What would happen if no men showed up for work today?
Yesterday’s post got me thinking about what would happen if no men showed up to work today. For certain, the trains would stop running. But before we get into that, I want to tell you a bit about how I came to be – how I came to think the way I do.
I credit my father, first and foremost.
My father failed in so many ways, but one thing he did perfectly was provide. He could coax food out of the barest patch of earth; he could collect a swarm of wild bees and turn them into gallons and gallons of honey; he could take a bush and make it flower; he could take a cow or a goat or a chicken and make the foolish creature love him. My childhood was blighted by religious-based violence centered on the concept of breaking a child’s will so they might better accept the will of God, but that is not the reason I am atheist. If God had been presented to me in a better light, someone who wasn’t keen on beating children unconscious, I still don’t believe I would be one of the faithful. God makes no rational sense to me.
And if I am one thing, it is rational.
What my father did was instill indelibly in my mind that his role was to provide. I never thought of that in terms of love. Only in terms of material goods, which amounted to food and shelter and clothing in our sparse, dirt farm existence, and my Dad was a genius at providing those things. My mother and I turned the goods of his labor into “value-added” products, to be certain, but we would have had no flour to mill, no butter to churn, no eggs to collect, no firewood to burn, no cookies and cakes and breads and loaves to sell without him.
My most basic understanding of men is that they keep you from starving or freezing to death.
My three brothers played a key role in that they made me appreciate my chores were so much easier. At no point would I have ever traded churning butter or kneading bread with pitching out stalls or baling hay.
From my brothers I learned that men do the hard, shitty work, and tedious is nothing compared to physically brutal.
My husband’s grandmother played a curiously central role in who I am, too. The Queen was the sort of woman who showed up for Sunday dinner dressed in elegant suits with her hair perfectly coiffed and pantyhose and heels and lipstick exquisitely applied, and I really, honestly, expected her to hate me with my worn denim and flannel shirt and practical flat shoes and penchant for the saltier forms of the English language.
But she didn’t.
While Mr. JB and I were still dating, she gave me two pieces of advice that are with me to this day.
Friends of the family were expecting and everyone was all excitement and anticipation, which is utterly lovely. A discussion about the mother and working and how to get the baby sleeping through the corporate night ensued, and the Queen blessed me with two morsels of wisdom.
On the subject of maternal guilt, she said, “People hardly ever feel guilty about doing the right thing, now do they? Let guilt be your compass, letting know you are headed in the wrong direction”.
And gazing upon a sturdy tome of Popular Childcare Manual, she said, “Honey, the baby IS the book. If 50 000 years of evolution isn’t good enough for you, then I don’t know what is. You do what the baby tells you to do and you can’t go wrong. It’s important to have an open mind about scientific advances, but not so open your brains fall out onto the sidewalk.”
The Queen passed away before our first child was born, and I will never forget the look on her face when we left her in the hospital, after a devastating stroke left her immobile and uncommunicative. She was tied to a bed with her hair disheveled, wearing one of those awful gaping hospital robes, and the look in her eyes was so very clear:
No. Please no. Please kill me. I do not want to live like this.
And I knew then I loved her. The Queen was gone, although her body was present. I would have killed her, had the law permitted it.
Obviously, I didn’t.
It made me realize that even though the Dowager, the Queen’s Daughter and Mr. JB’s mother has been no peach to deal with, I will never let her spend her last years in a home with messy hair and crinkled clothes. I won’t kill her, obviously, but she will spend her last moments looking like herself, surrounded by the people she loves and no “career” in the world will make her comfort and care irrelevant to me.
And obviously, the same goes for Mr. JB’s father, and my own. They will end their days in the company of those they nurtured into love, no matter how clumsily they effected the emotion.
Mr. JB’s mother and grandmother made me realize that the single most important thing I can contribute to the world is love. If every family made loving one another a priority, then the bonds of family would become the single most important “wealth” we can pursue. It used to be that way. It can be that way again. But families aren’t families without men.
