The next "Equal Occupational Fatality Day" is Sunday October 11, 2020. This date symbolizes how far into the future women are expected to work to experience the same loss of life from work-related deaths that men experienced in just the single year 2008.

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While I appreciate your point, the five quoted dangerous, largely male professions in the article are "coal mining (almost 100% male), fire fighters (96.6% male), police officers (84.5% male), correctional officers (73.1% male), and construction (97.4% male)".

While the corporate overlordship of coal mining and construction can arguably support your point, the other three are genuinely professions that require their workers to put themselves in relatively dangerous positions. The alternatives there are pretty unthinkable; you'd be left with non-rescuing firefighters, corrections officers (who I assume are jail guards of various types) working without direct human contact with prisoners, dehumanising the prisoners and wrecking a large part of what small fragment of the prison system that actually works towards rehabilitation, and police officers, who have enough paperwork already without adding "self-danger-minimisation" reports to those towering stacks.

So, yes, safety levels can be improved in some ways, but the bare fact of it is that some jobs are simply more dangerous than others. Mining is, at the end of the day, digging certain kinds of rock out from some other kinds of rock, underneath a whole lot more rock. Sometimes shit happens.

[–]cryptogirl -2 points-1 points0 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

You make some good points here.

I hope most MRAs would agree with me that we need a radical reform of the criminal justice system. Not only eliminating anti-male bias, but doing away with draconian drug laws, as well as addressing the institutionalized racisms that plague communities of color. I know the word "Nazi" gets thrown around a lot in online fora, but we are at super-Nazi levels of incarceration (in the U.S. at least).

We should be organizing against the prison-industrial complex.

I don't know what we can do about firefighting, except eliminating any vestiges of discrimination and making sure firefighters are properly equipped. Construction, on the other hand does seem like an industry where heightened regulations could still do a lot of good.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I know that we should be working together to address the underlying problems.

Shit does happen, but we should be working to make it happen less often.

[–]Abdias_the_Blind 7 points8 points9 points 16 years ago (6 children) | Copy Link

Ha! Quite ironic considering Feminism itself vituperates women's supposed oppression in the workplace; this supposed oppression of middle class white women in upper-middle class jobs whilst incessantly ignoring, minimizing, and denying the very real oppression of a huge chunk of the male population who occupy the lowest, and most dehumanizing and dangerous jobs; you know, the garbage men, loggers, construction workers, etc. The men at the bottom of society that nobody (including feminists) cares about.

Isn't that interesting? How reactionary and bourgeois can a movement be?

I'm quite incredulous how you could call MRA's reactionary in this regard as they're practically the only people who care about the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat who both are almost exclusively men whilst feminists bemoan the 'oppression' and 'woes' that women face in middle and upper class jobs.

So there! How does it feel being a reactionary? ;)

[–]Qeraeth 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

this supposed oppression of middle class white women in upper-middle class jobs

You mean like sweatshops, maid work, housekeeping and the like, several of which also have intersections with questions of race, class, and immigration-status which are of precious concern to a subreddit that is recently on record equivocating on white privilege and racial oppression?

A good deal of the service industry, which is something one might call neo-proletarian, is occupied by women. Feminism certainly has historically had a white cis perspective that is bourgeois; unlike Men's Rights Activism, many sectors of mainstream feminisms have at least owned up to that, with various feminisms being run and promoted by those who had previously been excluded. Issues of immigration-status, race, and class are becoming more commonplace in discussion, writing, research, and textbooks. What I see from a lot of MRAs is a fair amount of equivocation on those issues.

I and others have thoughtfully criticised how feminism still has a whiteness problem. The fact that this criticism is part of the mainstream discourse is a far cry, however, from what one sees around here.

Crypto's point was that MRAs use issues like this to claim gendered oppression yet until she spoke up no one talked about corporate hegemony or labour organisation or trade unions or indeed any issues that speak directly to the suffering of the people who work the most dangerous, physical, blue collar (and otherwise) jobs in the US and abroad.

denying the very real oppression of a huge chunk of the male population who occupy the lowest, and most dehumanizing and dangerous jobs; you know, the garbage men...

