Does Anyone Believe There’s Work Women Cannot Do?
Neo-feminism insists on picking arguments where none exist to “prove” things not in contest
Neo-feminism has moved well beyond self-parody into one fantastically embarrassing public display of insecurity.
A perfect example this faux-feminism’s incarnation? “12 Stunning Photos That Prove There’s No Such Thing As ‘Men’s Work’” published by the HuffPo.
Pictures feature women as butchers, firefighters, farmers, and carpenters. While the photos are beautifully shot, do they really prove anything?
Does anyone believe there’s work women cannot do?
Combat fighting aside (which the pictorial post doesn’t address), are there large swaths of our population who still believe that them there’s work for the menfolk?
Perhaps this was a common conception thirty-plus years ago, but not anymore. No longer are there clear delineations in gender roles — at least not in American society.
I was raised in a perfectly traditional household — Dad worked and Mom stayed home with us. Mom was THE poster-child for traditional homemaker (and damn good at it, too). On weekends Dad took care of the yard, cussed at football games, and played with us kids. Even in our Leave it to Beaver-esque microcosm, I grew up mowing yards, hauling firewood, picking weeds, cleaning toilets, baking cookies, off-roading, and shooting deer (for food, not sport). There were no jobs allocated to men in our family in which women were unable to participate. The expectation was that everyone pull their weight wherever that was needed.
Of course that’s just my experience, but I have never been told I could not do something because I was a woman. Not once. Nor do I know any other woman who has been told such a thing.
There are jobs women typically choose not to do, but choice and ability are two very different issues.
Neo-feminism insists on picking arguments where none exist to “prove” things not in contest. And it’s supposed to be revolutionary. Or something.
Can we stop with the constant contests?
This is the most annoying bit — perpetuating the immature idea that there’s an ongoing contest to “prove” one’s worth or capabilities to anyone other than one’s own self. These are things we should all be learning as we age.
If your value is tied to the fact that you’re a woman in a traditionally male job, then the focus is directed to gender, not what you’re able to accomplish in whatever role you’ve chosen. Ultimately, what’s meant to dispel gender ideals ends up detracting from individual accomplishment.
Gender is not an accomplishment.
This is not the way to normalize non-traditional gender roles
There’s no need to normalize what’s already commonplace, but supposing women farmers were unheard of; the way to normalize that fact is not to treat it as special, but to act as though it’s perfectly normal.
Once upon a time, women were viewed as the lesser sex — though even that statement is reductionist. But women were prohibited the luxury of following their dreams of pig farming. That time has since passed thanks to the dedication of actual feminists.
Neo-feminism’s reliance on the obsolete notion that women are the repressed sex in society is precisely why the movement is not taken seriously by anyone with functioning logic or critical thinking skills. There is scarcely a facet of modern society where women do not receive preferential treatment or deference to their male counterparts.
You’re a woman who works as a butcher. Yay. Here’s a trophy. I’m not impressed by this fact alone, I only care whether you’re a good butcher, particularly if I’m buying cuts from your meat market.
Men and women are different. Each bring different strengths and weaknesses that complement one another. This is so basic, it’s embarrassing that such a simple fact needs constant repetition.
My dream is that my daughters will grow up to find a world less worried about the sex of an individual and more interested in what that person has contributed.
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Is there any job a woman can’t do .. The better question is are there some jobs that men and women do better because of being a man or a woman … That answer is … Yes
And then there are the jobs that women would rather not do. Check out all the highest risk jobs. Do women make up even 1% of those employed in these jobs?
What we really have is that there are some jobs few women choose to do. I’ve often urged women who kept thinking they had no skills beyond minimum wage to get their commercial driver’s licenses, which would enable them to get jobs around twice minimum wage, driving dump trucks, easily but few would think outside the box.
The greatest impediment to people succeeding is thinking that they cannot. You have to actually try to succeed.