And that is where we have gone off the rails.
The birth of my son is what brought that home to me forcefully. Our first child was a fearful, cautious child by nature. She was born clinging to me and it took more than a year before she stopped freaking out every time the phone rang. Her baby brain took any sudden sound to mean the world was surely coming to an end, and she responded appropriately: by screaming her head off.
LittleDude is so totally different. He was born calm and curious and totally open to anything the world had to throw at him. It took a long time before Pinky would let Grandma hold her for any length of time, but LittleDude was happy as long as there were warm arms around him.
As a toddler, he would go up to any man in the park, and ask to be picked up when he got tired.
“Daddy, pick me up”. He called them all “Daddy”.
I used to joke with my husband that I was the “single mom whose kid got no male attention” at the park, because LittleDude just loved men and he showed no fear of them whatsoever. He would happily snuggle up with the homeless guy with the puppy, which forced me to face some uncomfortable truths.
I would try to coax LittleDude away from these men, who never behaved in any way that alarmed me, other than simply being men. Who were they? I don’t know. War vets. Chronic alcoholics. Men whom society had discarded, and the confusion I could see in my son’s face when I would try to pull him away made me examine where I was getting my ideas from.
I’ve never been the hysterical “someone is gonna kidnap my child” sort of person. That happens so rarely, it’s not a rational belief. It would make more sense to worry that he might be struck by lightning or swept away by a tornado. I was afraid of those men because they were men.
And I didn’t want my son to grow up thinking that men are something bad. I lived through parental alienation and had the poison of feminist inspired man-hate poured into my soul every day, thanks to my mother, and I refused to let her anger and bitterness and venom affect my life.
So that is how I began.
Commenters have often mentioned that if men didn’t show up for work one day, the entire world would screech to a halt, and today, using data from the US Department of Labor, I want to take a look at just how true that is. Hearing about “male privilege” is so common in the media, but what is hardly ever mentioned is just how many of our own privileges are a direct result of the work that men do.
Perhaps the reason men have historically had the privileges they do is because they EARN THEM BY MAKING OUR LIFE POSSIBLE?
Just a thought.
And in the same breath, women have historically had the privileges they have because they CREATE LIFE.
Modern, feminist inspired liberal democracy has destroyed women’s role, by and large, with plunging birth rates across the developed world, but they cannot destroy men’s traditional work, or we all perish. What they want is for men to do the work silently. With no acknowledgement. For no reward.
There’s a word for that: slavery.
Let’s see what happens when the slaves revolt, shall we?
All information taken from Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2013, except where noted.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
First up, the entire power grid is down. 100% of power plant operators, distributors, and dispatchers are men. Now, it’s possible that there are a few women working in these occupations, but however many there are, they do not make up even 1% of the total workforce, so statistically, 100% of the workforce is male.
91% of the nation’s electrical engineers are men, and if they don’t show up for work, there is no one to monitor and manage the nation’s electrical supplies. Assuming some automation (designed by men, naturally) kicks in for the day, we had all better pray there are no problems. 97.6% of electrical power line installers and maintenance workers are men.
Lights out, ladies and gentlemen.
Don’t bother turning on your taps, either. Or flushing your toilets. 95.5% of water and liquid waste treatment plant and system operators are men.
Think you might be able to get out-of-town for the one day the men don’t show up?
Think again.
Planes are out.
95.9% of aircraft pilots and flight engineers are men. If you happen to find a plane with a female pilot, don’t get too excited. 98.4% of aircraft mechanics and service technicians are men. You can, however, be assured of your comfort as you sit on a pilotless aircraft that has no mechanic for pre-flight clearance, because 77.6% of flight attendants are female.
Should you be lucky enough to find a female pilot and a female technician to clear you for take-off, you still have some praying to do. Statistically, 0% of air traffic controllers and airfield operations specialists are women.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
Of course, that doesn’t mean there are ZERO ladies working in air traffic control. There just aren’t enough to constitute even 1% of the workforce.
