Great article. I would bet a million dollars that male flight from college is also a big factor in the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years.
My son is in high school. 4.0 GPA, student awards, phenomenal athlete. He came home today and told me that high school is stupid and he doesn’t want to go to college. His LGBTQ teachers always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males; the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department. Combine the feminine ration with favoritism, discrimination, and a non-objective reward system and boys will opt out…
“science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys”
Sorry to burst your bubble but that, of itself, isn’t enough to prove a “non-objective reward system”. It could be (and I know this will be hard to hear) that the girls in that cohort were objectively better at *science* 😱 than their male peers.
The double standard here is interesting. Imagine if I claimed that the predominance of men in software engineering means that men are simply better with computers. This would be seen as clear evidence of the sexism which keeps women out of the industry.
When women underperform, it's always an urgent issue that society has a moral obligation to address with various supportive programs. Anyone who suggests patriarchy is *not* to blame can be dismissed as a misogynist. When men underperform, on the other hand, it's probably their own darn fault.
But historically, ONLY boys and men were allowed to attend school/participate in professions of any kind. Women and girls were historically prohibited from attending school and not allowed in ANY profession. The discrimination that stood in women's way is historical.
If boys and men are now underperforming in educational settings where they used to do well, of course it's a problem that should be addressed, but nobody anywhere is prohibiting boys from going to school, or forcing them out of any professions.
As far as "discrimination" in awards is concerned, I suspect that if a particular boy loses out in competition with ANOTHER BOY for an award, it's automatically fair, but if a girl wins over a boy, it must be due to anti-male/pro-female "discrimination."
The history you’re bringing up is decades old and has little relevance for the present moment. [edit: instead of "present moment" I should have said "present youth"]
Here in 2024, it’s far more socially acceptable to make discriminatory statements about men than about women. (E.g. you can hold down a PMC job and tweet "men are trash"; you can't hold down a PMC job and tweet "women are trash".) And it's far more socially acceptable to advocate for discrimination against men (often in order to bring more women into an organization or profession where they are a minority).
So claims that men are being discriminated against are more plausible, a priori, here in 2024.
If you wish to make it clear that you stand against anti-male discrimination, simply advocate for gender-blind meritocracy. Given that most feminists advocate *against* gender-blind meritocracy, it's easy to infer their discriminatory motives. This leads to justified suspicion.
Oregonian said: “the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department”. Taken in the general context of his comment he’s implying the awards were skewed because the female teachers favored the girls.
I pushed back saying that for all he knows, the 11 girls deserved the awards on merit. That doesn’t mean:
(a) I am asserting women are “simply better” at science; or
(b) the underperformance of the boys in that cohort shouldn’t be addressed.
Supposing the computer science department awards were split 11/2 boys/girls. I predict someone would throw a fit, or I would be accused of sexism, if I said something like: "Imagine that. It appears that the boys in this cohort are objectively better with computers."
I think you're bringing up technicalities which don't speak to my core point.
That is not what the tone of your first reply suggests.
Oregonian gave context which suggested that the reason was not down to the ability of the boys in the class. Note her son who is intelligent and is high achieving, and reported discrimination.
Why should we discredit their experience of boys in the classroom? Especially when the report is from a student with high scores who feels boys like him are being overlooked and he notes stats to prove his point.
If that's true, one of Celeste's foundational assumptions is wrong in that case. If it's true, those boys are right to avoid college, because they would do badly anyway. They would be making rational choices.
You make a point of saying your son's teachers (are they all LGBTQ? That's odd) "always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males." "Reprimand" them for what?
And didn't you just say your son has a 4.0 GPA and has won student awards?
Your son can't be WINNING awards and ALSO deprived of awards because he's straight and male.
Or are you saying that awards are "objective" when they go to boys, and "non-objective" when won by girls?
I have no citation for this, sadly. Back in the 1980s, or 1990s, I remember running across this in a Christian book, one that was presumably arguing why women should stay in the home and raise children, since having a book that pointed out misogyny would be rare in those days. I remember the book cited the Russian medical profession, or at that time, the Soviet medical profession, which had been exclusively male for most of its history, and then at a certain point, as women entered the field, it began to be viewed as a women's profession, and Men stopped applying to medical school.
I'm assuming that it was trying to derive a natural theology from this, that women were to stay out of men's professions, but I do not remember. But it indeed did cite the idea, that at some point, the presence of women in a profession tipped it to being a women's profession. The idea that perhaps this was due to a culturally-approved flaw deep in the male psyche was not considered.
Honestly, that line of thinking seems to reinforce the notion of masculine fragility. It's almost as if though the very premise of being male is anchored to being anti-female. Females do not experience this dependency. They are just female and that is enough.
I, failing to recognize the tectonics of these changes, andcoming from a heavily academic, professionally "educated" environment, have come late to the game, but am putting the puzzle pieces together.
It seems the increase in female students has been in lockstep with courses and emphases such as a ‘gendered approach to law’. I recall my daughter having to pay for various ‘elective’ courses that had nothing to do with her targeted studies and included BS like the impact of vampires on modern literature. (The Twilight books were rampant at the time). Prestigious universities now offer courses on Taylor Swift! Easy to see young men opting out of this era bullshittery.
I think whoever wants to fund courses and study Taylor swift should be free to do so but if they’re presented as an elective, that must be taken, in a stream where it has zero bearing (such as law, medicine) then it’s just dishonesty on the part of the institution.
Fretting about things that aren’t actually happening has become quite normal. You do understand that electives are elective, right? No one is “forced” to take electives.
That may be true and gives me an idea. What do women want to stop? Deer hunting, perhaps? We could swarm the hunting areas, appropriately dressed, and play pretend, making sure our women's voices were ringing loudly over the distances. A sacrifice of time, but could be worth it.
Which shows the idiocy of 'feelz' over reason. To stop deer hunting for even one season allows an over-propagation and over-abundance of deer - properly labeled as pests in some quarters, which in turn threatens the quality and quantity of existing feeding grounds and threatens the overall health of the remaining deer population. Killing deer in reasonable numbers is properly culling a resource which could quickly outstrip its own habitat and should be considered absolutely environmentally sound - not just men acting 'macho' out to make loud popping noises and posing for beer-piss pictures. And yes, this is an absolute (and effing appropriate) example of mansplaining.
We need MORE deer hunting. They grow their population to an unsustainable level and then their environment gets degraded plus farmers crops decimated. I'm in UK. We need more deer hunting and cheap meat from it. Kill em and eat em and enjoy it
No. Not a good comment or article. You have forgotten or reject the basic principles of capitalism and supply and demand that occur in every profession. For example, in the case of veterinary science, how many veterinary doctors practice on large animals common to agriculture versus how many practice on family pets? What was the ratio 50 years ago? Why might one gender be better suited for one type of practice over another. Years ago I was told that it was harder to get into vet school than med school. If true, why? Is it still true today? What changed in engineering is that by 2005, when I was recruiting women engineers to join Caterpillar, there was a significant starting salary bonus for women in order to attract them to the profession. Unfortunately, many did not have the mechanical experience to be very good at design development and were promoted to managers where they were in charge of doing personnel performance reviews for people doing work on projects that they had no personal interest in or skills to determine best course of action. Consequently, decisions were made by uneducated committees instead of product experts. The cost of product development skyrocketed at the same time that the overall end result was less satisfactory.
Science is a process of question what is currently known. Assuming men are more likely to question the validity of COVID precautions is just as valuable as suggesting women aren't good at math. These sorts of stereotypes aren't really helping anyone.
We actually don't 'know' that to be true and we can't know. Historically, women weren't allowed to study and do research. Of those who did, their husbands often published their work and got the credit.
THE SCIENCE. It's the immutable truth in a Big Book that you swear and oath on. THE SCIENCE,the Sacred Text of the contemporary angry Thunder and Lightning God.
