Manly Men Need to Do More Girly Jobs

BDMR_lurker · 2016-12-07T16:26:21+00:00

Trump represents a vision of masculinity that those who embrace the modern economy have readily abandoned.

By encouraging men to cling to work that isn't coming back, Trump is doing them a disservice.

Because we have moved on beyond building housing and infrastructure. I see it everyday. /s

These sectors where women excel may not be so safe either. First, they're often about redistributing value, not creating it. Second, they definitely are not safe from robotic replacement.

I think it's easier to replace a travel agent or university teaching assistant with an AI (it's happening right now) than it is to replace your basic construction grunt with a robot. As of now, it has to be one hell of a robot, meaning expensive.

.

And women will be delighted to see men flood their 'reserved' haunts, driving wages further down.

2016-12-07T15:50:02+00:00

One problem is that these occupations conflict with traditional notions of masculinity. They require sitting, caring and communicating, as opposed to working with big machines.

http://www.timworstall.com/2016/04/26/depends-a-bit-really/

I’m calling bullshit on this. Not that I’d expect an Old Chelmsfordian called “Grayson” to understand, but working class men don’t generally give a monkey’s about working with their hands.

We’re not living in the 1960’s, you see.

They care about finding jobs that pay well. Men care about money and success.

It’s true we have a huge problem in that our modern economy is increasingly hostile to young men from poorer backgrounds. Not because they have a manual labour fetish, but because half the population is below average intelligence and thus not suited to the knowledge economy.

The jobs they can do are increasingly taken by immigrants who live 10 or more to a house and can therefore afford to take lower wages than a British man could.

The remainder are mostly very low paying service industry jobs, and no woman dreams of shagging an Aldis shelf stacker. So – given that just about everything men do can be understood in terms of trying to get laid – why should they bother?

"Reimagining Masculinity" and the Macho, Macho Murse

Family and educational matters aside, Romano and Dokoupil also believe men need to reimagine masculinity so that they feel more comfortable pursuing careers in the booming healthcare industry - specifically, nursing. This is one of my favorite feminist tropes, because a lucrative career in nursing seems to be one of the only advantages tone-deaf feminists can come up with to sell the complete abandonment of traditional masculine ideals. Your detachable manhood, apparently, is the key to your exciting and rewarding future as a nurse.

Nursing is an iconic career. As with a policeman or a firefighter or a farmer, we carry around a picture of a nurse in our heads. For many of us, the nurse remains a compassionate female figure, dressed in white. Perhaps she has a cap on her head with a big red cross in the front. Maybe she's a sexy cartoon.

If you've been inside a hospital lately, you know that modern nurses don't wear sexy white outfits. The modern nurse spends most of his or her workday in some sort of frumpy pajamas. Further, the highly qualified modern nurse is probably not the person who wipes your forehead or holds your hand. Other, lower level healthcare professionals and caregivers do that sort of thing. A modern nurse is an educated, skilled intermediate level medical professional. They often have specialties and some are involved in medical research. Very little of what nurses do today requires an overflowing abundance of oxytocin.

So, from my admittedly limited knowledge of what nurses today do, I really don't see nursing as an emasculating profession. There are manlier professions, sure, but our culture caters most to female consumers, so it's hard to find a job today that doesn't require one to listen sweetly to the troubles of strangers and dutifully say "yes, ma'am." Plenty of manly contractors and movers spend their days prostrating themselves before a woman with a wallet. As such, I use the slang "murse" (male nurse) above only in jest. Men everywhere are made painfully aware that it is no longer a man's world, and the job of a nurse has changed a lot since the days of Florence Nightingale.

If writers like Rosin and Romano and Dokoupil were truly concerned about the plight of men in America, and sincerely wanted to help them transition into female-dominated - but not necessarily effeminate - areas of the healthcare field, why not address some of men's concerns about those fields honestly? Telling men to "MAN UP!" and become nurses is dissonant. If, as Romano and Dokoupil unconvincingly claim, emasculating men is not the point of this exercise, then why not lobby the healthcare industry to make nursing more appealing to men?

Why not reimagine nursing?

Separate the job from its female iconography and sell it to men. It’s my understanding that a decent looking straight male enrolled in a nursing program can more or less play the harem bull, but that's not what I mean.

Why not change the name of the profession?

