How the gender pay gap gave me empathy for men
A lot of people, especially women and leftists, are very unsympathetic about the epidemic of male loneliness. I understand why. But it’s never sat quite right with me.
Today I want to share how thinking through the gender pay gap helped me empathize with men and boys.
To help you understand where I’m coming from, I’m going to tell you a story.
I moved to D.C. in 2011 to work for a libertarian magazine.
My plan had three parts:
Become the libertarian version of Ann Coulter, especially the sheath dresses and skeletal body (I already had the long, straight blonde hair and superior attitude)
Use the skills I’d honed marketing fishing lures and magazine racks online to sell libertarianism to the masses
Profit???
Unfortunately, my influence on the masses was negligible. Then again, looking back at libertarianism generally and some of my takes specifically, that might be for the best. I’m also grateful that I proved pretty resistant to anorexia.
I did manage to become a minor online celebritarian, mostly through successfully picking fights with more prominent celebritarians and shitposting. Lastly, and most sadly for me specifically, I did not directly monetarily profit from this endeavor. I did learn the valuable lesson that successful pundits preach to the choir, a task for which I am far too disagreeable and easily bored to make my living. The fastest way to get paid to tell people they’re wrong is usually 1:1 and involves leather. I also managed to wear a few sheath dresses.
Pretty soon after arriving in D.C. I started attending libertarian house parties, happy hours, and conferences where I noticed a dearth of ladies. I also noticed that the liberty movement was a bit paler than the nation as a whole. And not just for lack of sun exposure.
I started to read feminists in order to understand what women wanted that libertarianism could provide. I approached it like a marketer trying to empathize with my target audience so I could discover why other women disliked libertarianism and how to change their minds. One of the first things I learned is that most libertarians were not trying very hard at all to win over women or people of color. I couldn’t really blame anyone for rejecting a political philosophy that, at best, ignored their political problems and, at worst, exacerbated them.
I think I assumed that if libertarians could win over feminists, we could win over women generally. Which, looking back, is slightly insane. On the one hand, I guess if we did actually win over feminists it would mean we probably created something less openly misogynistic than existing default libertarianism. That probably would be more appealing to women generally. On the other hand, feminists and normal women with regular hobbies think and behave quite differently.
It’s also possible that I had goals outside of convincing the average woman to lean more libertarian. I found feminists more interesting than women generally (still true). I probably found the project of reconciling feminism with libertarianism more interesting than winning over the average woman to my way of thinking (not true anymore). I’ll never know for sure.
My high school interest in feminism mostly consisted of reading BUST and Bitch magazines along with my mom’s copies of Backlash and Reviving Ophelia. Reading feminists circa 2011/2012 led me to believe that a lot of women (or at least a lot of feminists) seemed to care a great deal about the gender pay gap.
I mostly heard two stories, which I’m going to vastly oversimplify for concision:
The left: The gender pay gap results from gender discrimination. We need to implement X, Y, and Z government programs/policies in order to fix this grave injustice today.
The right (including libertarians): The gender pay gap results from individual choices. This makes it good and proper. It also means X, Y, and Z government programs/policies can’t possibly fix it. Here’s a bunch of evidence that these programs/policies will actually make things worse on-net.
Back then, I found the right more convincing. I actually still do, at least on this question. But now I resent it more.
The gender pay gap does demonstrably result from individual choices rather than gender discrimination. Once you correct for college major, hours worked, years worked, etc., the gap narrows to a few cents. Most of the gender pay gap is explained by two specific choices which happen to correlate very closely with other impactful decisions: Marriage and childbirth.
’s post on this topic is excellent.But knowing this didn’t solve anything. It sure didn’t reconcile libertarianism with feminism. To synthesize the two, I focused on the fact that cultural pressure influences individual choices.
There’s a reason men and women choose different college majors. There’s a reason wives work fewer hours and are far more likely to take time out of paid work to care for children and elderly parents than their husbands. There’s a reason women who graduate from Harvard Business School prioritize their husbands’ careers over their own.
Some of it is innate, of course. Behavioral sex differences are real. But these differences are far too small to explain the entire gender pay gap.
The best explanation, in my opinion, for the vast majority of the gender pay gap is the male breadwinner norm. It’s so strong that studies show that women reliably turn down pay and promotions to avoid becoming their family’s breadwinner. I don’t blame them. Female breadwinners are more likely to get beaten and cheated on than women who earn less than their husbands.
To say “Well, it’s their decision” and then downplay, deny, or ignore the fact that we punish women, sometimes physically, for pursuing gender parity and instead put the responsibility for our own subjugation solely upon women ourselves is gaslighting and victim-blaming at its misogynistic finest.