No! It’s the fact that intellectuals and scientists have been so consistently pushing wrong or false narrative! They lose respect because they have been DEAD WRONG on too many issues of i importance !
Plus, so many academics are effeminate dweebs, even the males are feminists!
What even makes someone an "effeminate dweeb" lol...is it because they don't do woodworking or something? They wear glasses and have other "intellectual" pursuits in life than just getting laid? They play video games (because that was the previous definition of the "effeminate dweeb" before video games went mainstream)? Or is it still that they're "eating too much soy"--even though that manosphere myth has already been debunked 1000x ad nauseum?
Also, feminism literally just means that you believe in gender equality, which is just...believing in human rights. There have been 4 different waves of feminism so far, and it's an incredibly diverse field with many different philosophical schools of thought.
The hollowed out "corporate feminism" that we see everywhere in media isn't actually feminism, and every feminist that I know is extremely frustrated/conflicted with its nonsense shallow "girl boss" crap--it's just corporations jumping on the Overton Window shift around gender equality to profit off of it as much as possible. And they do that with literally everything/anything.
Maybe learn what feminism is before going around and using the word in a way that is supposed to mean something, because this is just incredibly confusing to try and understand.
Quite likely. And in my more suspicious moments, I wonder if it is also a factor in the use of AI to replace intellectual work. Remember that before the invention of the typewriter, secretaries were respected (and of course male).
Do you have a million dollars to bet? Are you willing to give odds based on your confidence level? I think that you are confusing and conflating issues. As an engineer I am eager to embrace new developments in any of the sciences. What I reject is censoring countervailing opinions and research that is not part of current group think. It is idiotic to call it being anti-science to challenge prevailing scientific dogma with new evidence.
Again it’s the mandating of courses like ‘vampires in modern literature’ (during the Twilight series boom). Don’t mandate courses outside educational stream, let the market decide if they’re of any interest. Why do you think it’s valuable to force them on students?
I don’t agree. Anti-intellectualism has been an obvious factor in American society. When the first atom bomb exploded and its explosion took “too long” (there was a fear that other atoms would continue the chain reaction) General Leslie Groves, then in charge of the Manhattan Project, is reported to have cried out, “The long hairs have gone and done it…!”
Intellectuals at colleges have been complaining about "the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years" for at least the past 40 years. It's like a meme. Plus, you have to define what "anti-intellectual" means, and how "anti-science" attitudes have been growing in a time like now when so many people think that anything labeled as science is automatically true. Is it anti-intellectual to think you're wasting your time sitting in a class where the lazy prof is supposed to teach you the fundamentals of linguistics but prattles on every week about his own research? Is it anti-intellectual to think it's a waste of time sitting in a classroom where the prof drones on about his garbled version of Marxism instead of teaching English composition and then everybody gets an A?
I used to buy into the “men and women are interchangeable” narrative but 10+ years of coaching work teams (tech but also other fields) have changed my mind. It’s fascinating to see the differences between men and women at work. I’m a woman btw.
A quick Google search will confirm my position. The core reason why women prefer male bosses is female relational aggression. I have rarely seen a man go after other men or women with the I have seen women go after other women. Call it ruthless versus vicious. Men don’t try to destroy someone’s career because they’re younger and more attractive. That’s psychodrama.
I’ve observed that women have an innate equality bias. Perhaps as a way to ensure offspring get access to resources, they promote collaboration, consensus, and sharing more. Actually, the workplace push for hypercollaboration is precisely an aspect of feminization. In contrast, men prefer to order themselves within a hierarchy based on (perceived) merit and tend to want to work by themselves but that’s penalized now (also penalizes introverts of either gender).
Another Google search will show that women trend more neurotic and take things more personally. Also, more likely to involve authority in disputes like HR.
Many male employees fear of giving female workers developmental feedback because they fear being called sexist. It reflects one of the most corrosive social shifts: labeling anything less than praise as bias, if not discrimination, especially among younger female workers.
Earlier this year, a young female worker accused a male coworker of calling her stupid. I smelled Damsel manipulation vibes, so I asked her to repeat exactly what he said. Turns out, he didn’t call her stupid but she *felt* stupid and therefore it’s the same thing. For fucksake!
A quick Google search proves NOTHING. That’s not researh.
You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish. Most of us have greater ambitions — and frankly, children do grow up! I’ve had an empty next for quite a while now. Even if I’d stayed home for much longer than I did (I was home with my kids until they were both in school all day) I’d still have had decades to do something with after they grew up.
Madam, the research can found via Google because it’s available digitally.
> You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish.
Completely unfounded projection. As mentioned *twice*, I’m a professional workplace coach in tech. Moreover, ambition is not limited to goals that require a person to clock in/out of an institution. Also, there’s nothing wrong with being a “tradwife” whatever that means if a woman chooses to be.
You’re drifting farther into an emotive frame of discourse. Every piece of psyche illustrates the differences between male and female archetypes. By and large, they hold true.
This kind of unwillingness to acknowledge what so many men are saying supports the author’s premise. Thus is especially true when even pop art relies on the same tropes about women in the workplace. These ideas were created in neither a vacuum nor the thin air of fantasy. I know too many men who left female-dominated professions because of gossip, passive-aggression, and emotive reasoning.
Imo there is nothing greater than bringing forth and rearing the next generation. Those other (not greater) ambitions will be forgotten two weeks after your retirement or death unless you have contributed something unique enough to be commemorated and that excludes 90% of the gen pop. Your descendants will remember and appreciate your place in the family tree of life.
There was a study years ago comparing men and women's soccer teams: if one male player committed an off field offense against another, it was quickly shaken off but if a female soccer player committed the same offense, she was shut out. Gender? Culture?
The reason I preferred a male supervisor is because they were direct, consistent and had probably done the job they are supervising. It’s bad enough when you hire someone with no experience but much worse when it’s a person that could never actually do the work in the first place. It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children. That’s the natural order and this completely explains what has happened to wages in the Western world, every job has been turned into woman’s work. All labor has been devalued because we now have twice the labor pool. Why not go back to a traditional employment situation that yielded the highest standards of living we have ever had. I guess because it doesn’t fit the gay/trans/ single self centered attitude about why we are here. The most important part of being here is to have and raise children. All the education, work and money does nothing for the advancement of people if it’s all squandered on pets and thyself.
Why don’t we women just stay home and have kids? Let me explain this to you.
First of all, I found motherhood very fulfilling, actually. I had my kids just as soon as I could — after I finished my degree, got married and started working. I really do love babies, baking, all that traditional mom stuff. I stayed home until my youngest was ready to start school.
But let me clue you in! SO MANY WOMEN HAVE BEEN FUCKED OVER SEVERELY FOR THIS CHOICE. Women who don’t have solid careers are stuck with men who beat them, belittle them, cheat on them, etc. When my first husband decided to leave the marriage, it meant my job — which I had seen as a supplement to the family and not as something I could afford to support myself and my children with — was not nearly enough. My kids are grown now and I’m STILL being punished by our system for having stayed home with my kids for many years and for not working on my career hard enough. I will never be able to afford to retire, because I was not prioritizing my financial wellbeing — I was prioritizing my children and allowing my then-husband to concentrate on his career, unencumbered by domestic concerns.
Now, not every woman wants to have babies and stay home, regardless. But some percentage of us wouldn’t have minded it a bit as long as we were treated with respect, not financially exploited, etc., etc. You can blame bad men for that. We’ve learned not to trust any of you.
Eventually, I ran the newsroom for a daily newspaper. I assure you I was better at it than the man who came before me and was fired. I’d been working in newspapers since my youngest started school. I knew what I was doing. I had a degree and years of experience and I’m really proud of what a good job I did as the editor of a newspaper.
Your claim that women aren’t as competent simply proves you’re sexist. And sexist men are not good people. They certainly are not good husbands or fathers.
