It’s the economy, stupid.
So says Rachel Burger, who believes that the current economy is to blame for the demise of masculinity, not those darned feminists:
The reality is that the economy–that men themselves created–is far more to blame for the sorry state of American men. The Internet Age, along with global trade and the mass outsourcing of low-skill labor has brought forth in the West a people-based and knowledge-based economy which emphasizes social intelligence. Young women are now outpacing men across the board, from education to employment, and men should take a hint. If men want to pursue their roles as providers and achievers, they’re going to have to woman up.
It’s not the girls’ fault. “After all, it was men who invented the Internet, who created and sold mass-produced computers, who shipped jobs overseas and who even fashioned social media.” Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg.
Burger’s is a thinly veiled response to Camille Paglia’s praise of the “modern economy as a male epic” published last month in Time. Unlike Paglia, Burger comes to the table lacking an understanding of the relationship between economy and gender. With a millennial’s narrow perspective on American history, Burger manages great insight into the post-dot-com world of social intelligence-based tech companies while completely skipping over the debacle of NAFTA with the grossly prejudicial term “low-skill labor.”
In that primordial decade known as the ’90s, America’s manual labor industry was eviscerated by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Seventeen years after the agreement was signed, studies showed a loss of 682,900 American jobs, 60% of which were lost in the manufacturing industry. That doesn’t include the jobs that would be necessary without the imports from NAFTA — a whopping 1.47 million. Those jobs, and the financial boost that would’ve come with them, sure would’ve come in handy in 2008 when, as a result of the recession, the U.S. lost 2.6 million jobs. Mexico, the nation that continues to profit from NAFTA, does not defame nor downplay the benefits of so-called “low-skill labor.”
Instead of focusing on these facts and their impact on the growth of her self-titled “social intelligence-based economy,” Burger’s solution is to embrace the feminist myth that men need to divorce themselves from their masculinity…in order to fulfill their masculine urges:
Men must become more like women if they want to be able to continue fulfilling their more masculine roles as earners and providers.
It is a response that plays directly into Paglia’s assertion that,
Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.
“The new economy is a woman’s economy, and inventions created by men, not feminists, are to blame for slowing male participation,” Burger concludes, seemingly without realizing that the economy she’d spent an entire article attributing to men had suddenly come under the ownership of women.
Burger’s embrace of typical academic feminist theory is boring and her assessment of the economy bland, which makes one wonder how her commentary was found in the pages of the financially oriented Forbes. How could men possibly be responsible for creating an economy they supposedly have no emotional intelligence to understand, let alone function within? It is the kind of circular reasoning best left to the likes of those who inspired That Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party. You know, the kind of millennial feminist chick that confuses men and inspires them and their masculinity to run for the hills.
Those darn feminists.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member