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| Apparently, it's only 15p! |
With Valentine's day fast approaching, I thought I'd point you all to an interesting little set of online apps, courtesy of the fellows at NoMarriage.com: calculators that purport to tell dudes the true cost of sex -- with wives, girlfriends, and what the kids today are calling "randoms."
The assumptions behind each of these calculators are pretty revealing: they essentially assume that guys generally resent the women they're involved with, and only spend time with them because it's necessary to pretend to be interested in them in order to get sex. The calculators also assume that guys are more or less paying for everything.
I ran a few numbers, and the results are telling: for the guys for whom these calculators are basically designed -- that is, guys who generally dislike spending non-sexy time with women, and who believe that "every kiss begins with Kay" -- the cost can easily be hundreds of dollars for each and every time they and their special ladies manage to set aside their resentments long enough to engage in a grudging bout of the old in-and-out.
By contrast, for guys going out with independent (and perhaps even feminist) women they actually like and enjoy spending time with, who pay their own way, and who live nearby, the putative cost of sex can literally be pennies a pop. For married men who actually like their working wives, the cost of sex can actually be negative, because it's cheaper to cohabit than to live alone.
In a nutshell: misogyny costs you, big time. But actually liking women? That makes sense -- dollars and sense!
By contrast, for guys going out with independent (and perhaps even feminist) women they actually like and enjoy spending time with, who pay their own way, and who live nearby, the putative cost of sex can literally be pennies a pop. For married men who actually like their working wives, the cost of sex can actually be negative, because it's cheaper to cohabit than to live alone.
In a nutshell: misogyny costs you, big time. But actually liking women? That makes sense -- dollars and sense!
For dedicated Men Going Their Own Way, the calculators, with a little tweaking, can also be used to calculate the cost of NOT having sex. Using the girlfriend calculator, replace "How many hours do you spend having stupid conversations with your GF (per week)" with "How many hours do you spend having stupid conversations with other MGTOW (per week)." Ignore the rest of the questions until you get to the one about your hourly wage. Then, for the question asking how many times you have sex per week, ignore this wording and simply input "1." Voila! You have calculated the (opportunity) cost per week of not having sex!
So, dear readers, what is YOUR cost of sex?
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*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
They left out the cost of birth control.
ReplyDeleteOh, riiiiiight, not their problem. How foolish of me.
According to them, zero since I am a girl and girls are never expected to pay for anything.
ReplyDeleteI actually tried to fill this out regarding the relationship I have with my boyfriend, but I got stopped at the first question, "Hours in stupid conversation per week." I kind of *like* the stupid and silly conversations we get into (If the Watchmen graphic novel were a tabletop RPG, who is playing each character?).
ReplyDeleteApparently, these dudes feel that sex should happen whenever they want, with minimal effort and no concern to anyone else who might be in the room. There's also no quantifier for quality - I'd rather have really good sex once a week than tepid sex every day.
Hold up. Is that Courtney Love on the cover of that book?
ReplyDeleteBecause that bitch is expensive.
I cost thirty bucks per fuck, apparently. I'm cheaper than a whore.
ReplyDelete$20/month. I consistently try to bring the cost lower than the cost of condoms, which roughly *giggle* equates to having sex at least 20 times a month. Sometimes I cannot convince my partner of the supreme logic of this plan, that makes the cost per occasion rise slightly.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking about switching to a form of birth control which costs $40/ 5 years. Which will make the cost per occasion plummet.
Their hand is free, lets hope they use that.
ReplyDelete$200/mo if you use the girlfriend calculator; $170/mo if you use the wife calculator. The main expense is mostly due to our schedules, which only allow us to hang out together 1 day/week and so we spend the ENTIRE day together. But I also don't like big-ticket items (jewelry, perfume, shoes, games); both of us buy our clothes second-hand; and we don't take vacations together, so that helps cut down costs.
ReplyDeleteWhat the calculator doesn't take into account is splitting costs of living. So I end up actually saving him money, even considering the cost of his time.