Also -- what's with that weird mention of pets at the end? Let me guess -- you're a Vance follower who fixates on single women with cats. And "thyself"? What fucking century are you from, anyway?
You sound like an incel who hates women because you cannot attract one.
YES. Thank you!! I lived a similar life of choices for marrying, having children, able to stay home & raise them, then go back to school for a Masters and then to work outside the home.. I am so glad I did all of it that way. HOWEVER I too was punished: My Social Security, it was explained, is less because I "stayed home during prime earning years." As if lazy?! So if I had paid someone else to raise our children, I would have been a good little soldier and gotten another $500+ per month for my time as a worthless, long-lived Grannie. Our economy is seriously deficient for everyone except white males. We women--old and young-- are in process to change that. Stand back.
My understanding is that a number of Westernized countries do adjust their public pension systems appropriately to reflect the years a caregiver was home with children (whether the caregiver was male or female does not matter). I hope Americans can work together on having the same approach.
On your deathbed are you going to be wishing you spent less time with your children so that you could have upgraded to an ocean view room on your retirement cruises?
Having dwelt with the fall out from my mother's self centered choices since I was nine yrs old - for well over half a century. Endured abuse at the hands of two stepmothers and watched my father die from a Hep C infection deliberately given to him by one of my stepmothers. As well being married for well over four decades I've learned not to trust women and prefer to live alone now that my wife has passed away than dwell within the living hell of feminine emotional chaos.
"More sexist than men have ever been"? When women pass legislation barring men from certain professions, excluding them from higher education, taking away their right to vote and signing their property over to their wives, I might start to believe you.
All she said was "the so-called "traditional" system has harmed women and still harms women today; here is my own story of how I didn't prioritize my financial wellbeing and when my husband left me, it greatly harmed me and I'm still living with the effects of that harm today."
That's it.
She only pointed blame at the restrictive "traditional" system that categorizes what people's entire lives are "allowed" to look like based on nature's arbitrary chromosome sorting, as well as "bad men" + "sexist men."
She literally went out of her way to not generalize all men--like, she went out of her way to not trigger any "not all men"s...and you *still* managed to get offended?
You guys really are out here at this point just calling anything a woman says about a man "misandry" unless it's overt praise or something.
You seriously cannot be this fragile (a person, because fragility has nothing *inherent* to do with gender or sex).
If a woman just *speaking* of her own personal life experience is "misandry" to you, you need to do some serious reflection as to why.
You are not helping. You may be are trolling for your own ego, or you maybe you are becoming what they want you to be. Or maybe you are a feminist flooding threads with random hate. Either way, you are spoiling the debate and not just boys will suffer. Everyone will.
“It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children.”
Better for *you* bro, is what you mean. Earn $, control the family and have someone raise your kids.
How do you not writhe with embarrassment at your audacity when you exhort the singular importance of having and raising children *at the very same time* as you advocate returning to a social system that would ensure you personally would have next to no involvement in the having and the raising.
Get away with that sanctimonious clap trap. It’s 2024 and we see right through you.
I don't know what makes them think they can convince us to go back to a time women risked everything to extricate themselves from in the first place. We know it was a better time for white men, so they can quit beating that drum.
While I don’t entirely agree with the original comment, and I’m not against women working per se, it does have some merit we would best not dismiss.
It’s uncharitable to assume believing in the traditional gender arrangement to be purely a matter of control. This arrangement had persisted through history until very recently because it potentially affords the most optimal conditions for childrearing.
Breast milk tailored to your children is better than formula. Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t and can instill unwanted values and behavior-- that is, daycare workers and teachers (aka the State).
That means, especially when very young, mothers ARE the best primary caregivers along with dad. Dads are next. Close family after that. Live-in nanny next perhaps. Best overall: mom, dad, and close family. It is what it is. Furthermore, most women, when they become mothers, wish to work less to some degree (if I recall correctly, 20% want to be FT SAHM). Yhis is natural and reasonable. This is an unacknowledged driving reason behind the pay gap.
However, society prioritizes the wants of adults over the needs of children. Liberal feminism has a strong anti-motherhood and child bias. Women entering the job market created surplus workers which drove down wages. Combined with inflation, and other various factors means both parents must work to make ends meet.
Not I didn’t offer solutions. I’m just spitting inconvenient truths.
I know it's always tempting to revert to nostalgia, but it's really not really historically accurate to say that a working dad and a stay at home mom nuclear family must be the best and most natural because that's how it's been in the past, taking an anthropological lens and looking across cultures and places amd economies. That's actually just the most recent past. Si many factors, including the GI bill after the second world War that, speaking very simplistically, made single generational nuclear family living even possible for a plurality of people in America. This doesn't even address other places and cultures and natural degrees of variation towards the economy and care roles. I highly recommend the first several episodes of the podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy for an overview of these topics.
>Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t
This is a false dichotomy, though of course it is important that children are raised by loving family.
>and can instill unwanted values and behavior
Children are best raised by those who will instill good values which has nothing specifically to do with who is the child's parent or not. All of parents, extended family, friends of the family, complete strangers can instill bad values or behaviors. The values or behaviors parents want their children to have might well be very bad ones and it is not hard to find examples of this.
What is 'unwanted' or 'unwanted' by anyone (parents or otherwise) has nothing to do with how children should be reared and is entirely relative. There is no particular reason to privilege the values or behaviors parents want if we are thinking about what is best for the child and of course, the parents (much less grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other members of the family) may want incompatible values or behaviors so that standard is even more of a non-starter.
Depending on the culture, breastfeeding generally lasts around a year. It doesn’t justify prescribing a particular role for the rest of a woman’s life. “Optimal conditions” for child-rearing are two caring, attuned, involved, competent parents, both of whom can provide materially for the child.
“ The most important part of being here is to have and raise children.”
According to whom? Not to me. Not to my husband of more than 30 years. Not everyone can have children and it does not make one ’less-than’ if we don’t.
Eric, my grandma was a stay at home mother with young children when her husband, my grandpa, was killed by a drunk driver. They were plunged into poverty. Thoughts on how society should handle that?
Relatedly, my husband - an incredibly healthy individual - had a stroke this year. Thank god I have a good paying job or else the same might have happened to me and my young kids.
I've had the opposite experience with male supervisors, actually. Most didn't know what they were doing, but grossly overestimated their own skills + knowledge. Or they managed to skate by on so little effort that they were essentially just "existing" in their role while doing the absolute bare minimum.
I've never experienced an incompetent or bare minimum/passive female supervisor, though I'm sure they exist as well (because I'm not going to absurdly overgeneralize billions and billions of people).
Now, do my anecdotal stories weigh more than yours? Do they weigh anything at all to you? No? Is it because anecdotes aren't a basis for any kind of logical conclusion, and using them for "logic" is a recognized logical fallacy?
Yeah, not sure why you would think that supports your "we need to return to patriarchy, even if it means removing the right to individual liberty/freedom/self-determination/etc" comment.
Plus, are you literally implying that women "could never actually do the work in the first place"? That's such a big yikes, dude. I can't even imagine being that blindly prejudiced--do you hold similar views about the competency, capabilities, and intelligence of other entire demographic groups, like black people or gay/trans people too?
I suppose it's a yes for the latter, at least, via implication.
Like, you rail against their "single self-centered attitude" but that's...the foundation of American identity + culture. Haven't you heard of "American individualism"? The core tenet of the American Dream?
That individualistic culture/mindset is the primary factor in why so many Americans are still so opposed to even the most basic social welfare programs or socialist policies (despite FDR himself saving us from the Great Depression and setting the foundation for the "American Golden Age" with his aggressive implementation of them...because their intention/design is about sharing wealth + resources more fairly overall to benefit all society, rather than letting a small group of individuals hoard everything disproportionately).
Based on your own gender essentialism, anyone could come up with literally any random "justification" for any random societal system, though I'm sure you've never thought about systems outside an individualistic, capitalist framework.