Garbage men like my father? Yes, I know all too well. I've been with him to the hospital, watched him as he slept from exhaustion, felt my heart go out to him when he came home with another scar gained from peoples' improperly disposed garbage, watched him get respiratory problems (which thank goddess are receding, he's more fortunate than some of this city's civil workers) from working to clean up Ground Zero... He and I never got along, but I always told him how proud I was of him, and I never stopped respecting him for the necessary work he did. It was not feminists who mocked garbage men, but pipsqueak kids at school and pipsqueak white guys in offices who think they're better than my father because they work in the vaunted "private sector."

That's why I'm as red as they come with organised labour. That's why I supported Toronto's outdoor workers' strike against the jibes of entitled citizens who don't know what it's like to haul trash in 32 degree Centigrade weather or during a snowstorm or in a torrential downpour. Or who had to hope that their parent wouldn't be the next to die in a compactor accident or crushed at the side of their truck by a thoughtless driver. People who then had the audacity to furiously type on a news website that sanitation was a job that could be done by monkeys.

I was enraged when my own city's newspapers turned on the labouring men and women who run New York City Transit, the people- mostly men- who give their lives on the tracks to repair them and our subway stations, and who rain or shine must keep this city moving. To be called "Rats" by two major tabloids that ran the slur over images of black striking workers, against a labour union that was run by a black man and was made up primarily of people of colour...

And the whispered racist, classist outrages that followed under the shadow of the politely evasive media.

For what? Because they dared to strike.

Yes, I'm familiar with the concerns of organised labour, with the risks these people take every day to make this country work as well as it does, and with the scorn heaped on them. Regulation, strikes, trade unions... all of these things have given these people wages and benefits that classism and racism would've seen wrenched from them. And yet in all of these dishonest discussions, what I see is a Potemkin village of oppressions.

Men work in the most dangerous jobs. But let's not speak a whisper about organised labour.

Men are overrepresented in prison. But let's erase the War on Drugs, and the institutional racism that ensures it's primarily men of colour who are in prison.

It feels shameless and disingenuous, and without paying heed to those underlying issues it feels like no one here is really interested in fixing the problems. Just in saying "this bad stuff happens more to men! Raceless, classless men! Evil feminists!"

they're practically the only people who care about the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat who both are almost exclusively men whilst feminists bemoan the 'oppression' and 'woes' that women face in middle and upper class jobs.

Which is why this statement makes virtually no sense to me. Where are the MRAs for trade unions? Every feminist I know supports organised labour against the slings and barbs of armchair economists, conservatives, neo-liberals and other forces that truly are fighting against the working classes. Marxist and socialist feminisms are among the most storied traditions and perspectives within feminism.

Being a working class girl myself I'd feel remiss if I did not take these things seriously. What I object to is the hollow use of these serious issues of corporate abuse, graft, and malfeasance in a context-less way to somehow bash feminism.

As I have said repeatedly, NOW is not the entirety of feminism. The occasional article in the New York Times about sexism in corporate America, while valuable, is not the totality of feminism either. There's as much of a struggle with whiteness and classism in this movement as there is outside of it. Womanism was forged in those fights.

Whereas, what occurs around here is the use of racism for only one thing:

"Oh, if you said that to a black person it'd be totally racist! But it's okay to say it to a man because our culture is all feminist and PC!"

But when race is actually discussed from a 'hey, here's this bad thing that happens to people of colour' or even 'men of colour' perspective... White privilege and nothing but. So it seems strange to mock feminisms' whiteness when the house in which we're now speaking is very untidy indeed.

As well as the nonsense that all feminists talk about are female executives. Early feminism could be as varied as its descendants but several early thinkers like Emma Goldman were very sympathetic to the labour movements of their time when it was even more dangerous to be an open supporter thereof.

As to feminism's race and class issues, they're prevalent yes. But many feminists are at least admitting white privilege (and class, cis, abled privilege, etc) actually exist which is a far cry from what one sees around here. And I very much doubt that The Spearhead or some other MRA news site would even broach the topic of MR whiteness.

To take a selection of topics from Feminist Frontiers, a gender studies textbook, however:

From the Third World to the "Third World Within": Asian Women Workers Fighting Globalisation, by Grace Chang.
The Lady and the Trap: Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers, and the Challenge of Welfare Justice, by Gwendolyn Mink.
It's Not an Oxymoron: The Search for an Arab Feminism, by Susan Muaddi Darraj.
Las Mujeres Invisibles (The Invisible Women), by Sharon Ann Navarro.
The Managed Hand: The Commercialisation of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons, by Miliann Kang.
Maid in LA, by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Working at Motherhood: Chicana and Mexicana Immigrant Mothers and Employment, Denise A. Segura.

