If men stopped working…the world would continue on.
If women stopped working, then things would get ugly.
What?
there has been an instance where this happened. it was 1975 and icelandic women decided not to work for one day.
working as in cooking, cleaning, taking care of the children, doing chores and so on, not only “not showing up to your workplace”. women did nothing that day, except showing up in reykjavik and protesting for gender equality, equal pay and equal representation in parliament, you know, cool stuff.
you know what happened? havoc. men were left with food to cook and children they never took care of to pick up from kindergarden and entertain for the day. they went en masse to the food shops buying sausages because they could cook nothing else, they had to bond with children they never spent more than a couple hours a day with. they struggled combining their work day and the domestic tasks they had to sort out. and this just for one day.
iceland in 1975 stopped working and things indeed got ugly. so ugly that women in the following decades became woke AF and soon it happened that women became president, took half of the seats in parliament and achieved one of the best living environments in the world.
is your astonishment solved now?
We already know what happens to countries when the majority of the male workforce is removed. It is called “war.”
If you want to read Highly Documented and Very Historical accounts of how countries function without internal male labor, you can start by diving in to World War 1 and World War 2! (I’m just gonna talk about the Allied forces because my English is best
and I know the most about them, but the Axis powers had similar
dynamics!)
See, when the warring civilizations threw every able-bodied man they could at war fronts all over the planet, this left enormous labor vacuums. Not only did the countries have to function without male labor, but they also had to funnel vast amounts of food, clothing, ammunition and weapons to the men in combat. By WW2, women were needed in every possible role that didn’t include active combat.
If you send millions of men to combat, then the resulting millions of empty, necessary, “male” jobs must be done by women. That’s just how it works.
This is an British WW1 poster from 1917. It says it succinctly – every woman who takes a “male” job in the military, frees up that man for active combat.
One thing that you can’t get enough of in war is bullets! With men spending bullets but not making them, the women need to do it. These WW1 posters from around 1918 are pretty cool – the woman “doing her bit” has shades of Art Nouveau, I think.
Here’s an American WW1 poster in which the women are dressed as mechanics, train drivers, military support, manufacturers, farmers and nurses. I like the cool Victorian shoes and the baggy trousers. Isn’t it funny to think that this happened between the Victorians and the flappers?
In WW1, you couldn’t even afford to spare able-bodied men to drive ambulances in warzones. Ambulance drivers on the Front were largely women. They picked up the wounded and dying men and took them to field hospitals staffed largely by women.
By WW2, the women of the Allied nations were SO ON TOP OF THIS.
Here is a Canadian lady from the 1940s. Women in Air Force support were vital – men were the fighter pilots, women were transport pilots – as well as doing the support roles like aircraft maintenance and preparation, parachute packing, communications and intelligence, managing the radar, plotting the weather, and, of course, doing the catering. The language on this poster shows that the woman does all of this necessary work to get the fighter pilots in the air. Every non-combat military job that a woman took meant one more fighter pilot and soldier in active combat.
Back at home, people functioned fairly well without men in WW2. Everyone’s seen this American WW2 poster, you know she’s encouraging women to get into the factories and make All The Stuff!
HEY WE STILL NEED LOTS OF FOOD TO EAT AND THERE ARE NO MEN TO MAKE THE FOOD, SHOULD WE STARVE?
NO WE SHOULD NOT
THIS AUSTRALIAN LADY IS GOING TO FARM ALL THE THINGS
Land Armies (staffed by Land Girls) were super necessary to feed everyone at home PLUS everyone at war. Land Girls were used in both WW1 and WW2. While farming was a “protected occupation” (male farmers wouldn’t be forcibly drafted into the military, because their jobs were too important to a functioning society) the majority male farmworkers decided to enlist voluntarily. This left elderly or disabled male farmworkers to do intensive work. By WW2 they had some tractors to help, but most farming was still done by hand or with draft animals, especially since the steel and fuel for the tractors was more needed on the Front.
This American lady found a cool old-timey tractor, which is just as good as an ambulance…
But this British lady has to do her plowing with a draft horse! The weathered old farmer, too old for combat, is very grateful.
