Some fine old neoliberal misandry from The Economist magazine

PrincessofPatriarchy · 2019-12-07T05:22:33+00:00

I clicked the link and was given a short preview with a demand that I subscirbe to read it. What little I did see was so insulting, I ended up going into the page source to read the article and honestly, it's bad. They are essentially recognizing that there is a problem, with a poor education system leaving many men unable to find jobs, as blue collar jobs in the area shut down. But the tone of the article is basically making a mockery of the situation, almost laughing at them as being dumb losers rather than placing the blame where it belongs, on the Louisiana education system.

Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars, obviously, do not have jobs.

Why was that statement even necessary? It's just intentionally written to be condescending. Not to mention a lot of prisoners are put to work, they are frequently the ones that for instance cook the jail food, and some jails have programs with corporations. Also are these exclusively male jails? There's not a single place to house a female inmate or are we only making fun of male inmates today?

Nor do many of the young men who hang around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze.

How would the author know this? They see a guy hanging around playing dice and chatting, and assume that because they're not working that very moment they must not have a job? Even the language they choose is intentional "shooting the breeze" as opposed to a more common term like "talking", "socializing", etc. It's intended to imply that this is a useless, time-wasting activity.

Criminality, alas, remains an option for men of all skill sets, as Tallulah’s prisons bear witness. The world’s most dysfunctional people are nearly all male. Men have always been more violent than women, even if they are less violent now than they used to be.

Let me just back that up for a moment. I work in criminal justice so clearly I have a lot of respect for it but "Dysfunctional" and "illegal" don't always go hand and hand. We live in a country where people go to jail for smoking a little marijuana. I'm not going to call that "dysfunctional" because it's not. Let's just ignore the fact of course that while violent crime in general is in a decrease, female violent crime has been on a steady increase. I also don't agree that we can say that men are more dysfunctional than women based off of crime stats alone. Female criminality has historically been ignored and there are more ways to be dysfunctional than committing crimes. The OP is using the terms criminality and dysfunction as though they are interchangeable synonyms.

The author also enjoys calling out that some of these men have children with different mothers, but of course they're not going to call it dumb for these women to have had babies with these men in the first place. Somehow pregnancy is only the man's fault?

Yuck, what a condescending, overly simplified, biased piece.

I have had a few articles published before. If we want to write a rebuttal I will do it. That just makes me upset. The misandry, general intellectual dishonesty of the writing, treating inmates without dignity, etc. It's bad form.

Title	Some fine old neoliberal misandry from The Economist magazine
Author	Thin-Ant
Upvotes	2
Comments	4
Date	December 7, 2019 4:52 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/e7a1y1/some_fine_old_neoliberal_misandry_from_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/some-fine-old-neoliberal-misandry-from-the.1064330 https://theredarchive.com/post/1064330

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