Because, ironically, that "natural order" you're referring to--the extremely isolated nuclear family model--is *recognized* to be a relatively recent capitalist "invention" to promote + optimize economic efficiency + profit. Humans lived in communal models (ie. large intergenerational families, close-knit villages/communities) basically up until the Industrial Revolution, even in America. It's not "natural" by any measure.
But let's try this--if we should all be less "single self-centered" and need to "optimize" economic recovery, then how about switching it up to:
"Men can't 'naturally' raise children like women can, they're (apparently?) only good at working for paychecks. So men should go work but then pay huge taxes so that women can live together in special large family co-op residences to dedicate all their time/energy to raise children communally. That would, in fact, be an even *more* efficient model of traditional separated gendered spheres--because genders wouldn't even have to waste time interacting and getting distracted by each other! Men could even just donate sperm and women could order it straight to their communal family living co-op residences and everyone could go about and do their 'natural roles' better + undistracted + unfettered."
I'm going to take a wild guess, though, and assume that this doesn't seem so appealing to you, does it?
Because what "traditional" men want in that "natural order" is far more about access to a woman, her body/intimacy, and her labor + care via marriage. It has crap all to do with "employment/economic crisis" or "wages" or whatever "every job being turned into women's work" is supposed to mean.
Those "highest standards of living we've ever had" just translates to "highest standards of living that *men* have ever had" and it's obvious to everyone, even if it's not obvious to you.
I wish you trad-types would all at least stop pretending otherwise.
Ugh, ok. I'm still frustrated by this shocking level of ignorance, so I'll reply one more time.
All the economic trends you've mentioned have nothing to do with women joining the workforce. In fact, according to the UN, that's actually the *number one* solution for struggling + developing countries to trigger an exponential economic growth rate...because cutting off half your population from participating in your economy....obviously cuts your economic production and thus strength in half?
You're complaining about something that has so many recognized + well studied factors, but arbitrarily blaming it all on women to justify the society that you *personally* want (which is actually very "single self-centered" of you, isn't it).
What you should look to is decades of neoliberalist policies, decades (arguably centuries) of corporate greed + labor exploitation, and the rise of automation + globalization. That's actually your "twice the labor pool" source...except it's even larger than "twice the labor pool," because it's every single country's labor pool, and not just "the other half" of the population in your own country.
How did you even manage to conclude your premise? Like, did women somehow "kill the coal mining industry" by "feminizing it" or something too, in your eyes?
And lastly, that "natural order" (regarding your gender essentialist beliefs--ie. patriarchy) of yours has only been around for 5,000-8,000 years, which is a blip in time because our species is *hundreds of thousands* of years old.
Anthropologists have completely debunked the "man the hunter, woman the gatherer/homemaker" myth, and now report that we lived in completely egalitarian communities for all of that time. Biologists also believe that we evolved as an egalitarian species too, via our extremely negligible sexual dimorphism (via comparing it to the dimorphism in other animal species--both those with very large + very negligible dimorphism like ours).
It's like every single sentence is based on a wrong premise that has way too much baggage to unpack in a comment section. I'm going to stop writing before this one turns into an article-length comment too.
🤪 You chuckled! Menz are soooooooo funny and *never* arseholes! You’d seek him out for your team so he could actively work to spread his misogyny and undermine your authority! You are *so cool* and 100% definitely not like the other girls!!!!!
I'd much rather work for a woman than for a man. Whether it has anything to do with being gay, I do not know, but I never learned how to earn the approval of male authority figures. It may go back to prep school in the early 70s. They probably don't see their younger selves in me. I know I can't identify with the average male corporate type.
I doubt I would have found myself in the following scenario had my boss been a woman. It was my first day on a new job. One of the first things my new boss, a man, said to me was "Do you play golf?" When I said I didn't, his response was "Too bad."
I feel the same and I am straight. I have a bad temper. I have had violence issues. That is not an issue with women. Even as I age, sometimes I need to work hard not to punch men I disagree with.
I see that happen too. On the other hand, I have also seen male bosses who prefer their female staff over their male staff. We humans are flawed but endlessly interesting (and we do need enlightenment on how we treat one another...it's a work in progress).
I bet you were a charmer then who could harmlessly flirt and get away with murder cos you made them feel beautiful and sexy . Some men can do that. Bad boys,we love em.
In my loooong career in the private and later the public sectors, it was observable that in many cases males had better work relations with female bosses than did the females who worked for those bosses. It was intriguing to see.
That old canard of Italians (or Irish) not being white is totally fabricated and isn't held up to even the slightest bit of research. They weren't allowed into higher society because they were recent immigrants, that's all. And race isn't a social construct. Terms may change over time but every culture and language has words for black, white, Amerindian, etc. To say that there is no race of people who are from South and Central America because 60 years ago the US government didn't have a place for it on their forms is absurd. The ancient Greeks wrote of race, as did the Chinese, Romans, Indians, Japanese. Its a thing, it exists, it matters. We've all known this for thousands of years up until about 3 weeks ago when academics started thinking that it makes them sound intelligent to say otherwise.
By construct I think people are referring to the idea of skin color equating to race, which was made up (contructed) around the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Race in more ancient times that you mention referred mainly to culture, ethnicity. This is typically what people mean when they describe race--and gender--as constructs. Things that are part of the ever evolving ways humans conceptualize and categorize themselves and gatekeeping rules we make up. Gravity=not a construct. Long hair is for girls= a construct (and a recent one).
Usually it has been culture and language. Religion can get in there as well, but culture is a huge block. The Chinese referred to the "black skin and black souls" of the British during the Opium War. The fight was racial from the Chinese perspective, and had nothing to do with skin color.
I can’t speak to the Irish, but even in my early years (60’s & 70’s,) there was plenty of bigotry against people with names like mine. I wasn’t until I learned some Roman history that I began to feel some pride in my ancestry.
Great article. I would bet a million dollars that male flight from college is also a big factor in the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years.
Yes great link! I think we are going to be seeing more of this
My son is in high school. 4.0 GPA, student awards, phenomenal athlete. He came home today and told me that high school is stupid and he doesn’t want to go to college. His LGBTQ teachers always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males; the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department. Combine the feminine ration with favoritism, discrimination, and a non-objective reward system and boys will opt out…
“science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys”
Sorry to burst your bubble but that, of itself, isn’t enough to prove a “non-objective reward system”. It could be (and I know this will be hard to hear) that the girls in that cohort were objectively better at *science* 😱 than their male peers.
The double standard here is interesting. Imagine if I claimed that the predominance of men in software engineering means that men are simply better with computers. This would be seen as clear evidence of the sexism which keeps women out of the industry.
When women underperform, it's always an urgent issue that society has a moral obligation to address with various supportive programs. Anyone who suggests patriarchy is *not* to blame can be dismissed as a misogynist. When men underperform, on the other hand, it's probably their own darn fault.
But historically, ONLY boys and men were allowed to attend school/participate in professions of any kind. Women and girls were historically prohibited from attending school and not allowed in ANY profession. The discrimination that stood in women's way is historical.
If boys and men are now underperforming in educational settings where they used to do well, of course it's a problem that should be addressed, but nobody anywhere is prohibiting boys from going to school, or forcing them out of any professions.
As far as "discrimination" in awards is concerned, I suspect that if a particular boy loses out in competition with ANOTHER BOY for an award, it's automatically fair, but if a girl wins over a boy, it must be due to anti-male/pro-female "discrimination."
The history you’re bringing up is decades old and has little relevance for the present moment. [edit: instead of "present moment" I should have said "present youth"]
Here in 2024, it’s far more socially acceptable to make discriminatory statements about men than about women. (E.g. you can hold down a PMC job and tweet "men are trash"; you can't hold down a PMC job and tweet "women are trash".) And it's far more socially acceptable to advocate for discrimination against men (often in order to bring more women into an organization or profession where they are a minority).