Yes. That same woman should strive to buying her own dump truck. There are so many jobs out there that require a DBE or WBE component that the paving companies look to their trucks as a way to meet the requirement.
NFL Linebacker. NBA center
Women can cut food!?! OMFG! Who knew? LOL Morons.
You can not inseminate your wife.
There is a big difference between cannot and will not or prefer not to do that’s lost on these feminists. But they simply look at numbers and infer “cannot”.
“…firefighters…”
Only because the strength requirements were watered down in the name of “diversity and equality”: Not strong enough to do “the fireman’s carry”? Eliminate that requirement and say that either the men on the team can do it or two women can carry the victim. Not strong enough to haul the heavy hoses? Ditto. Not strong enough to carry the full gear plus breathing apparatus? Ditto.
There was a shocking report some years ago about the dilution of such requirements in the Navy: The traditional method of transporting casualties during battle is one sailor at each end of a litter–along narrow passageways, up and down companionways, etc. But two female recruits were usually were unable to do this, so the requirement was relaxed in the name of the dual needs for diversity and defeat in wartime.
Agreed. I am a tall woman. I want the firefighters who respond to my house fire, if it ever happens, to be able to haul me out — or to carry out my husband. It’s simply nonsense to pretend that there are not some jobs that require physical strength the large majority of women do not have.
And there are lots of jobs in the military that women can do–as was shown back in WWII. The first priority of the military must be to win wars, not win diversity medals.
Indeed. And in today’s military. The Air Force and Navy have found that women tend to be slightly better fighter pilots than men.
The USS Cole was almost lost because the female sailors could not carry out some of the damage control tasks, and the men who had to step in were burning out due to lack of relief.
Male bathing-suit model.
The beginning position is that men and women are equal and complementary. The longer answer is that there is an implicit or explicit reconciliation of moral, natural, and personal imperatives. While there are natural biases that favor one sex over the other in certain roles, those incidental differences are few and far between. That said, class diversity schemes are a reconstitution of institutional racism, sexism, etc.
Well, yes, outside of ground combat there are jobs men can do that women can’t.
http://nypost.com/2014/12/11/fdny-drops-physical-test-requirement-amid-low-female-hiring-rate/
http://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter-despite-failing-crucial-fitness-test/
My uncle was a battalion chief in a major west coast city fire department. Men, when they were safely away from hostile monitors such as gathered around my Uncle’s kitchen table, derisively called females in their departments “firewatchers,” not “firefighters.” Because they were basically useless, and they knew they couldn’t haul all the gear up ten flights of stairs, and the men knew it, so would ride along to the fire and they’d be given busy work to keep them out of the way.
After Tail Hook women were integrated into the crews of combat ships. But, before the Navy got smart and stopped collecting the kind of data that upset women in Congress, we knew that over 90% of the female recruits couldn’t handle the damage control equipment. This is very similar to the situation in firefighting. To be useful, tools such as dewatering/firefighting pumps, generators, etc., have to be a certain size to have the capacity to do the job. You can make such things smaller and lighter, but if you’ve ever used too small and light an air compressor you know it simply can’t power your tool to complete the job. That is deadly in a damage control situation. And again, over 90% of the women back in the ’90s couldn’t deal with the equipment. I’m not going to try to convince anybody, especially anybody who was infantry let alone special forces, that the Navy is terribly physically intense. But it takes a certain amount of muscle and stamina to haul the kind of equipment up and down vertical ladders and then use it when you get to where you need to be. Wearing all the PPE.
You can go through your entire career and never have to do it for real. It is not confidence-inspiring, though, to know that 90% of women couldn’t do it in training. If you need to do it in real life it’s going to demand more than you could ever have been trained to give from the first moment you have to deal with it, and far longer than any training evolution ever demanded of you.