Over the following decade I watched Lean In and the discourse around it highlight the limits of individual responsibility. It brought to light the double-bind in which women operate. The better we are at performing femininity, the more money and independence we leave on the table. This increases our risk of abuse and exploitation. The more we pursue money and independence, the more people punish us for performing masculinity.
At the same time, I watched the left turn and do the same thing to men and boys.
Instead of the gender pay gap, it’s about the male-female gap in education achievement, loneliness, addiction, and deaths of despair.
Once again, I’m hearing two stories, which I’m going to vastly oversimplify for concision:
The right (including libertarians): Men are victims of the left and feminism’s successful demonization of men and masculinity and the feminization of every major institution.
The left: Have you been inside a boardroom lately? Men are thriving, thankyouverymuch. The bottom-half men who aren’t doing so hot just need to make better choices.
The take is essentially the same. Gender gaps result from individual choices and are thus good and proper.
Once again, I think the right is more correct than the left here.
I’ll go into more detail about why in a future post. The TL;DR is “It’s systemic.” However, these systems are not feminism successfully demonizing men and masculinity and feminizing every major institution. In this case and every case, when you see “feminism” and “successful” in the same sentence, be skeptical.
The main point I want to make in this post is that blaming individuals for systemic problems is bad praxis, regardless of whether it’s from the left or right.
Much like women, bottom-half men don’t choose to suck ass at life in a vacuum.
In fact, in some ways, bottom-half men actually make for more sympathetic victims of gender norms.
First, unlike bottom-half male malaise, the gender pay gap is already correcting itself. Already, the average single, childfree woman in a city already out-earns her male counterparts. Its main causes are on life support. Fewer women are getting married and having kids. Plus, the male breadwinner norm is facing a math problem that I assume is insurmountable.
Bottom-half men’s problems, on the other hand, are likely just getting started. Masculinity enjoyed a brief blip of high demand in the post-war manufacturing boom. This is well and truly over. Labor demand disproportionately rewards the traits we’ve coded feminine. This is unlikely to reverse anytime soon.
Even more importantly, I think, is that when you tell a lonely man to “just be vulnerable,” you’re telling him to perform femininity. If you want to understand how we socialize girls and boys differently and how it hurts our relationships for the rest of our lives, read The marriage advice every couple needs, but no one gets by the amazing
right now. It’s very good. She pointed out (as I’ve also stated many times) that we punish men far more harshly for performing femininity than we do women for performing masculinity.Telling men to just act more like women would be like telling a 12-year-old me to just reject purity culture. It’s insulting and unhelpful. I think bottom-half men might be more afraid of being seen as acting like a girl than I was of Hell.
I very much want men to do the hard work I’ve done. I want them to question and dismantle the loads of bullshit adults have spewed at us since before we were even born.
I also recognize how difficult it is to even begin.
Misogyny, patriarchy, and yes, the entire concept of gender, is water. We are fish. It takes a lot of bell hooks to even begin to recognize that we’re swimming in something at all.
Plus, the moment you begin to talk about the water, people are going to lose their shit and be mean to you because you’re scaring them. Most people absolutely, very much do not want to know about the water. I, frankly, do not blame them. It’s fucking scary.
So I very much understand the urge to shake bottom-half men and say “Wake up and stop shooting yourself in the foot and making it everyone else’s problem!” But I also remember what it is to do the best I can in a fundamentally fucked-up society. I remember what it felt like to see misogyny but not know what it was or how to talk about it. I remember the rage I felt when I started to understand it and then heard conservatives tell me that I was right to do the patriarchy’s bidding and wrong to stop or feel any type of way about it.
Progressives are not better when we tell men to stop doing the patriarchy’s bidding without acknowledging the ways in which we punish men for failing to perform masculinity as expected.
All I’m asking for right now is that everyone who understands that when women make choices we do so under constraints also open ourselves up to the possibility that men do too.
I don't think normal men with normal hobbies are big into libertarianism either ;)
I think that fighting sexism against men is hard because of a status paradox, so whereas feminists are like "break out of the box! Take on the areas where men have disproportionate power" whereas the men who fight on their own behalf are like "reinforce the box! Do not take on any area where women have disproportionate power!"
Also, because I'm me, I'll add that I think the fact that the work women tend to do is paid less when it's paid at all is sexism, and the fact that so much care labor would not be compensated at all if not for government information makes libertarianism unattended to fairly normal women in a way that feminists don't always seem to grasp when chasing the pay discrimination red herring.
You think it's more accurate to say feminists have demonized men than it is to point out the still extant features of patriarchy?
I don't think we have to tell men to be more like women. I think we have to show men there are better versions of masculinity.
And I do think we have to tell someone something, however uncomfortable that makes us and however much we worry about moralizing and implying blame. We have to shape behavior through culture because it's fundamentally a cultural problem, not an economic one or anything else easily remedied by a policy toggle.