So claims that men are being discriminated against are more plausible, a priori, here in 2024.
If you wish to make it clear that you stand against anti-male discrimination, simply advocate for gender-blind meritocracy. Given that most feminists advocate *against* gender-blind meritocracy, it's easy to infer their discriminatory motives. This leads to justified suspicion.
It’s 2024. Women have been in stem fields for a while now.
What are you talking about?
Oregonian said: “the science department awards were split 11/2 girls/boys from an all-female science department”. Taken in the general context of his comment he’s implying the awards were skewed because the female teachers favored the girls.
I pushed back saying that for all he knows, the 11 girls deserved the awards on merit. That doesn’t mean:
(a) I am asserting women are “simply better” at science; or
(b) the underperformance of the boys in that cohort shouldn’t be addressed.
Supposing the computer science department awards were split 11/2 boys/girls. I predict someone would throw a fit, or I would be accused of sexism, if I said something like: "Imagine that. It appears that the boys in this cohort are objectively better with computers."
I think you're bringing up technicalities which don't speak to my core point.
That is not what the tone of your first reply suggests.
Oregonian gave context which suggested that the reason was not down to the ability of the boys in the class. Note her son who is intelligent and is high achieving, and reported discrimination.
Why should we discredit their experience of boys in the classroom? Especially when the report is from a student with high scores who feels boys like him are being overlooked and he notes stats to prove his point.
If that's true, one of Celeste's foundational assumptions is wrong in that case. If it's true, those boys are right to avoid college, because they would do badly anyway. They would be making rational choices.
Not very likely.
Oh yeah?
You make a point of saying your son's teachers (are they all LGBTQ? That's odd) "always reward the girls and reprimand the straight white males." "Reprimand" them for what?
And didn't you just say your son has a 4.0 GPA and has won student awards?
Your son can't be WINNING awards and ALSO deprived of awards because he's straight and male.
Or are you saying that awards are "objective" when they go to boys, and "non-objective" when won by girls?
I have no citation for this, sadly. Back in the 1980s, or 1990s, I remember running across this in a Christian book, one that was presumably arguing why women should stay in the home and raise children, since having a book that pointed out misogyny would be rare in those days. I remember the book cited the Russian medical profession, or at that time, the Soviet medical profession, which had been exclusively male for most of its history, and then at a certain point, as women entered the field, it began to be viewed as a women's profession, and Men stopped applying to medical school.
I'm assuming that it was trying to derive a natural theology from this, that women were to stay out of men's professions, but I do not remember. But it indeed did cite the idea, that at some point, the presence of women in a profession tipped it to being a women's profession. The idea that perhaps this was due to a culturally-approved flaw deep in the male psyche was not considered.
Honestly, that line of thinking seems to reinforce the notion of masculine fragility. It's almost as if though the very premise of being male is anchored to being anti-female. Females do not experience this dependency. They are just female and that is enough.
Spot on.
My son bailed early.
I, failing to recognize the tectonics of these changes, andcoming from a heavily academic, professionally "educated" environment, have come late to the game, but am putting the puzzle pieces together.
See my post below.
It seems the increase in female students has been in lockstep with courses and emphases such as a ‘gendered approach to law’. I recall my daughter having to pay for various ‘elective’ courses that had nothing to do with her targeted studies and included BS like the impact of vampires on modern literature. (The Twilight books were rampant at the time). Prestigious universities now offer courses on Taylor Swift! Easy to see young men opting out of this era bullshittery.
Taylor Swift is a cultural phenomenon that should be studied imo. Do you think they're dressing up and dancing?
I think whoever wants to fund courses and study Taylor swift should be free to do so but if they’re presented as an elective, that must be taken, in a stream where it has zero bearing (such as law, medicine) then it’s just dishonesty on the part of the institution.
Fretting about things that aren’t actually happening has become quite normal. You do understand that electives are elective, right? No one is “forced” to take electives.
Is there any bias in his and/or your analysis and conclusions?
I'd wager its far more about what women reward or avoid in the mate market than what teachers reward or reprimand in class.
That may be true and gives me an idea. What do women want to stop? Deer hunting, perhaps? We could swarm the hunting areas, appropriately dressed, and play pretend, making sure our women's voices were ringing loudly over the distances. A sacrifice of time, but could be worth it.
Which shows the idiocy of 'feelz' over reason. To stop deer hunting for even one season allows an over-propagation and over-abundance of deer - properly labeled as pests in some quarters, which in turn threatens the quality and quantity of existing feeding grounds and threatens the overall health of the remaining deer population. Killing deer in reasonable numbers is properly culling a resource which could quickly outstrip its own habitat and should be considered absolutely environmentally sound - not just men acting 'macho' out to make loud popping noises and posing for beer-piss pictures. And yes, this is an absolute (and effing appropriate) example of mansplaining.
I mean, she just chose a random example. Plenty of women are actively involved in culling pests and plenty of men go to Africa to trophy hunt.
And that is precisely why men dont want to go to college. They want to avoid...women like you.
LOL
Love this idea.
We need MORE deer hunting. They grow their population to an unsustainable level and then their environment gets degraded plus farmers crops decimated. I'm in UK. We need more deer hunting and cheap meat from it. Kill em and eat em and enjoy it
No. Not a good comment or article. You have forgotten or reject the basic principles of capitalism and supply and demand that occur in every profession. For example, in the case of veterinary science, how many veterinary doctors practice on large animals common to agriculture versus how many practice on family pets? What was the ratio 50 years ago? Why might one gender be better suited for one type of practice over another. Years ago I was told that it was harder to get into vet school than med school. If true, why? Is it still true today? What changed in engineering is that by 2005, when I was recruiting women engineers to join Caterpillar, there was a significant starting salary bonus for women in order to attract them to the profession. Unfortunately, many did not have the mechanical experience to be very good at design development and were promoted to managers where they were in charge of doing personnel performance reviews for people doing work on projects that they had no personal interest in or skills to determine best course of action. Consequently, decisions were made by uneducated committees instead of product experts. The cost of product development skyrocketed at the same time that the overall end result was less satisfactory.
https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/the-feminisation-of-public-life-cory?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Came to say this. Now that being informed is gay, apparently, suddenly it’s cool to make up your own facts.
This “anti-science” trend you speak of affects men in my area! Because if Covid taught us anything, it’s that SCIENCE can’t be questioned.
Science is a process of question what is currently known. Assuming men are more likely to question the validity of COVID precautions is just as valuable as suggesting women aren't good at math. These sorts of stereotypes aren't really helping anyone.
But women actually aren’t as good at math as men are, on average
We actually don't 'know' that to be true and we can't know. Historically, women weren't allowed to study and do research. Of those who did, their husbands often published their work and got the credit.
Because men like to question everything and in my experience at least,women don't fucking care. Or maybe that's just my neighbourhood.
THE SCIENCE. It's the immutable truth in a Big Book that you swear and oath on. THE SCIENCE,the Sacred Text of the contemporary angry Thunder and Lightning God.
Please be sarcasm
No! It’s the fact that intellectuals and scientists have been so consistently pushing wrong or false narrative! They lose respect because they have been DEAD WRONG on too many issues of i importance !
Plus, so many academics are effeminate dweebs, even the males are feminists!
What even makes someone an "effeminate dweeb" lol...is it because they don't do woodworking or something? They wear glasses and have other "intellectual" pursuits in life than just getting laid? They play video games (because that was the previous definition of the "effeminate dweeb" before video games went mainstream)? Or is it still that they're "eating too much soy"--even though that manosphere myth has already been debunked 1000x ad nauseum?
Also, feminism literally just means that you believe in gender equality, which is just...believing in human rights. There have been 4 different waves of feminism so far, and it's an incredibly diverse field with many different philosophical schools of thought.
