Are "Manly Jobs" a Problem?

Some jobs are men’s jobs. Apparently, feminists find this offensive. They have long been militating against men’s jobs, and thus against male identity. As Susan Chira argues in The New York Times, certain jobs define men as men. But why, pray tell, do we think that there is something wrong with that? Surely, feminists do. They take it as an article of faith. Their sisters have paid a heavy price for their ideological blindness.

Under the feminist aegis our society has brought more and more women into male dominant jobs. It did not matter whether they could meet the physical standards, as happened in the military, or whether they would undermine the masculine ethos. We were told that we had to have gender parity and we did not much think about how the presence of women would influence male behavior. If men behaved badly we could always denounce them as criminals and destroy their lives.

Chira cites a mountain of learned studies explaining how men should learn new skills from their new female coworkers. They should learn to be open about their feelings and to work to develop their skill at empathy and caring. Thus, a firefighter who is not strong enough to carry a victim out of a burning building can compensate for her failure by feeling the pain of the victim she cannot help. After all, isn't the feminization of male jobs the reason why men do not want women in the mix.

When men are forced to accept underqualified women in jobs that have traditionally been typed masculine, they feel diminished. The more women are in a profession the less the job will make a man feel like a man. Feminists don't care about this. They think it's a social construction. They are grievously wrong. 

If there are too many women. at a certain tipping point the job or profession will become feminized. Men will flee it. The reason, simply enough, is that women find men who are, for example, nurses, to be less desirable mates. So, men who want their jobs to continue to be male dominant have a reason.

Feminists who are happily imposing this new regime do not care about men. They hold men in contempt and believe that if men are stupid enough to want to work with other men—on the battlefield, for example—they need to be beaten down by an invasion of females. The fact that these same women are likely also to be mothers, and thus, are cued to care for helpless infants and small children does not seem to matter to our feminist overladies. If women are more attuned to the needs of small children they might be less adept at competing in a male dominant arena. Apparently, women who are not mothers and who are not feminine are treated better than other women in these workplaces.

As seems to be clear by now, when the presence of women undermines male bonding and solidarity the men in question respond by abusing and harassing women. If these men cannot affirm their masculinity be belonging to a male dominant social group they feel compelled to do so by abusing women, by mistreating them.

Those are the options. There are only two. Either men have the chance to function professionally in a world that defines them as men or they will assert their manliness by abusing women. Feminists do not understand this. They do not understand men. They want men to be more like women. They believe that more feminine men will be nicer and gentler. And they do not understand how business functions. They want to impose their ideology on business, and do not care about what happens to the women they are sacrificing to their delirium or what happens to the business itself. They want more women in the military; they want more women in the combat infantry; they do not know how to win wars and do not care about winning wars. Its’s all about diversity. Diversity uber alles.

One understands that feminists complain all the time about the fact that no man can ever really understand a woman. Would it not follow logically that no woman can ever really understand a man? Or better, since women do not understand masculinity they are constantly trying to fix it, as though there is something wrong with it. Do you know what it means to "fix" an animal... for example? They believe there is something wrong with men because men do not fulfill the predicates their ideology lays down.

Why are these men so hostile toward women? In part, they believe that the women who are insisting that there is no difference between men and women are treating them with contempt and do not understanding what it means to be a man. In another part, they are competing against these women and understand, as most competitors do, that if you want to out-compete someone you should attack his weak point, his Achilles heel. In the case of women, the way to show them that they are not wanted and that they are not accepted is to take aim at their sexuality. It is not hostile toward women. It affirms the value of the masculine ethos.

The truth is that men do not want more women in traditionally male jobs. The other truth is, feminists like Chira do not care. They want to force men to do things that they do not want to do because they want the workplace to resemble a feminist paradise. Like Sweden. They do not care whether things work as well or whether the company succeeds as easily. They do not care if the men need to cover for the deficiencies women bring to the job. And they do not care if the camaraderie, the bantering exchanges between men must be self-censored in order not to offend any woman’s delicate feminine sensibility... or get you brought up on charges for being a sexual harasser.

Now with the #MeToo movement, women are exercising more and more power. They are fighting back against the wave of sexual harassment by punishing men, by treating them with even more contempt.

If the current wave of sexual harassment was caused by women treating men with contempt, with women telling men how to run their companies and their armies, how will more of the same do anything more than to make the problem worse?

Now, feminists are exercising their so-called power by bringing down reprobate males. Some of them deserve it; some don’t. And yet, destroying men does not make you a builder. It does not make anyone qualified to do a man’s job. Destroying what others have built does not make you powerful. If you want to be powerful and show you competence build the building, fight and win the war, rush up the ladder to save the victims of a fire. But, don’t ever imagine that you are more powerful because you can destroy other people… even if justice demands it.

The men who remain behind, the men who see their bosses and their managers, the executives who built their companies, removed from office, publicly shamed, their lives destroyed are not going to come away with warm, fuzzing feelings toward the power of women.

They are going to feel empathy with the disgraced men and will likely want to retaliate. In a better world they would not. In a better world, they would simply fold their hands and rush off to learn how to be more sensitive. But, as we all know, when women encounter weak and ineffectual men outside of the workplace they turn away in disgust.

Susan Chira notwithstanding, manly jobs are not the problem. The feminist reaction against them is.