FOOD COMES FIRST!
okay but LOOK at some of these other Plushy Man Jobs, Necessary To Prevent the Downfall of Society, that American women needed to do RIGHT NOW TO BEAT THE NAZIS:
AMERICAN WOMEN! THESE ELEVATORS AREN’T GOING TO OPERATE THEMSELVES
I CAN KEEP GOING FOREVER
TAKE THE JOBS FROM MEN!! TAKE THEM!! SEIZE THEM!! DRILL THE THING
Oddly, even without men at work, “women’s work” still got done.
Children were still mostly looked after. Large communal childcare programs were set up (they were quickly closed after WW2, though.) Food was prepared. Households
ran. Single women stayed single. The countries functioned. The world still turned. MILLIONS OF MEN
were WIPED OFF THE PLANET but the world still turned.
In fact, the Allies won both WW1 and WW2.
And the resulting power/gender/employment vacuums shaped the gender dynamics of most of Tumblr’s parents and grandparents.
Today is more or less the day that the Democratic nominee is decided.
It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?
But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.
First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.
But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really) to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.
But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.
Now I’m gonna say something controversial:
HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.
There. I said it. What a shocker.
People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?
No really, why?
Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.
Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others.
And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.
Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!?
She also fucking follows through. For real.
Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1
(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)
Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)
How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?
My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.
So my plea is this:
Look for the good in HRC.
She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKINGTALK ABOUT IT.Let her campaign know.
I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)
Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .
This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you.
And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…
REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.
thx
There’s also the story Andrea Mitchell told tonight on MSNBC – about Hillary during her tenure as First Lady, traveling to China to give a speech about women’s rights, despite the resistance from the State Department. She hid the speech from them during the trip overseas, refusing to allow it to be vetted. There are dozens upon dozens of stories like that, before, during and after when she was last in the White House.
A lot of people either don’t remember or weren’t alive to know just how galvanizing, how much of a force Hillary was when Bill Clinton took office, and how unprecedented it was (outside of a few powerful examples, such as Eleanor Roosevelt) for a First Lady to be quite so strident and purposeful in matters of state – how much of a shock to the system it was to Washington. Hillary has always been controversial and a firebrand in her own way; she has always been despised by the GOP, which has thrown everything they have at her for almost 25 years but never taken her down. She has been tested, burnt, bowed but never broken. She’s been fighting for the issues she believes in since before she was Hillary Clinton. And she never stops working.
A rare politics reblog because the primary is finally over and we have ascended to the next level of hell.
This post has a more rah-rah than I generally prefer or espouse but it has useful information that many of you may not be aware of and also an image of Hillary Clinton with a watch on a shoelace around her neck which is, I cannot lie, the main reason I am reblogging it.
I’d like to add a couple of things: first, Rachel Maddow devoted her A block last night to the history of women running for president in the US and it almost made me cry. Please watch. Second, Rebecca Traister’s profile of Hillary Clinton, which you may already have seen, is the best piece of writing on her so far this election.
I keep thinking about Ezra Klein’s piece from Tuesday night (ETA: forgot the link) about her skill as a politician and how it’s essentially un-male:
But another way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a
less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by
spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the
entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female
approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and
winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed Sanders.
[…]
In this telling, in order to do something as hard as becoming the
first female presidential nominee of a major political party, she had to
do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition,
supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and
depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that
played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers’
strengths. And she did it.
Hillary Clinton is a generationally talented politician — albeit
across a different set of dimensions than men tend to be talented
politicians.
He references her frequent comments that she is not a “natural” politician like Obama or Bill Clinton, and draws on Traister’s suggestion in her piece that “charisma” as we understand it is arguably a masculine trait:
She can’t just suffer through the
indignity of campaigning and then hole up with her policy papers. It’s
not enough to have a plan; you have to sell it to the country, over and
over again. Obama proved to be particularly adept at using the media to
disseminate his administration’s messages to the audiences it was trying
to reach, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too. Even George
W. Bush was charismatic in his way.
But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with
no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially
plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who
knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic,
perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking
to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait.
Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men
doing it?