The hollowed out "corporate feminism" that we see everywhere in media isn't actually feminism, and every feminist that I know is extremely frustrated/conflicted with its nonsense shallow "girl boss" crap--it's just corporations jumping on the Overton Window shift around gender equality to profit off of it as much as possible. And they do that with literally everything/anything.
Maybe learn what feminism is before going around and using the word in a way that is supposed to mean something, because this is just incredibly confusing to try and understand.
It's also a big factor in the rise in anti-intellectual and anti-science attitudes at colleges.
Quite likely. And in my more suspicious moments, I wonder if it is also a factor in the use of AI to replace intellectual work. Remember that before the invention of the typewriter, secretaries were respected (and of course male).
The tyranny of inventions. 🙄
There are still plenty of important respected job with “secretary” in the title. You know, like “of treasury”
Do you have a million dollars to bet? Are you willing to give odds based on your confidence level? I think that you are confusing and conflating issues. As an engineer I am eager to embrace new developments in any of the sciences. What I reject is censoring countervailing opinions and research that is not part of current group think. It is idiotic to call it being anti-science to challenge prevailing scientific dogma with new evidence.
Again it’s the mandating of courses like ‘vampires in modern literature’ (during the Twilight series boom). Don’t mandate courses outside educational stream, let the market decide if they’re of any interest. Why do you think it’s valuable to force them on students?
I don’t agree. Anti-intellectualism has been an obvious factor in American society. When the first atom bomb exploded and its explosion took “too long” (there was a fear that other atoms would continue the chain reaction) General Leslie Groves, then in charge of the Manhattan Project, is reported to have cried out, “The long hairs have gone and done it…!”
Intellectuals at colleges have been complaining about "the anti-intellectual/anti-science attitudes that have been increasing in the US in recent years" for at least the past 40 years. It's like a meme. Plus, you have to define what "anti-intellectual" means, and how "anti-science" attitudes have been growing in a time like now when so many people think that anything labeled as science is automatically true. Is it anti-intellectual to think you're wasting your time sitting in a class where the lazy prof is supposed to teach you the fundamentals of linguistics but prattles on every week about his own research? Is it anti-intellectual to think it's a waste of time sitting in a classroom where the prof drones on about his garbled version of Marxism instead of teaching English composition and then everybody gets an A?
Define intellectual and science.
I had the same thought.
Who the hell prefers a male boss! What?
I don’t appreciate your claim of “women?/ covert psychodrama.”
I used to buy into the “men and women are interchangeable” narrative but 10+ years of coaching work teams (tech but also other fields) have changed my mind. It’s fascinating to see the differences between men and women at work. I’m a woman btw.
A quick Google search will confirm my position. The core reason why women prefer male bosses is female relational aggression. I have rarely seen a man go after other men or women with the I have seen women go after other women. Call it ruthless versus vicious. Men don’t try to destroy someone’s career because they’re younger and more attractive. That’s psychodrama.
I’ve observed that women have an innate equality bias. Perhaps as a way to ensure offspring get access to resources, they promote collaboration, consensus, and sharing more. Actually, the workplace push for hypercollaboration is precisely an aspect of feminization. In contrast, men prefer to order themselves within a hierarchy based on (perceived) merit and tend to want to work by themselves but that’s penalized now (also penalizes introverts of either gender).
Another Google search will show that women trend more neurotic and take things more personally. Also, more likely to involve authority in disputes like HR.
Many male employees fear of giving female workers developmental feedback because they fear being called sexist. It reflects one of the most corrosive social shifts: labeling anything less than praise as bias, if not discrimination, especially among younger female workers.
Earlier this year, a young female worker accused a male coworker of calling her stupid. I smelled Damsel manipulation vibes, so I asked her to repeat exactly what he said. Turns out, he didn’t call her stupid but she *felt* stupid and therefore it’s the same thing. For fucksake!
A quick Google search proves NOTHING. That’s not researh.
You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish. Most of us have greater ambitions — and frankly, children do grow up! I’ve had an empty next for quite a while now. Even if I’d stayed home for much longer than I did (I was home with my kids until they were both in school all day) I’d still have had decades to do something with after they grew up.
Madam, the research can found via Google because it’s available digitally.
> You are free to marry the first man who comes along and do the tradwife thing if you wish.
Completely unfounded projection. As mentioned *twice*, I’m a professional workplace coach in tech. Moreover, ambition is not limited to goals that require a person to clock in/out of an institution. Also, there’s nothing wrong with being a “tradwife” whatever that means if a woman chooses to be.
If you’re a woman with a career, why are you shitting on the idea of women having careers?
Here from the future to say a quick Google search did, in fact, prove exactly what she said it would prove.
Women in aggregate prefer male bosses.
I'll go with my own experience and those of the women I know in real life instead of a butthurt misogynist on social media, thanks.
You’re drifting farther into an emotive frame of discourse. Every piece of psyche illustrates the differences between male and female archetypes. By and large, they hold true.
This kind of unwillingness to acknowledge what so many men are saying supports the author’s premise. Thus is especially true when even pop art relies on the same tropes about women in the workplace. These ideas were created in neither a vacuum nor the thin air of fantasy. I know too many men who left female-dominated professions because of gossip, passive-aggression, and emotive reasoning.
Imo there is nothing greater than bringing forth and rearing the next generation. Those other (not greater) ambitions will be forgotten two weeks after your retirement or death unless you have contributed something unique enough to be commemorated and that excludes 90% of the gen pop. Your descendants will remember and appreciate your place in the family tree of life.
There was a study years ago comparing men and women's soccer teams: if one male player committed an off field offense against another, it was quickly shaken off but if a female soccer player committed the same offense, she was shut out. Gender? Culture?
Nicely explained Hermosa.
Does one have to agree to appreciate an explanation?
Jesus Christ! This post really brought out the incels and misogynists, didn’t it?
Shocking
Conforming to each others’ stereotypes…
The reason I preferred a male supervisor is because they were direct, consistent and had probably done the job they are supervising. It’s bad enough when you hire someone with no experience but much worse when it’s a person that could never actually do the work in the first place. It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children. That’s the natural order and this completely explains what has happened to wages in the Western world, every job has been turned into woman’s work. All labor has been devalued because we now have twice the labor pool. Why not go back to a traditional employment situation that yielded the highest standards of living we have ever had. I guess because it doesn’t fit the gay/trans/ single self centered attitude about why we are here. The most important part of being here is to have and raise children. All the education, work and money does nothing for the advancement of people if it’s all squandered on pets and thyself.
Why don’t we women just stay home and have kids? Let me explain this to you.
First of all, I found motherhood very fulfilling, actually. I had my kids just as soon as I could — after I finished my degree, got married and started working. I really do love babies, baking, all that traditional mom stuff. I stayed home until my youngest was ready to start school.
But let me clue you in! SO MANY WOMEN HAVE BEEN FUCKED OVER SEVERELY FOR THIS CHOICE. Women who don’t have solid careers are stuck with men who beat them, belittle them, cheat on them, etc. When my first husband decided to leave the marriage, it meant my job — which I had seen as a supplement to the family and not as something I could afford to support myself and my children with — was not nearly enough. My kids are grown now and I’m STILL being punished by our system for having stayed home with my kids for many years and for not working on my career hard enough. I will never be able to afford to retire, because I was not prioritizing my financial wellbeing — I was prioritizing my children and allowing my then-husband to concentrate on his career, unencumbered by domestic concerns.
Now, not every woman wants to have babies and stay home, regardless. But some percentage of us wouldn’t have minded it a bit as long as we were treated with respect, not financially exploited, etc., etc. You can blame bad men for that. We’ve learned not to trust any of you.
Eventually, I ran the newsroom for a daily newspaper. I assure you I was better at it than the man who came before me and was fired. I’d been working in newspapers since my youngest started school. I knew what I was doing. I had a degree and years of experience and I’m really proud of what a good job I did as the editor of a newspaper.
