she’s got dck?! Gtfoh!!)
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.
I would like women like her to please shut the whole hell up and sit down (taking all the seats while she’s at it) because I know for an absolute certainty that she ain’t thinking about women like me. she is also not the first white person to jump on this idea that women who get married and as a result are less independent vote Republican.
There’s a whole bunch of sht wrong with her premise. This is just one of them. The whole damn premise is infuriatingly wrong but that’s where that party is right now. Saying wrong sht just because they have lips and air, or fingers and a laptop!