I notice the wife calculator doesn't take into account tax breaks and lower insurance rates that often come with being married. Those can amount to quite a bit.
$200/hr. Call me, sweetheart.
ReplyDeleteIt's seriously telling that they don't seem to be aware of the fact that most women LIKE having sex. No need to pay for it in any way or form!
ReplyDeleteThat they have to pay their girlfriends/wives tells us more about them than they want, I think.
In a way, I find it really sad that they see relationships as having to endure their partner (watching shows with them they don't like, talking about things they don't care about, etc.) and paying for them so, in exchange, they may have a warm hole every now and then.
It's no wonder they are so frustrated.
If two partners in a relationship resent each other and have to actually calculate the cost-benefit ratio then HOLY SHIT THERE IS SOMETHING REALLY REALLY WRONG!
Cheeze-a-pete. What is the cost-benefit analysis of your child? Your dog? Your cat? Your best friend?
ReplyDeleteThe corporatist mind set is really takin' the f%ck over.
I know that it's a tired and cliche thing to say, but if a guy is calculating the "cost" of his girlfriend, perhaps he should just invest in a Real Doll instead. In the long run, it would be cheaper and be what he professes to want.
ReplyDeleteThat, or shell out some money for therapy. Either way, it should help.
My boyfriend and I sat down together and did the math. Because we're students at an out of state university, he makes -$25 an hour (because of tuition). Hence, not factoring in time, the cost of having sex with me is about $2. When factoring in time, the cost of having sex with me is -$3. Apparently he makes money by having sex with me?
ReplyDeleteAre we honestly (in the comments here) humoring the idea that it costs men money to date (fuck) women? Are some of you women here running the calculation just to see how cheap you are, like it's a testament to your low-maintenance?
ReplyDeleteOkay then, let's talk about my fucking expenses to date men. Dumb clothes I only wear on dates, makeup (since I'm never perfect, apparently) the time and effort it takes to be acceptably thin, plastic surgery for a lot of women, birth control for women is WAY more expensive than condoms...I mean seriously.
In the end if you're thinking about relationships in terms of cost then you really shouldn't be in one. Like someone said above, get a real doll instead.
Are we honestly (in the comments here) humoring the idea that it costs men money to date(fuck) women?
ReplyDeletePROTIP: They're being sarcastic.
@ Keiko44 - I'm just entertained that the calculator allows negative numbers.
ReplyDeleteKeiko, I ran it to see how much my husband is costing me. I'm the highearner.
ReplyDeleteHe is an economical choice! Also he doesn't waste any of my time.
Lordy, Can we just say "Dudes, Thats not what relationships are like, If you are spending time with a person doing these things you are not having a relationship. There now, isnt that better? go have a real relationship,WITH SOMEONE YOU LIKE!"
ReplyDeleteum sorry about that screen name, side effect of logging in?
ReplyDeleteI like to think of it in terms of how much time and money I save by NOT having sex with anyone. No time spent shaving areas that don't need shaving, no time spent cleaning up when I otherwise wouldn't need to clean up, no time or money spent on STD tests, pregnancy tests, EC, or abortions ... ahhhhh. Life is good.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the same sorts of guys who view women as emotional harpies who are only good for a fuck and nothing more are the same sorts who call me a selfish bitch for not putting myself on the meat market. It's pretty confusing.
"The corporatist mind set is really takin' the f%ck over."
ReplyDeleteThat's something that's struck me about a lot of the stuff on this blog, both in David's posts and in the comments from MRA/MGTOW guys: this insistence on seeing human relationships as financial transactions. They seem to think that the way to get a rewarding relationship is to give as little as possible while taking as much as you can in return. Because that means you got a bargain!
Like these sex calculators. If you have a real relationship with a person you don't hate, these questions don't even make sense. I tried filling out the wife one to see how much my husband was costing me, but it's hopeless.