Your claim that women aren’t as competent simply proves you’re sexist. And sexist men are not good people. They certainly are not good husbands or fathers.
A sexist man is worthless in every way.
Also -- what's with that weird mention of pets at the end? Let me guess -- you're a Vance follower who fixates on single women with cats. And "thyself"? What fucking century are you from, anyway?
You sound like an incel who hates women because you cannot attract one.
YES. Thank you!! I lived a similar life of choices for marrying, having children, able to stay home & raise them, then go back to school for a Masters and then to work outside the home.. I am so glad I did all of it that way. HOWEVER I too was punished: My Social Security, it was explained, is less because I "stayed home during prime earning years." As if lazy?! So if I had paid someone else to raise our children, I would have been a good little soldier and gotten another $500+ per month for my time as a worthless, long-lived Grannie. Our economy is seriously deficient for everyone except white males. We women--old and young-- are in process to change that. Stand back.
My understanding is that a number of Westernized countries do adjust their public pension systems appropriately to reflect the years a caregiver was home with children (whether the caregiver was male or female does not matter). I hope Americans can work together on having the same approach.
On your deathbed are you going to be wishing you spent less time with your children so that you could have upgraded to an ocean view room on your retirement cruises?
Surely you meant heterosexual white males 🤔 😳 🙄
Having dwelt with the fall out from my mother's self centered choices since I was nine yrs old - for well over half a century. Endured abuse at the hands of two stepmothers and watched my father die from a Hep C infection deliberately given to him by one of my stepmothers. As well being married for well over four decades I've learned not to trust women and prefer to live alone now that my wife has passed away than dwell within the living hell of feminine emotional chaos.
"More sexist than men have ever been"? When women pass legislation barring men from certain professions, excluding them from higher education, taking away their right to vote and signing their property over to their wives, I might start to believe you.
Can’t get laid, huh?
Point out the "misandry." Specifically.
All she said was "the so-called "traditional" system has harmed women and still harms women today; here is my own story of how I didn't prioritize my financial wellbeing and when my husband left me, it greatly harmed me and I'm still living with the effects of that harm today."
That's it.
She only pointed blame at the restrictive "traditional" system that categorizes what people's entire lives are "allowed" to look like based on nature's arbitrary chromosome sorting, as well as "bad men" + "sexist men."
She literally went out of her way to not generalize all men--like, she went out of her way to not trigger any "not all men"s...and you *still* managed to get offended?
You guys really are out here at this point just calling anything a woman says about a man "misandry" unless it's overt praise or something.
You seriously cannot be this fragile (a person, because fragility has nothing *inherent* to do with gender or sex).
If a woman just *speaking* of her own personal life experience is "misandry" to you, you need to do some serious reflection as to why.
Lol, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel. Misandry 🤣🤣🤣
You are not helping. You may be are trolling for your own ego, or you maybe you are becoming what they want you to be. Or maybe you are a feminist flooding threads with random hate. Either way, you are spoiling the debate and not just boys will suffer. Everyone will.
“It’s just a much better system to have the men work and the women stay home and raise children.”
Better for *you* bro, is what you mean. Earn $, control the family and have someone raise your kids.
How do you not writhe with embarrassment at your audacity when you exhort the singular importance of having and raising children *at the very same time* as you advocate returning to a social system that would ensure you personally would have next to no involvement in the having and the raising.
Get away with that sanctimonious clap trap. It’s 2024 and we see right through you.
I don't know what makes them think they can convince us to go back to a time women risked everything to extricate themselves from in the first place. We know it was a better time for white men, so they can quit beating that drum.
While I don’t entirely agree with the original comment, and I’m not against women working per se, it does have some merit we would best not dismiss.
It’s uncharitable to assume believing in the traditional gender arrangement to be purely a matter of control. This arrangement had persisted through history until very recently because it potentially affords the most optimal conditions for childrearing.
Breast milk tailored to your children is better than formula. Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t and can instill unwanted values and behavior-- that is, daycare workers and teachers (aka the State).
That means, especially when very young, mothers ARE the best primary caregivers along with dad. Dads are next. Close family after that. Live-in nanny next perhaps. Best overall: mom, dad, and close family. It is what it is. Furthermore, most women, when they become mothers, wish to work less to some degree (if I recall correctly, 20% want to be FT SAHM). Yhis is natural and reasonable. This is an unacknowledged driving reason behind the pay gap.
However, society prioritizes the wants of adults over the needs of children. Liberal feminism has a strong anti-motherhood and child bias. Women entering the job market created surplus workers which drove down wages. Combined with inflation, and other various factors means both parents must work to make ends meet.
Not I didn’t offer solutions. I’m just spitting inconvenient truths.
I know it's always tempting to revert to nostalgia, but it's really not really historically accurate to say that a working dad and a stay at home mom nuclear family must be the best and most natural because that's how it's been in the past, taking an anthropological lens and looking across cultures and places amd economies. That's actually just the most recent past. Si many factors, including the GI bill after the second world War that, speaking very simplistically, made single generational nuclear family living even possible for a plurality of people in America. This doesn't even address other places and cultures and natural degrees of variation towards the economy and care roles. I highly recommend the first several episodes of the podcast Breaking Down Patriarchy for an overview of these topics.
>Children are best raised by family who loves than strangers who don’t
This is a false dichotomy, though of course it is important that children are raised by loving family.
>and can instill unwanted values and behavior
Children are best raised by those who will instill good values which has nothing specifically to do with who is the child's parent or not. All of parents, extended family, friends of the family, complete strangers can instill bad values or behaviors. The values or behaviors parents want their children to have might well be very bad ones and it is not hard to find examples of this.
What is 'unwanted' or 'unwanted' by anyone (parents or otherwise) has nothing to do with how children should be reared and is entirely relative. There is no particular reason to privilege the values or behaviors parents want if we are thinking about what is best for the child and of course, the parents (much less grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other members of the family) may want incompatible values or behaviors so that standard is even more of a non-starter.
Depending on the culture, breastfeeding generally lasts around a year. It doesn’t justify prescribing a particular role for the rest of a woman’s life. “Optimal conditions” for child-rearing are two caring, attuned, involved, competent parents, both of whom can provide materially for the child.
“ The most important part of being here is to have and raise children.”
According to whom? Not to me. Not to my husband of more than 30 years. Not everyone can have children and it does not make one ’less-than’ if we don’t.
Eric, my grandma was a stay at home mother with young children when her husband, my grandpa, was killed by a drunk driver. They were plunged into poverty. Thoughts on how society should handle that?
Relatedly, my husband - an incredibly healthy individual - had a stroke this year. Thank god I have a good paying job or else the same might have happened to me and my young kids.
I've had the opposite experience with male supervisors, actually. Most didn't know what they were doing, but grossly overestimated their own skills + knowledge. Or they managed to skate by on so little effort that they were essentially just "existing" in their role while doing the absolute bare minimum.
I've never experienced an incompetent or bare minimum/passive female supervisor, though I'm sure they exist as well (because I'm not going to absurdly overgeneralize billions and billions of people).
Now, do my anecdotal stories weigh more than yours? Do they weigh anything at all to you? No? Is it because anecdotes aren't a basis for any kind of logical conclusion, and using them for "logic" is a recognized logical fallacy?
Yeah, not sure why you would think that supports your "we need to return to patriarchy, even if it means removing the right to individual liberty/freedom/self-determination/etc" comment.
Plus, are you literally implying that women "could never actually do the work in the first place"? That's such a big yikes, dude. I can't even imagine being that blindly prejudiced--do you hold similar views about the competency, capabilities, and intelligence of other entire demographic groups, like black people or gay/trans people too?
I suppose it's a yes for the latter, at least, via implication.
Like, you rail against their "single self-centered attitude" but that's...the foundation of American identity + culture. Haven't you heard of "American individualism"? The core tenet of the American Dream?