Sure, you'll have to change some stationary, but if it's that important that men become nurses, why not do what we did for the secretary? Outside of high profile government and military realms, the word "secretary" carried a lot of cultural baggage. At least partially due to portrayals in film and television, the secretary was seen as a perky female helper to the male boss. In the wake of the sexual revolution, women found this image demeaning, and the industry standard changed. The person who filled the role of secretary in the old days is now an administrative assistant, and very few men are going to bother ribbing a male admin about being a "secretary." It's not a manly job or a womanly job. It's just a job. No one really had to change ideals of womanhood or manhood to change the way we looked at the job. The old image is preserved on film, but more or less forgotten in the everyday working world.

Men don't seem to have a problem being radiologists or physical therapists or EMTs or X-Ray techs. They have a problem with the image of the nurse, and the word nurse. It's an understandable problem. The word "nurse" is a verb that we still use to describe the act of suckling a child on a woman's breast. It's anything but gender-neutral.

If you want to make the field of nursing gender-neutral, change the name of it and create some space between the old image and the modern job. It will take some time, but it's a simpler, more straightforward and more practical fix than "reimagining masculinity."

xNOM · 2016-12-07T18:27:31+00:00

Hey Trump-hater, one of the things that makes those "new" jobs "unmanly" is that they pay less. Service jobs are shit.

Also you might want to take a cue from your Bloomberg colleague Noah Smith on the matter:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-30/give-trump-s-infrastructure-plans-a-chance

Unlike during the $830 billion fiscal stimulus last time, when the vagina lobby freaked out that "shovel-ready" jobs would go primarily to men, more than 10% might actually be spent on infrastructure this time.

https://www.aei.org/publication/no-country-for-burly-men/

jeff_the_nurse · 2016-12-07T17:46:32+00:00

I'm stoked as hell I took a "girly" job!

5th_Law_of_Robotics · 2016-12-08T13:33:26+00:00

Given that women do better work than men for lower pay (it's established canon in politics now) perhaps a solution to outsourcing manufacturing and mining jobs would be to have women get over themselves and be willing to do dangerous, dirty, and unpleasant manly jobs like work in a coal mine or smelting plant.

What do you say ladies? Want to put aside your comfort to make America great again?

mochacola · 2016-12-07T19:02:15+00:00

Well, Silicone Valley is still giving out H1's and lobbying for raising the limit. Which means, there are well-paying jobs for Americans, in America. Job supply is still exceeding demand. Get rid of affirmative action, let deserving boys go into STEM, and they'll be productive.

mochacola · 2016-12-07T19:17:13+00:00

Men's jobs won't be replaced, men as a whole just move up. Jobs of designing smartphones and writing apps didn't exist. As jobs of repairing mechanical cars shrink, jobs of improving automated electric car boom. As some tasks are replaced by A.I., new jobs are created to make better A.I.

We used to work the plantation. Now that work in the plantation is so automated that few workers can feed a whole village and more, we are still working despite growing into billions in population. We don't see just 1/10 of us working because food production is efficiently automated. Industrial revolution's mass production of products also didn't make everyone unemployed.

rg57 · 2016-12-07T23:16:22+00:00

I'd like a manly-ish man to cut my hair, actually...

ThePigmanAgain · 2016-12-08T00:23:38+00:00

I stopped reading as soon as she mentioned Trump. If you can't keep your mind on the topic at hand your writing is probably not worth reading.

thrway_1000 · 2016-12-08T00:37:02+00:00

https://archive.is/A8J85

YetAnotherCommenter · 2016-12-08T05:54:22+00:00

I have to say I don't entirely disagree with this.

Our society sees hard physical labor as the epitome of manliness. The hard, manly, dirty jobs. The thing is, it is because these jobs are tough/dangerous/expensive/etc. that they are the first targets for automation.

Automation doesn't necessarily destroy jobs (since people can get jobs repairing the machines etc) but it does mean that jobs generally require more education and less hard physical labor over time.

In a way, GAAAAAR MANRINESS is becoming progressively less required. Not necessarily fully obsolete but over time it will become less necessary in more fields. The entire point of capital is to do more production with less labor after all.

This is a good thing, not a bad thing. And a re-evaluation of traditional masculinity is a good thing too.

The long term trend is on the wall; many traditionally masculine jobs are becoming progressively more automated and more scarce. Gender roles may have made sense in the pre-industrial world, but the industrial and post-industrial worlds have changed the calculus substantially.

Title	Manly Men Need to Do More Girly Jobs
Author	beers-and-bratwurst
Upvotes	8
Comments	27
Date	December 7, 2016 3:25 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/5h0gjn/manly_men_need_to_do_more_girly_jobs/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/manly-men-need-to-do-more-girly-jobs.936226 https://theredarchive.com/post/936226

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