Hillary Clinton is not a perfect presidential candidate because nobody is a perfect presidential candidate. But I think that Klein has hit on something important, which is that she got to a place where she could feasibly become a presidential candidate in what is likely the only way a woman in this country could, certainly the first time: she fucking networked. A woman could not have run Obama’s campaign. She would not have been taken seriously. And a woman could not have run Sanders’ campaign, because if a woman had somehow managed to be elected to Congress for ~25 years and then gone around the country yelling about The System, having not actually passed any meaningful legislation during her time in office, and not gotten endorsed by almost any of her colleagues, she would have been ripped to shreds inside of a month.
Instead, Clinton worked and worked and worked. And her punishment for that is now that people penalize her for having done so because she is an insider. Well, no shit. How the hell else could she have gotten to this point? I hope that in future we will be able to have female politicians who have an easier route. But if they do it will in part be due to her working her ass off for 25 years and getting shit on the entire time for doing so.
19 yr old Boy:I’m scared of having children can I get a vasectomy? Society: Yeah! Its so easy to get one too!
19 yr old Girl: I legitimately suffer from bad mental health issues that could kill me if i was ever forced to bear a child because I’d have to go off my medication for 9 months, I have a physical disability that I do not want to pass on, and I have bleeding disorders that often put my life in jeopardy. Can I get a hysterectomy? Society:FUCK NO!!!!!!!! YOURE TOO YOUNG YOU HAVE TO KEEP BLEEDING AND HURTING EVEN IF YOU NEVER WANT KIDS ALSO WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU NEED TO HAVE BABIES OR ELSE YOURE A FAILURE AS A WOMAN!!!!!
I’m seriously fucking sick of seeing this attitude, and especially from other women too. Even on support forums for women who want or have had hysterectomies, they scold young women and feed them the fucking disgusting “You’ll change your mind, you must accept your duty as a walking incubator” bullshit. I’m tired of being quiet about this shit, I’m honestly fucking furious about this and I want it to be addressed by our society NOW.
As some of our own followers have shared, this isnt just something prevalent in random citizens. Actual doctors will refuse to do these types of procedures on adult women/those able to bear children for these same reasons.
Movies for boys that are cinematically not great but are fun, kinda dumb escapist fantasies (e.g., Kingsman, Fast and the Furious, 90% of all action movies): I mean, they’re not great cinema but it’s a fun two hours at the movies just let boys have their wish fulfillment films like whatevs
Movies for girls that are cinematically not great but are fun, kinda dumb escapist fantasies (e.g., Snow White and the Huntsman, Maleficent, Jupiter Ascending): THIS IS THE DEATH KNELL OF CIVILIZATION ALL OF CINEMA MUST BE BURNED TO THE GROUND AND SALTED AND STARTED ANEW TO RID OURSELVES OF THIS PLAGUE
crying males: “disney is destroying star wars with female leads”
“rogue one also has a female lead? ugh”
“great another mary sue”
me:
I don’t mind if Star Wars has a female lead, as the Star Wars franchise has always been home to strong female characters, I do care if she is another giant Mary Sue like Rey was. Rey was so Mary Sue that it became distracting to the movie. A character with no force training takes down a trained Sith Knight, she flies a freighter designed for two pilots with no help despite the fact she had never left the planet before, and she can also repair said ship with no problem because she had spent years salvaging parts off of a broken star destroyer? The only thing she didn’t do was have all of the male characters try to romance her at once and I thank the force for that small concession.
The only good new character in episode 7 was Finn. The rest of the characterization fell flat or was just used to make Rey ascend to Mary Suedom.
anakin built the worlds fastest pod racer and c3po when he was nine
the first time luke flew a spaceship he destroyed the fucking death star.
Kylo Ren: Not a Sith. Not fully trained. Also? Injured by a bowcaster that we’d seen could take out several stormtroopers at a time.
Rey: Literally spent all of her downtime flying a flight simulator to the point that it could no longer throw anything at her she couldn’t handle. For all kinds of ships. Nor did she solely scavenge star destroyers. She spent her entire life scavenging every imaginable wreck on Jakku, and her survival depended on her learning what ships had what parts and what was valuable. This, while competing with other scavengers, most of them working in teams.
Which meant she had to learn how to fight, or else she wouldn’t have gotten out of childhood.