Trains, of course, are also out.
100% of locomotive engineers and operators are men, as are 100% of the workers who operate railroad brakes, signals and switches. 94.4% of railway yardmasters are men, but if you chance upon a female yardmaster, it won’t help you much. She can’t operate the trains.
You might have better luck with bus drivers, almost half of whom are women.
But the streets are likely to be chaos. And there won’t be anyone on hand to help you navigate that.
87.4% of police and sheriff’s patrol officers are men. 96.6% of firefighters are men. 68.8% of Emergency Medical Technicians and Paramedics are men, so if it all goes tits up and you get hurt, there’s a small chance you might make it to a hospital.
I hope you don’t get too badly hurt, though. 65.7% of all surgeons are men.
Maybe you should just work from home? In the dark, mind you. With no running water.
Uh-oh. Looks like that might be a problem, too.
For all computer and mathematical occupations combined, 74.4% of the workforce is male. Computer network architects, who design and implement all our computer based communications systems are 91.9% men. And 94.2% of radio and telecommunications equipment installers and repair technicians are men.
Looks like that plan is fucked.
Hope it doesn’t get too hot, or too cold the day men don’t show up for work. Even if you had power, which you don’t, you would be hard-pressed to get anyone in to take a look at your wonky air-conditioner or furnace.
98.4% of heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers are men.
Oh well. Guess you’ll have to mosey on down to the local café, which has no power either, but what’s logic and consequence anyways? Be careful when you step over all that accumulating garbage! Remember that most EMTs are men, and they’ve taken the day off. Don’t want to get hurt now.
Most garbage collectors are men, too – 93.4%, to be exact.
You’ll need to stop at the ATM first, for a little cash injection.
Oops. Don’t bother.
The machine hasn’t been filled with money today. 81.5% of security guards and gaming surveillance officers are men. It’s unlikely the banks would be functioning anyways, with no men at work. 72.1% of all securities, commodities and financial services sales agents are men. 72.6% of the nation’s CEOs would be taking the day off, along with 70.9% of all the general and operations managers.
Don’t count on getting a weather report today. Statistically, 0% of the nation’s atmospheric and space scientists are women.
Actually, don’t plan on acquiring pretty much anything today. The workers in the entire production, transportation and material moving occupations are 78.2% men. Not only will no goods be moving on the day men go on strike, they won’t be made, period. 82.4% of all the industrial production managers are men.
Nothing will be built or extracted from the earth in terms of raw materials. 97.5% of that workforce is male.
Nothing will be installed, maintained or repaired. 96.8% of that workforce is male.
If men took a collective day off, we would instantly be without power, without the means to communicate, without protection, without water, without trucks bringing us the food and products we take for granted, because men are the ones who provide all those things.
Where in our culture do we EVER see that acknowledged? If women took the day off, with the sole exception of NURSES, nothing would happen. No one would die. The world would continue to function. The hair salons and primary schools and retail clothing stores would close, and the male management structure would have to find some way to answer their own phones for a day, but essentially, nothing would happen.
You will often hear feminists barking on about male privilege, usually in a well-lit room, comfortably warm, with her iPhone close at hand, buzzing with updates from her latest #mensuck Twitter feed, with zero awareness that every single one of those luxuries is provided by men.
Male privilege is the idea that men have unearned social, economic, and political advantages or rights that are granted to them solely on the basis of their sex, and which are usually denied to women. – from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_privilege
Unearned.
UNEARNED?!?
The Department of Labor says otherwise, bitch. It is women who have failed to earn their privileges. We live in a world powered and created and maintained by men, and yet feminists have created a whole philosophy and ideology that insists women and men are equal.
We are not equal.
We do not need to be equal.
We can’t be equal.
What we can be is grateful.
And we can pray men never, ever take a day off.
Lots of love,
JB
