As anyone not hiding under a rock should know, the coronavirus is carving its way through human populations and it is taking the lives of men in higher numbers than women. The coffins of men are lined up in rows before the furnaces, but little attention is paid to the true victims of that massacre – the women who watch on while grieving in silence.
Who will hear their voices?
This clearly is a grave situation for bevagina’d humans – the best humans – who are toiling on the front lines as the only ones truly capable of dispensing emotional labor, medical assistance to the elderly, and childcare — while men stand back and gaze in wonder at women’s special skills and ‘ways of knowing’ during a peak emotional time.
As the recent headline reminds us, ‘Women more stressed, burdened by coronavirus than men, poll finds. 5 ways to help change that.’
Thank goodness someone is trying to address women’s grievances, along with the journalists already addressing same with thousands of moving articles underlining the horrific fact that women are most affected by, well, literally anything and everything. The article lists women’s noble deeds, each deserving of serious chivalric response from the masses of unwashed Don Quixotes.
As the article says, women are the “most affected” by stress at this time, not men, and this prompts women to take more burdensome precautions than males. Moreover, unlike the case of men who feel nothing (or very little, lets be honest), such womanly stress makes women worry all the more. The article tells:
Women are worried that they or someone in their family will get sick from the new novel coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19. They worry more about losing income and worry more about putting themselves at risk because they can’t afford to stay home, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a non-profit organization focused on national health issues.
The bombshell revelation of women’s hidden stress was unearthed by a KFF’s ‘self-reporting’ poll for over 1,200 adults ages 18 and older in the U.S. that found women worry more than men which, for any thinking, compassionate person, indicates that most emotional support, resources, money and other compensations should be directed overwhelmingly to women.
While waiting for the necessary cash bonuses and other supports from governments, there are many things we as a society – and especially men – can do to alleviate women’s worries. The article makes some preliminary suggestions, starting with how women can give themselves more self-love:
1. Give yourself five minutes to write down everything that is worrying you at the moment, Ali said. Next, look at your worries and see if you can pull from each one something that is in your control, something that you can manage.
Then, acknowledge in each worry the things you cannot do anything about, i.e., not being able to control when schools will reopen or whether someone at the grocery store may have coronavirus.”
2. Practice self-love in the form of deep breathing and mindfulness and gratitude practices.
“These are things that don’t take a lot of time and cost us nothing and even five minutes is better than not doing anything at all,” Ali said. “Find those little times throughout the day to find your center so you can better help yourself therefore your partner and your children.”
3. Find community in this time that you may be physically alone.
“It’s really important to recognize that social distancing is not social isolation,” Ali said. “Even if you have individuals in your home with you, it could be helpful to reach out to siblings and friends and colleagues and make a connection.”
4. Start where you are now and realize there is no one way to handle a pandemic, Rodsky said.
“Understand that your home is going to look different than other homes and it doesn’t have to look like others’ homes,” she said.
Importantly men, most of whom are spending most of their time in the shadows, and on the sidelines like voyeurs, are asked to step up to the plate and start supporting the pandemic’s frontline worker sex:
5. Spend 20 minutes every night debriefing about how everything is going.
“Sit down with your partner and say, “How are we doing? How’s it going with us? How are we doing with homeschooling? Who’s doing laundry tomorrow?'” she said. “Ask open-ended questions.”
Eve Rodsky, author of the book Fair Play, shows couples how to build a stronger marriage through sharing the workload at home. Eve Rodsky, author of the book Fair Play, shows couples how to build a stronger marriage through sharing the workload at home.
Rodsky said asking open-ended questions and starting by explaining why something is important to you instead of just why something has to get done.
“If you can focus on why it’s important to you in your nightly check-in, it’s the most important communication tool in a crisis,” she said, noting that couples also need to agree that “all time is created equal,” i.e., we all only have 24 hours in a day.
If you don’t have a partner, the nightly check-in is still a valuable tool to help you see what’s going well, what’s causing stress and what you can control versus letting go of.
Solid advice for men who are sitting around twiddling their thumbs clueless about how to help; in short, men are called to be emotional support persons who can sit patiently and listen to women talk about their feelings.
Its the least they can do.
While advice for women to focus more on themselves is increasingly urgent, the authors of the article, and indeed most mainstream press, have overlooked perhaps the most devastating price women will pay as a result of this pandemic: the reduction of men in the available dating pool.
In this, society draws a great big fat blank, and we all too quickly forget Hillary Clinton’s sage advice that women are the primary victims of war – or in this case, pandemics.
Both collectively and individually, we need to pause and spare a thought for Becky who works in a lowly job at the local sandwich shop and who yearns for a husband who will provide the financial backbone of her dream for a better life. Or think of lonely Chloe, a feminist who works at the United Nations UNESCO department and who desires a man to support her in her endless emotional labors. These women, and millions more just like them are poised to find that the dating game will become more difficult as the numbers of available men are thinned by death — not to mention the competition between women for the remaining men is going to become far more catty and vicious.
Does anybody care that Becky will now have to face vicious relational aggression when simply seeking a date, or that Chloe will be more lonely than ever?
I doubt it. Such is the life of woman.
It seems that women have never mattered, and society will probably turn its back on women at the very moment Tinder begins to implode with infighting and the inevitable misuse of the ‘report button’ aimed at deplatforming competitor-women’s dating profiles. The lack of sympathy for this potential situation is truly gut wrenching.
I live in hope that the next series of headlines to appear in mainstream media will be concerned with how Becky is going to fight the impending dating wars. Aside from that, its on us gents… or at least on those of us who are not yet deceased. We might begin by giving women more of whatever it is they are demanding, or alternatively, and perhaps more wisely, we could isolate our covid19-ridden bodies in the hope we can draw our final breaths in peace — away from the incessant ring of feminist whining.