That individualistic culture/mindset is the primary factor in why so many Americans are still so opposed to even the most basic social welfare programs or socialist policies (despite FDR himself saving us from the Great Depression and setting the foundation for the "American Golden Age" with his aggressive implementation of them...because their intention/design is about sharing wealth + resources more fairly overall to benefit all society, rather than letting a small group of individuals hoard everything disproportionately).
Based on your own gender essentialism, anyone could come up with literally any random "justification" for any random societal system, though I'm sure you've never thought about systems outside an individualistic, capitalist framework.
Because, ironically, that "natural order" you're referring to--the extremely isolated nuclear family model--is *recognized* to be a relatively recent capitalist "invention" to promote + optimize economic efficiency + profit. Humans lived in communal models (ie. large intergenerational families, close-knit villages/communities) basically up until the Industrial Revolution, even in America. It's not "natural" by any measure.
But let's try this--if we should all be less "single self-centered" and need to "optimize" economic recovery, then how about switching it up to:
"Men can't 'naturally' raise children like women can, they're (apparently?) only good at working for paychecks. So men should go work but then pay huge taxes so that women can live together in special large family co-op residences to dedicate all their time/energy to raise children communally. That would, in fact, be an even *more* efficient model of traditional separated gendered spheres--because genders wouldn't even have to waste time interacting and getting distracted by each other! Men could even just donate sperm and women could order it straight to their communal family living co-op residences and everyone could go about and do their 'natural roles' better + undistracted + unfettered."
I'm going to take a wild guess, though, and assume that this doesn't seem so appealing to you, does it?
Because what "traditional" men want in that "natural order" is far more about access to a woman, her body/intimacy, and her labor + care via marriage. It has crap all to do with "employment/economic crisis" or "wages" or whatever "every job being turned into women's work" is supposed to mean.
Those "highest standards of living we've ever had" just translates to "highest standards of living that *men* have ever had" and it's obvious to everyone, even if it's not obvious to you.
I wish you trad-types would all at least stop pretending otherwise.
Ugh, ok. I'm still frustrated by this shocking level of ignorance, so I'll reply one more time.
All the economic trends you've mentioned have nothing to do with women joining the workforce. In fact, according to the UN, that's actually the *number one* solution for struggling + developing countries to trigger an exponential economic growth rate...because cutting off half your population from participating in your economy....obviously cuts your economic production and thus strength in half?
You're complaining about something that has so many recognized + well studied factors, but arbitrarily blaming it all on women to justify the society that you *personally* want (which is actually very "single self-centered" of you, isn't it).
What you should look to is decades of neoliberalist policies, decades (arguably centuries) of corporate greed + labor exploitation, and the rise of automation + globalization. That's actually your "twice the labor pool" source...except it's even larger than "twice the labor pool," because it's every single country's labor pool, and not just "the other half" of the population in your own country.
How did you even manage to conclude your premise? Like, did women somehow "kill the coal mining industry" by "feminizing it" or something too, in your eyes?
And lastly, that "natural order" (regarding your gender essentialist beliefs--ie. patriarchy) of yours has only been around for 5,000-8,000 years, which is a blip in time because our species is *hundreds of thousands* of years old.
Anthropologists have completely debunked the "man the hunter, woman the gatherer/homemaker" myth, and now report that we lived in completely egalitarian communities for all of that time. Biologists also believe that we evolved as an egalitarian species too, via our extremely negligible sexual dimorphism (via comparing it to the dimorphism in other animal species--both those with very large + very negligible dimorphism like ours).
It's like every single sentence is based on a wrong premise that has way too much baggage to unpack in a comment section. I'm going to stop writing before this one turns into an article-length comment too.
😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣
I just hated taking orders from chicks.
I chuckled. I love your honesty. I would actually seek you out for my team. Clear communication is the best, and you have it.
🤪 You chuckled! Menz are soooooooo funny and *never* arseholes! You’d seek him out for your team so he could actively work to spread his misogyny and undermine your authority! You are *so cool* and 100% definitely not like the other girls!!!!!
I'm comfortable with my masculinity. Have lived with it all my life, and like it. To each their own.
Indeed. At least half of the disruptively dramatic people I met in the workforce were men.
Equality! Men and women can be equally disruptively dramatic.
That said, I had some truly wonderful colleagues and bosses of both persuasions. 😁
I'd much rather work for a woman than for a man. Whether it has anything to do with being gay, I do not know, but I never learned how to earn the approval of male authority figures. It may go back to prep school in the early 70s. They probably don't see their younger selves in me. I know I can't identify with the average male corporate type.
I doubt I would have found myself in the following scenario had my boss been a woman. It was my first day on a new job. One of the first things my new boss, a man, said to me was "Do you play golf?" When I said I didn't, his response was "Too bad."
I feel the same and I am straight. I have a bad temper. I have had violence issues. That is not an issue with women. Even as I age, sometimes I need to work hard not to punch men I disagree with.
-When women do poorly
"It's the men's fault!"
-when men do poorly
"Still the men's fault!"
:/
Good one. This is an article about why *men* are allegedly doing poorly, and how some people try to make that *women’s* fault.
Where did you read that second part?
I must be in anecdote alley
With rare exceptions, in my 20 years of working as a pleb, male bosses were easier 90% of the time.
People who prefer to get real work done prefer a male boss.
Enough sexism for today, buddy.
I’m a male and I prefer female bosses because they tend to promote me over more capable female peers.
I see that happen too. On the other hand, I have also seen male bosses who prefer their female staff over their male staff. We humans are flawed but endlessly interesting (and we do need enlightenment on how we treat one another...it's a work in progress).
She replied, dramatically.
I almost always prefer a male boss.
Sure. Individuals preferences vary. Out of curiosity, why do you prefer female managers?
I bet you were a charmer then who could harmlessly flirt and get away with murder cos you made them feel beautiful and sexy . Some men can do that. Bad boys,we love em.
In my loooong career in the private and later the public sectors, it was observable that in many cases males had better work relations with female bosses than did the females who worked for those bosses. It was intriguing to see.
Race is not a social construct.
This is not a binary.
That old canard of Italians (or Irish) not being white is totally fabricated and isn't held up to even the slightest bit of research. They weren't allowed into higher society because they were recent immigrants, that's all. And race isn't a social construct. Terms may change over time but every culture and language has words for black, white, Amerindian, etc. To say that there is no race of people who are from South and Central America because 60 years ago the US government didn't have a place for it on their forms is absurd. The ancient Greeks wrote of race, as did the Chinese, Romans, Indians, Japanese. Its a thing, it exists, it matters. We've all known this for thousands of years up until about 3 weeks ago when academics started thinking that it makes them sound intelligent to say otherwise.
By construct I think people are referring to the idea of skin color equating to race, which was made up (contructed) around the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Race in more ancient times that you mention referred mainly to culture, ethnicity. This is typically what people mean when they describe race--and gender--as constructs. Things that are part of the ever evolving ways humans conceptualize and categorize themselves and gatekeeping rules we make up. Gravity=not a construct. Long hair is for girls= a construct (and a recent one).
Usually it has been culture and language. Religion can get in there as well, but culture is a huge block. The Chinese referred to the "black skin and black souls" of the British during the Opium War. The fight was racial from the Chinese perspective, and had nothing to do with skin color.
United States vs. Ozawa and United States vs Sinngh Thind. Reading those briefs in order explains quite a bit.
I can’t speak to the Irish, but even in my early years (60’s & 70’s,) there was plenty of bigotry against people with names like mine. I wasn’t until I learned some Roman history that I began to feel some pride in my ancestry.
Race is not a social construct in the slightest. The biological differences between races are as immutable as those between the sexes.
Oh, yes, like the biological differences between (natural) blondes and brunettes, I'm sure skin tone makes a big difference. 🙄