“AMERICA’S FIRST CLASH WITH IRAN
The Tanker War, 1987–88
…chapter 1
The Stark Disaster
…Two of the deadly 15-foot long Exocet missiles, each tipped with a 300-pound warhead, were now streaking toward the Stark. Their blue rocket exhausts reflected off the waters of the Gulf as they bobbed up and down slightly, maintaining a sea-skimming altitude about 10 feet above the surface. The frigate’s low alert status had not changed and off-duty crewmen, some in the last moments of their lives, remained settled in their bunks.
…The Exocet’s warhead may not have exploded, but the missile easily sliced though the thin, unarmored hull of the Stark. Propelled by its still burning rocket motor, it tore its way deep into the body of the ship, ripping its way through the portside fire main, the ship control berthing area, the barbershop, the mail room and the Chief Petty Officer’s quarters. The missile started to break up as it careened through the ship,…
…Tragically, the still burning rocket motor came to a stop in a heavily occupied crew berthing area. Because the Exocet had been launched well short of its maximum range, it was still carrying a large quantity of solid rocket fuel when it hit.
A few seconds before, the rocket motor had been powering the
1,500-pound Exocet over the Gulf at 550 mph. Now, fueled by 300
pounds of remaining propellant, it was spewing an intense jet of flame like a gigantic blowtorch inside the relatively small confines of the berthing compartment. What it was like for the men trapped in there is unimaginable. Sailors screamed as they were incinerated in their bunks.
…the second Exocet hit about 20 to 30 seconds after the first. The warhead on this one did explode. From the time the Iraqi aircraft had been detected by the Stark’s radar to the time the second missile hit, the Stark had been plowing through the Gulf on a steady course and speed, seemingly oblivious to what was happening. The second Exocet hit about eight feet forward of the first, penetrating only about three feet into the ship before its warhead detonated.
Having traveled a shorter distance, the second missile had even more fuel onboard than the first. The exploding warhead ravaged an area with a radius of about 30 feet into the ship. Fortunately for the Stark, the quick warhead detonation also blew a large hole in the ship’s hull, venting some of its blast energy to the outside. Still, the explosive combustion
of the exploding warhead, and propellant shed by the first missile, released a near instantaneous wave of heat energy.
…Most of the men lost in the attack perished in the berthing area, where the burning rocket motor came to rest. They were either burned to death or were suffocated.
…The explosion severed the leg of Seaman Mark Robert Caouette, from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He also had shrapnel wounds and was severely burned. Nevertheless, he refused to let his crewmates pull him away from the burning area. Instead, he somehow dragged himself around, desperately shutting off valves to the fire main, which had been
ruptured by the initial missile impact. Unless that line could be shut down, there would be inadequate water pressure to fight the raging fires. Stark officer Lieutenant William A. Conklin later recalled, “Caouette knew he was going to die, that’s what he said to people who passed by him.”8 Mark Caouette’s charred body was later found slumped over one of the valves…”
I think if you google the title you can still download the pdf file from Casemate publishing, if you’re interested. This was just to set the stage so I could highlight my concerns about integrating women into the crews of combat ships. I said damage control was similar to firefighting, but there are critical differences. For one thing, if a building afire is too dangerous to enter, terrestrial fire fighters can and do choose to not go in, let nature run it’s course, and prevent damage to surrounding structures. If it’s your ship and you’re in the middle of shark infested waters, and they are always shark infested because the sharks f***ing know, you really have no choice in the matter. And another is if you have damage you need to control, you’ve already lost a certain number of the crew. These are going to include a number of the firefighters and damage controlmen (thank God I’m retired as it’s a sin to have the word man or men in job titles thanks to Obama) you were hoping to to be able to count on. A lot of the others you’re going to need have been damaged. You still need them to work, and they’ll be willing to work, because they don’t want to go swimming with the sharks while they’re leaking blood.