Basically, Rey had way more in-canon reasoning to be as good as she was than Luke Skywalker did–who basically went from never flying much out of atmo to piloting an X-wing under combat conditions and rocking it… apparently just because of genetics and the Force. Who then went on, only half-trained, into a fight that even YODA thought he was going to die in, and survived, against a man literally birthed by the Force, trained as both a Jedi AND a Sith, with about 25 years of combat experience under his belt, whereas Luke had had a lightsaber for about 3 years. What a Mary Sue he was, huh?
Rey had more reason to be what she was than Anakin Skywalker, who accidentally wound up in a fighter and accidentally destroyed a droid ship. Anakin who was such a Mary Sue he was LITERALLY A VIRGIN BIRTH. How Mary Sue is THAT?
The creators, in short, HAD TO GIVE REASONS for every single thing Rey knew how to do, because of assholes like this person, who would take any special skill she had as proof that she was a “Mary Sue” just because she was a female character. No one bothered to give those reasons to Luke or Anakin. Because they’re the hero. OF COURSE they can do the impossible. But Rey? Jesus, what a Mary Sue.
Reblogged for excellent commentary.
(I’d thought the Rey-hating twerp up there was like sixteen, in which case I’d cut them some slack, but nope turns out they’re in their 40s.)
crying males: “disney is destroying star wars with female leads”
“rogue one also has a female lead? ugh”
“great another mary sue”
me:
I don’t mind if Star Wars has a female lead, as the Star Wars franchise has always been home to strong female characters, I do care if she is another giant Mary Sue like Rey was. Rey was so Mary Sue that it became distracting to the movie. A character with no force training takes down a trained Sith Knight, she flies a freighter designed for two pilots with no help despite the fact she had never left the planet before, and she can also repair said ship with no problem because she had spent years salvaging parts off of a broken star destroyer? The only thing she didn’t do was have all of the male characters try to romance her at once and I thank the force for that small concession.
The only good new character in episode 7 was Finn. The rest of the characterization fell flat or was just used to make Rey ascend to Mary Suedom.
anakin built the worlds fastest pod racer and c3po when he was nine
the first time luke flew a spaceship he destroyed the fucking death star.
Kylo Ren: Not a Sith. Not fully trained. Also? Injured by a bowcaster that we’d seen could take out several stormtroopers at a time.
Rey: Literally spent all of her downtime flying a flight simulator to the point that it could no longer throw anything at her she couldn’t handle. For all kinds of ships. Nor did she solely scavenge star destroyers. She spent her entire life scavenging every imaginable wreck on Jakku, and her survival depended on her learning what ships had what parts and what was valuable. This, while competing with other scavengers, most of them working in teams.
Which meant she had to learn how to fight, or else she wouldn’t have gotten out of childhood.
Basically, Rey had way more in-canon reasoning to be as good as she was than Luke Skywalker did–who basically went from never flying much out of atmo to piloting an X-wing under combat conditions and rocking it… apparently just because of genetics and the Force. Who then went on, only half-trained, into a fight that even YODA thought he was going to die in, and survived, against a man literally birthed by the Force, trained as both a Jedi AND a Sith, with about 25 years of combat experience under his belt, whereas Luke had had a lightsaber for about 3 years. What a Mary Sue he was, huh?
Rey had more reason to be what she was than Anakin Skywalker, who accidentally wound up in a fighter and accidentally destroyed a droid ship. Anakin who was such a Mary Sue he was LITERALLY A VIRGIN BIRTH. How Mary Sue is THAT?
The creators, in short, HAD TO GIVE REASONS for every single thing Rey knew how to do, because of assholes like this person, who would take any special skill she had as proof that she was a “Mary Sue” just because she was a female character. No one bothered to give those reasons to Luke or Anakin. Because they’re the hero. OF COURSE they can do the impossible. But Rey? Jesus, what a Mary Sue.
Reblogged for excellent commentary.
(I’d thought the Rey-hating twerp up there was like sixteen, in which case I’d cut them some slack, but nope turns out they’re in their 40s.)
People keep saying, “what if men did what you did to ghostbusters but the other way around!!!!!” but 1) You can’t. There isn’t one major blockbuster from the past 30 years with enough girls to do that with, and 2) Don’t assume that I wouldn’t completely support an all male cheetah girls reboot
Can I vote for Pride and Prejudice with five brothers, but we still keep Mr. Darcy?
eirenical17 