And so on.

Yes, white bourgeois women. Totally. That's just one book, mind, among many. Feminism's race/culture problem is an ongoing one, yes, but I'm not the only person who's working on it. Don't erase my voice, the voices of those women, or those of many activists and academics, who are bringing that perspective to gender studies.

As I reread Ms. Darraj's work once again I can only smile at how off base some uninformed critics are about the discourses within any number of feminisms.

[–]cryptogirl 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]Abdias_the_Blind 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

Frankly, from my left-wing perspective (a perspective I realize most people here do not espouse) I think men tend to work the most dehumanizing jobs (whether the're high-paying or not) because of their social/economic (ie their position within the division of labor) role in society. If one lacks the means of production one does not effectively have much of a "choice" of where to work; this choice is even less for men. Society has affirmative action for (white) women in middle class jobs like retail, customer service, etc. Men are relegated to the shitty jobs essentially because of this, and the fact that they would be in horror at the thought of a (white) women having to do such fetid work, so they sacrifice themselves for women essentially.

As far as "working together" goes: Just no. Feminism's meta-narrative depends upon seeing men as hierarchically above women. This is why feminists always point to the top and exclaim, "see!, see!, women are still being oppressed!" Does it matter to these people that a very large minority percentage of men are at the very bottom of society; in the coal mines, in prisons, and being homeless for instance? No, of course not! That would invalidate said meta-narrative of feminism. This is why feminism is inherently bourgeois and anti-proletariat; because men make up the most exploited parts of the proletariat, which would challenge the entire basis of feminism.

Seriously, what matters more; a few ten thousands patriarchs at the top or tens of millions of men at the bottom? Feminists know the answer to this, and hence never bring up the latter. This is why feminists and MRA's can't work together because for the feminists to acknowledge this would be to deconstruct their own ideology.

Do you really think I'm a reactionary?

You personally? No. You come across as a highly intelligent, empathetic, and genuinely egalitarian person. However, the ideology you identify with is reactionary. I actually agree with what you say a whole lot more than others around here do; but that's probably because I'm a left-wing anarchist ;) To be honest, I would probably agree with you on almost every subject other than feminism. At any rate...

Feminism is reaction because it thrived/s solely because of Christian culture, homophobia (the decline of homo-sociality), and chivalry. And yes, I'm completely serious about those reasons. You're probably a little bewildered by the first two of those reasons, but to discuss them here would be a little off-topic, so you'll have to message me for a more thorough elucidation ;)

[–]Qeraeth 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

women in middle class jobs like retail, customer service, etc.

Those are not middle class jobs in the West by any definition. India, yes, but one presumes you're talking about the US. Furthermore, do you honestly think there's affirmative action for cashiers and people working in phone banks? It seems that's what you implied very strongly there.

and the fact that they would be in horror at the thought of a (white) women having to do such fetid work, so they sacrifice themselves for women essentially.

An oversimplification, but even that idea points to misogynist assumptions about women that undermine your point, not Crypto's.

depends upon seeing men as hierarchically above women.

En toto, no it does not.

First of all the meta-narrative one is speaking of depends on which feminism you're talking about. Secondly, many visions of gender in our society do not put men as a class above women conceptually in all ways at all times. My own apprehension of patriarchy/kyriarchy is that it's a privileging of a specific type of masculinity which, especially in the post-1960s world, can be accessed by women now and thus produces less tidy but no less pernicious gender oppression.

I'm not exactly an outlaw among feminists for thinking such either.

Women can be patriarchs as well, and play a leading role in marginalising other women through sexist actions and ideology, just as men do to other men quite regularly (constructions of class are part of this complex matrix).

So in short, no, that's not the meta-narrative of many feminists. Some, certainly. But the perpetual MRA fallacy is to reflect the singular thought in their own movement onto feminism which has a much wider canon and is vastly more diverse in every sense of the term.

because men make up the most exploited parts of the proletariat,

This borders on being offensive because it entirely erases the women of colour, here and abroad, on whose backs globalisation has been balanced.

Indeed I could argue that your leftism seems to rest very heavily on a white-centric perspective that sees only the men of the blue collar, unionised proletariat as the only working class, which is patently false and leads to you making generalisations of that calibre. Men of colour who are immigrants to the US do back breaking labour. Yet what is elided (both in workplace accident statistics and in the study of labour in general) is the fact that their wives and sometimes daughters have to enter the shadowy underbelly of capitalist mass production as well.

