I'll hire half of the workers to kill the other half
I
have several times and seen on TV and read on both magazines and
blogosphere how middle-aged women complain that they are "invisible"
and discriminated against in job market. It's strange that young women
seldom similarly complain how they are invisible and discriminated
against. This paradox was once explained by Tommi
who noted that young women get to live in a virtual reality that the
horny men simulate for them. Inside this "Matrix", women receive
artificial sensory input as if they were intelligent and interesting in
the social sense, and good and wanted workers in the job market.
After the certain age, a woman has to leave this "Matrix" and has to compete in the real world in equal footing with men, where she is ranked and evaluated based on her skills, personality and abilities. Under a system of free market, she then receives the salary that she deserves based on her skills, personality and abilities. The fact that middle-aged women complain that they don't do so well in this competition... well, it pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about how good they really are. If I were in a similar bind, I would be ashamed to publicly acknowledge my general undesirability to employers.
(Another complaint that always similarly comes back as a boomerang to hurt the person slinging it is when a man complains that his wife is fat, ugly etc. Sorry, but under the system of assortative mating, each person pretty much gets the spouse that they deserve, that is, one that they can monopolize over their competition. Therefore any complaint about the low quality of your spouse automatically indicates that you are similarly of low quality. The fact that the person could not monopolize a more desirable spouse pretty much reveals that person to be similarly undesirable in the eyes of the opposite sex.)
If some young woman disbelieves this and doesn't want to wait until reaching the middle age, another faster way to get there is to gain a hundred extra pounds. (One positive thing that I have to admit about morbidly obese women is that anything they have they certainly got with their own effort. They are also pretty much the only women who can actually understand what life is like for the average man, since they essentially live such life themselves. That is, being totally invisible in the eyes of the opposite sex and whose attempts to approach the opposite sex generate nothing but disgust 99% of the time.) Another way we can dig out the truth is by looking at men who exhibit feminine characteristics, attitude and behaviour. The low popularity of such men among other men pretty much reveals what men really think about the feminine way of thinking and general approach to life.
Even though binary logic and consistency are nothing but patriarchal tools of oppression, perhaps feminists ought to arrange their complaints about how women get paid less than men to have at least some internal consistency. As Wal-Mart keeps constantly teaching us, the greedy capitalist stops at nothing and doesn't care about any social conventions and traditions to add even a few percent to his bottom line. So how come Scrooge is so immensely stupid that he doesn't hire only women from now on, since by doing so he could immediately cut down his payroll costs by 25% or so?
After the certain age, a woman has to leave this "Matrix" and has to compete in the real world in equal footing with men, where she is ranked and evaluated based on her skills, personality and abilities. Under a system of free market, she then receives the salary that she deserves based on her skills, personality and abilities. The fact that middle-aged women complain that they don't do so well in this competition... well, it pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about how good they really are. If I were in a similar bind, I would be ashamed to publicly acknowledge my general undesirability to employers.
(Another complaint that always similarly comes back as a boomerang to hurt the person slinging it is when a man complains that his wife is fat, ugly etc. Sorry, but under the system of assortative mating, each person pretty much gets the spouse that they deserve, that is, one that they can monopolize over their competition. Therefore any complaint about the low quality of your spouse automatically indicates that you are similarly of low quality. The fact that the person could not monopolize a more desirable spouse pretty much reveals that person to be similarly undesirable in the eyes of the opposite sex.)
If some young woman disbelieves this and doesn't want to wait until reaching the middle age, another faster way to get there is to gain a hundred extra pounds. (One positive thing that I have to admit about morbidly obese women is that anything they have they certainly got with their own effort. They are also pretty much the only women who can actually understand what life is like for the average man, since they essentially live such life themselves. That is, being totally invisible in the eyes of the opposite sex and whose attempts to approach the opposite sex generate nothing but disgust 99% of the time.) Another way we can dig out the truth is by looking at men who exhibit feminine characteristics, attitude and behaviour. The low popularity of such men among other men pretty much reveals what men really think about the feminine way of thinking and general approach to life.
Even though binary logic and consistency are nothing but patriarchal tools of oppression, perhaps feminists ought to arrange their complaints about how women get paid less than men to have at least some internal consistency. As Wal-Mart keeps constantly teaching us, the greedy capitalist stops at nothing and doesn't care about any social conventions and traditions to add even a few percent to his bottom line. So how come Scrooge is so immensely stupid that he doesn't hire only women from now on, since by doing so he could immediately cut down his payroll costs by 25% or so?
You know, Ampersand, over on Alas A Blog, has a number of articles that try to debunk many of the responses to the essentially political claim that women are paid 75% of what men are (or whatever is your favourite fraction). Perhaps you can write some posts debunking Ampersand's debunking.
What I find interesting is that different people choose to use different understandings of the claim that women earn some fraction of what men earn. And, over time, they will change their definition.
So, for example, I was at a talk by one of the Linux Chix about women and Linux where she made the claim. In the context of the talk it sounded like she was saying that all women earn 75% of what men do for exactly the same work. This despite the fact that she works for a large US firm that is subject to EEO and that she was probably getting a premium over what males doing exactly the same job would get because she is a rarity.
However, when you press them, they retreat to claims that men force all women to do all the housework drudgery thus preventing women from being able to earn to their true potential.
In discussion with the woman mentioned above, she pointed me to the book Wifework. This book was very interesting. Perhaps its chief claim was that men were evil because all they wanted all the time was fellatio and that the author would rather have enjoyed a cunninglinguist, if only there was one to be found.
How ironic to be married to a woman who does not like the talents of a cunninglinguist :-)
Posted by cunninglinguist | 1:47 PM