Sort of a humorous aside, but the skipper of the OHP frigate Samual B. Roberts was mystified by how one pretty much sub-standard petty officer kept a generator running for days on end, a key component of their damage control efforts after the Sammy B. hit a mine and basically broke her back. The Petty Officer hadn’t been to the school for maintaining that particular piece of gear, and I don’t know what was state of the art then as it was slightly before my time. And, as I’ve said, this guy had only made himself famous by appearing fairly regularly at Captain’s Mast for administrative punishment.
It turns out he couldn’t swim. And he had seen all the sharks and sea snakes in the Gulf, and when Sammy B. hit that mine come hell or high water that generator was going to keep running no matter how steep the learning curve.
But back to the issue of women. What are the odds going to be that the one out of ten women I have aboard who could handle the damage control equipment in training are still alive? And if they’re still alive, are they damaged to the extent that they can no longer do what they could do when they were completely healthy?
Oh, and then there’s the configuring the ships so we have separate male and female berthing. Which is now apparently wasted because I’ve seen the Navy’s new transgender instructions and now everyone can sleep, shower, or take a dump at 4:00am wherever they like.
All in all it just wasn’t worth it. I think the relevant question is, if there are jobs that women can’t do and vice versa, does that mean men are better than women? Hell no.
My hunting partner’s granddaughter in law would beat those feminists to a pulp. She’s a tiny little lady, but she shot, dragged, skinned and butchered her own deer.
She doesn’t need whiny little witches shedding tears over her.
There are jobs that I can’t do as a man that other men can. Sharing a sex with those that can do it doesn’t make us have some kind of mythical chauvinistic high five between complete strangers.
I count 1.7 billion people who believe there’s work women can’t do.
Huge differences between “can’t”, “won’t”, and “shouldn’t”. Before women entered the workforce en masse, a man with a high school education and specialized training could support a family on just his pay. Think carpenter, auto mechanic, police officer as examples. Now it takes both parents working a such jobs, think nurse, teacher, police, or fire fighter, to support a suburban middle class family. What is more important, that women are enpowered, or families thrive?
Back in the 1970’s women entering veterinary school were relatively rare. I knew some who did, who wanted to specialize in “personal companion animals.” O. K., pets are important. But we need big brawny men to be vets, to get out of bed at 2 in the morning, in the middle of blizzard, to stick their arm up to their armpit in the backside of some heifer who is having a breach delivery of her first calf. Most women aren’t interested and couldn’t do it if they wanted to.
As “And then there are the jobs that women would rather not do.” mentioned, women avoid dirty, dangerous work. Work place fatalities are still about 95% male. Women usually prefer men as bosses, over other women, more than men prefer male bosses. I have seen studies that elevating testosterone levels makes study participants more legalistic, and less likely to make decisions based on emotions and feelings. Are feelings what is fueling the need for safe spaces?
Feminism failed by putting men and women in competition. There are things men do better than women because they are men. But there are things they do worse, because they are men. We should celebrate the great things that each brings to the table, and not try to be what we are not.
Disclaimer. I love women. I love them collectively. I love them individually.
I think we have cathedrals because of men, and homes because of women. We desperately need cathedrals and we desperately need homes.
This Job
https://m.youtube.com/watch?ebc=ANyPxKqtLtk7fADKlJshoMwX28LpGL2WgKHNjwO7NwJttewICSZG6FTVpmJbQV8C_FkJ2QmQgQy9JYsjgfwNc6HnqgzCl3EAdA&v=yCYZZPwJr_c
The linked video is repairman on a broadcast/cellular transmission tower. It involves working 1700 feet in the air without a safety harness and carrying a hundred pounds of gear up the ladder to the top.
Also, cannot or will not? Because there are tons and tons of aid/scoloraships/grants/affirmative action in the HVAC industry (heating and air conditioning), and women just will not take those jobs, because the job is too dirty.
This thread is an important topic that merits continuing attention. The left’s nagging delusion about women’s capabilities needs to be relentlessly rooted out.
As a female military vet, I promise you there was plenty I couldn’t do. As a homeowner, there’s plenty I can’t do. And more…. But it’s early. On another day, in another thread….