This is true in China, this is true in India, and this is true in the West itself.

I'm not erasing the travails of working men. But to say that men make up the most exploited parts of the proletariat when you've referenced primarily professions that are unionised (and whom I defend against right wing union busters) and well paid compared to what an Asian woman earns in a sweatshop seems disingenuous to the topic of class oppression, never mind matters of gender.

Seriously, what matters more; a few ten thousands patriarchs at the top or tens of millions of men at the bottom?

When you view oppression as something that is tied to only one thing (in this case class) and on a continuum of mutual exclusivity which holds that one loses privilege the more oppressed one is on that axis, this statement feels true.

When you view oppression, as many other leftists, anti-racist activists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists do, as a latticework of overlapping axes of disadvantage and privilege, one sees why your statement is vastly oversimplified.

A poor person can still have white or male privilege. I'm trans yet can still have able bodied privilege and a modicum of class privilege. I'm Latina yet light skin can grant me conditional white privilege.

In other words privilege and the ability to oppress are very often contemporaneous with disadvantage and marginalisation in some form.

Ergo, in sum, the problems of gender in our society do not go away because men or women happen to be poor in certain numbers (and the harder one looks, the more Euro and androcentric it seems to suggest that only men do all the heavy, life threatening labour in our wonderfully globalised economy).

Feminism is reaction because

If a movement is to be damned for reacting to something then no politics is valid.

If you're using "reactionary" to mean what most people including political sociologists use it to mean (i.e. a movement that wants to turn back the clock and restore a bygone order) you're prodding the wrong gender movements, by and large. Some feminism, certainly that of its older guard, has reactionary elements in it particularly in regards to transgender people (the reactionary element here is a desire to return to unquestioned biological/natal essentialism), but their time is certainly passing.

would be to deconstruct their own ideology.

If you think this has never happened with anything calling itself feminism you haven't read or listened to very much under that banner I'm afraid.

This is why feminists always point to the top and exclaim, "see!, see!, women are still being oppressed!"

Lastly, why are there more men at the top, then? Are we supposed to say that because many men are oppressed there isn't some meaning to, say, the male dominance of most governments, nearly all major religions, or many other institutions of power? Indeed, because of the fact that racial and class axes also act on the issue of hegemonic masculinity, it is that very thing which explicates the oppression of men throughout this system. For it is not only interesting that men dominate in those fields, but particular types of men fitting a certain privileged vision of masculinity that is refracted through a racial and cultural lens.

[–]Abdias_the_Blind 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

First of all, I'm not going to respond to your ideas on hegemonic masculinity and such because I responded to them in the pm (you got that right?)

At any rate, I'll just condense my ideas on your two posts here:

First of all, I take it as a given that most of the time when discussing gender, we're discussing them from a euro-centric point of view. Otherwise, every statement we made about gender would have to be prefaced with a disclaimer about the even worse conditions of the people in the "uncivilized" world.

I thought it would be presumed that I think women in third would countries are worse off than working class men in the west. So, I can only presume malice intent on your part.

Essentially you denied the systematic harm working class men face with this gem:

A poor person can still have white or male privilege.

I wasn't claiming that because some men are poor that they're systematically oppressed, but what I was purporting was that men are systematically forced to do the worst jobs (again, in the west!) thereby making them oppressed. Women for being women (again, in the west!,) are systematically privileged to generally not have to do such work. Are you denying this?

And I never claimed men of color don't have it worse. I realize racism plays a factor. The prison industrial complex, homelessness, and the working class degradation (again, in the west!) are men's issues and poc's issues. You're trying to adduce the proposition that it's only the latter, and that somehow men just happen to completely outnumber women in the prisons, on the streets, and in the coal mines. No, men are there because of systematic misandry employed in various legal and social forces. Similar to poc's situation. You're willing to permit the latter, you deny the former. But feminism is not being uncommon here, no, this is just a general attitude that makes male suffering normative.

Essentially the main problem with what you're espousing is that you very much want me to recognize the systematic racism in much of what MRAs discuss yet refuse to vouchsafe the notion that there is any systematic misandry inculcated in the system; that poc's issues are connected to a wider social/class system, etc, while men's issues are somehow meandering monads unconnected to any larger social web.

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