It is by now well-established that Democrats benefit from increasing women’s misery through increased family chaos. That’s the flip side of yet another election showing that single women are among the most reliable of Democrat voters.
Given that historically unprecedented percentages of young Americans are likely to remain single for their entire lives — more than one-third, according to Brad Wilcox — this dynamic is only accelerating. UnHerd’s Mary Harrington relates the phenomenon partly to the Information Age’s dramatically increased remuneration for work that doesn’t involve hard physical labor:
…very simply, technological advancements have delivered new opportunities for well-qualified knowledge workers of both sexes, even as the same changes have automated and de-industrialised away the physically more arduous work previously performed mostly by working-class men. This virtualisation of work has, overall, benefited women much more than men.
This is true, but it misses something important, too. Like woke institutions, the bureaucratization of work is in large part a product of political choices, not just technological change. That means it can be altered.
It’s government policies that force companies to siphon off money from making legitimately useful things and solving concrete human problems to parasitic forms of “knowledge work” that are also culturally destructive. These nonproductive forms of non-physical and mentally menial work are often grouped under the heading of “administrative bloat” in academia, and they aren’t exclusive to so-called education institutions at all. They are now endemic to society.
Many, many so-called “knowledge work” jobs are anti-productive. That is, they actually destroy productivity rather than aid, improve, and refine it.
Not coincidentally, either, women do most of these jobs. They comprise the vast army of woke state clerks, which is to say the cultural revolution foot soldiers. It’s not a coincidence that women overwhelmingly populate the government jobs that replace the social responsibilities women used to fulfill out of love instead of for a government paycheck.
The good news is, these women would be a lot happier doing something more productive for society than working in highly inefficient government-dominated industries, like raising a family or running soup kitchens. Many just don’t feel they have that option. We need to do more to make that option available. Part of that would entail eliminating jobs that exist to comply with stupid government regulations, by eliminating the regulations themselves.
I’m talking about the kinds of jobs labeled “administrative bloat” on campuses, which are essentially glorified secretarial work and relationship-managing. I am not arguing that all knowledge work — such as teaching, publishing, and the practice of law — is parasitic.
Obviously, some knowledge work is societally beneficial. But does every company really need a full complement of lawyers, a full human resources department, a tax compliance officer, accountants, and all the other variations of government compliance officers just to serve people burgers or fix roofs?
I don’t think so, but government regulations today demand smothering our economy with bureaucracy-descended make-work jobs that not incidentally have been lionized by our corrupt culture makers as somehow brave and independence-affirming when women do them. Paying some government-mandated cutout somewhere is essentially inescapable for anyone who wants to earn a simple dollar. That is to say that paying dues to feminism is a mandatory entrance fee for almost any significant economic activity.
This reality is a massive drag not only on our economy but also a massive subsidy to the people trained to think that being some rando’s secretary is the epitome of GirlBossery — and desperate enough to believe that because she can’t locate the far-preferable alternate of cultivating a lovely home while someone who truly loves her brings home the bacon and smooches the baby before settling in for a nice warm dinner after a rough day digging other people’s feces out of their clogged pipes. (Now that’s a job that earns its pay!)
It’s no surprise that a woman cast alone into a cold world seeks security in government when she can’t find it in a real-life community. Where else is she going to go? At least she’s not sitting in her mother’s basement playing video games instead of working, or LARPing on Twitter about how much women suck while making no effort to learn how to love a woman for real.
There are plenty of things to be said about this situation, but one of them is that it’s a collective social problem that is very difficult for individuals to fix themselves. Ask any young woman about her dating prospects and watch her sigh and express how difficult it is to find a decent man.
She’s very likely holding some impractically elevated standards for potential mates, but also not being entirely pie-in-the-sky. The good men are getting rarer every day. While families deserve to take responsibility for their poor parenting of both boys and girls that also fuels this situation by refusing to acknowledge sex differences and legitimize fathers’ distinct social contributions, it is also fair to blame government policies for preferencing and cushioning the family breakdown and economic distortions that degrade potential spouse quality.
Men are a canary in the societal coal mine. Women may be more emotionally fragile, but boys more easily and quickly show the strain of a broken family and society. Girls hide their suffering with compliance. Boys don’t as much. The boys are very obviously hurting and have been for a long time — while virtually nobody with power has paid attention to their decades of painful screams that typically subside into the silence of zombie life online and self-destruction with both legal and illegal drugs.
Boys are the ones given ADHD medications fastest to deal with their parents’ divorce and the plain reality of being male (i.e., active). They are the ones fastest to drop out of school and life, as Harrington points out. And that is not all their fault either. The schools and increasingly the workforce are hostile environments for men. A bureaucratized workplace is an anti-man workplace, as it is men who are quickest to see how stupid, wasteful, and demeaning are jobs that don’t actually accomplish anything but micromanaging other people’s choices.
Yes, we have a messaging problem of big advertisers like Honda encouraging young people to make themselves deeply unhappy by glorifying lifelong loneliness. Yes, we have young women foolishly rejecting both motherhood and marriage because that’s what they’re told to do by our toxic cultural arbiters, and they don’t understand how to encourage men to man up. Yes, we have wife-cucked fathers engendering weak sons en masse and Boomer-controlled institutions tone-policing everyone by setting female-dominated behavior as the baseline for being considered a decent human being.
But we also have government putting its big fat thumb on the scale against marriage by structurally preferencing work that women tend to do and structurally disadvantaging work that men tend to do. Such artificial preferences for work detached from concrete value to customers can be altered.
Unfair government preferences for work that’s easier for women to do, embarrassing for many men to do because of its obvious wastefulness, and that reduces men’s ability to earn a family wage and therefore attract a wife — these can be abolished. Of course, that would take long and hard political slogging, but given our family formation crisis, it would be certainly worth it to the nation.
It is, in fact, absolutely mandatory to reverse our national decline. For national decline starts in the home, and American homes at this point barely exist.