That was really an excellent piece, Kemberlee. I especially liked your “Neo-feminism insists on picking arguments where none exist to “prove” things not in contest. And it’s supposed to be revolutionary. Or something.” and “Gender is not an accomplishment”.
Men and women are designed differently because each one has been created to perform different roles. Where women are weak, men are strong and where men are weak, women are strong. When men and women come together and utilize their strengths to complement their partner’s weaknesses, the result is a powerful partnership. This is a win-win situation.
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While there are some men and some women that can perform well in roles typically occupied by the opposite sex, the majority do not perform well. The question we now face is whether we want a competition where there is a loser for every winner or whether we want a partnership where everyone wins or loses together (and the odds of winning are far greater)?
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What this argument boils down to is simply envy. Some women have an axe to grind and feel the need to prove themselves to be equal to that of a man. While this envy might occasionally lead to a successful case of a woman performing well in a man’s job and vice versa, this attempt at equality is not something that should be legislated into reality for all by the government. After all, government regulations cannot change a person’s biology or physiology by edict.
“Men and women are designed differently because each one has been created to perform different roles.” Even the brains are different.
Once upon a time the question was “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to come in out of the rain?” Moms are important because they teach stuff like that, like brushing your teeth before going to school, and changing your underwear daily. Dad’s don’t teach that stuff. They do teach stuff like “The tire is flat and needs to be changed now. If the car sits on it overnight it is ruined. Change it now and we can fix the tire tomorrow. Yes is is raining. Put on a hat and a coat and get your sorry self out there and change the tire.” Or, “Yes, there is a blizzard. But you signed up to deliver the paper. Go deliver the paper.” They teach their sons to pay their debts, abhor liars, live honestly, and never hit anybody who doesn’t have it coming to them.
“You make me whole.” is a line every spouse could say to their beloved.
I work in the male dominated industry of road building. My company puts the lines on the road that you drive between. This is an excellent job for a woman. You only have to be able to lift 50 pounds and handle the long hot days. You don’t work in the rain or when it’s too cold. It pays well and you get the winters off. I am the only woman at my company and I am not in the field. I run the office. We started our business March 2016. I have worked in the field when I was younger. I enjoyed it. We would hire women if they applied. There are plenty of women at other companies that do this and they strive. It can be rewarding for anyone who doesn’t want an office job or likes daily change. It can be a career for anyone.
Get serious. Quite with the bending of the rules and accommodations for our sweethearts and you will discover lot’s of things they cannot do.
Why do they never ask if there are any jobs that men cannot do?
What jobs are out there being performed by women that cannot be performed by men?
Childbearing for one.
I do.
And, I also believe there is a difference between boys and girls.
And I believe there are some things that boys just can’t do as well.
Further, I believe the U.S. Government was behind “Burn the Bra, and all that garbage, so they could double the work-force, double the tax base, and cut the wages in half.
And the Women bit it off, hook, line and sinker.
Nowadays, it takes Two Workers to support a household.
So, Wemon should never have been enabled to vote…
Because they are too dumb to think.
This ain’t checkers.
94% of all on-the-job fatalities are men. Square that with “workplace equality.”
I own a remediation business. We remediate mold and fire damage. This involves a lot of work in 2 foot high crawlspaces full of spiders and 140 F, cramped attics. It also involves a lot of demolition, ripping out drywall, chopping out 2x4s, and hauling the stuff out to the dumpster.
I hire a lot of women because, with their smaller frames, they fit in crawlspaces and attics better. And they clean better than most men. I know, sexist, but it works. But I have to swap in the burly guts on the demo work, because of their greater physical strength.
Yes, I have men that can clean, and skinny guys to stick in attics, and girls that cah swing a sledge, but the M/F division of labor makes a good first approximation. I suppose that makes me an Enemy of Humanity.
“Does Anyone Believe There’s Work Women Cannot Do?”
Yes. Motherhood.