How many hours do you spend having pointless conversations with your wife per week: This is a negative? That's one of the great pleasures of love or friendship or family, the pointess conversations.
How many hours do you spend doing other things with your wife you would rather not do: Do they mean things my husband wants to do and I don't? In which case, of course I sometimes do things I'd rather not do for his sake, just as he does for me. Or do the mean things neither one of us wants to do, and I'm supposed to blame it on my husband that we have to spend a Saturday afternoon getting our taxes done when I'd rather be eating ice cream?
How much would you spend on housing if you were single (per month - make your best guess): Um, I'd be paying twice as much, because my husband wouldn't be there to pay his half of the mortgage. Or am I supposed to guess how much I'd be spending in a fantasy world where I didn't make any of the choices that led to this marriage, this house, this life? In that case, my best guess is that Warren Buffett would decide to spend his fortune buying me a private island and paying me a million dollars a month to live in it. So, negative a million dollars.
I think I've figured out how this game works!
How much do you spend on your wife (besides housing) per month: On groceries? Comic books? The gas bill? Diamond rings? Cat food? What is this question? Does the guy who wrote these questions understand that married couples typically live together?
Big ticket items (not included above), such as a car, vacations, etc you buy your wife - per year: Okay, if you are in a marriage where you regularly buy your wife cars you're not allowed to drive and vacations on which you are not invited, I suggest you get out of that relationship. Also, who buys a new car on a yearly basis? I will punch you if I find you.
How many times do you have sex with your wife per year: I just like to picture them counting.
I was a little surprised to find the gap between my base cost (around $15) and my "real cost" ($54). The low base cost made sense, what with all that feminist check-splitting and the rarity of luxury dining opportunities in my area, but the real cost only assumed like 10 or 15 hours of interaction a week. Where is this $4/hr value on his leisure time coming from, and why isn't it canceled out by the value of mine?
ReplyDeleteIt proves that the only type of sex these guys can have is with a prostitute.
ReplyDelete> That's something that's struck me about a lot of the stuff on this blog, both in David's posts and in the comments from MRA/MGTOW guys: this insistence on seeing human relationships as financial transactions.
ReplyDeleteThis.
By contrast, for guys going out with independent (and perhaps even feminist) women they actually like and enjoy spending time with, who pay their own way, and who live nearby, the putative cost of sex can literally be pennies a pop.
ReplyDeleteWomen who pay their own way? I asked all my friends who work in restaurants and movie theaters how many times, in the course of a shift, they see women on dates paying their own way instead of the guy footing the entire bill. Their answers ranged from zero to two. TWO, on an entire shift!!!
I'm presently dating one of those rare women who pays her own way, but she was raised in Indonesia by a single father. In fact, the one thing that all the good women I have dated have in common is good fathers in their lives.
That's something that's struck me about a lot of the stuff on this blog, both in David's posts and in the comments from MRA/MGTOW guys: this insistence on seeing human relationships as financial transactions.
ReplyDeleteSticking your head in the sand and pretending that the financial aspect of relationships doesn't exist won't make it go away.
"Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that the financial aspect of relationships doesn't exist won't make it go away."
ReplyDeleteIf the money really matters to you more than the relationship, then you probably shouldn't be in a relationship.
As the kids say these days: 'Ur doing it wrong.'
"financial aspect" is completely different than what was quoted in cold's comment. Then he said, "financial aspect". There is a "financial aspect" of going to the toilet.
ReplyDeleteTYPICAL MRA DISHONESTY in argumentation.
I'll give an example, even though I've already won this one.
Substitute parent/child. 'They talk of their parenting as if it were a financial transaction.'
And then someone says, well, you can't ignore the financial aspect of parenting.
RIGHT. It's hard for me not to hurl insults when people argue like this. MRAs in particular seem to show a huge hostility to arguing points that were actually MADE, dealing with feminism that actually exists, etc.
My man would give me every penny he had if I asked him because he's happy. If you don't like women, stay away from them.
Cold: When I go out with my friend we don't always split the check. Sometimes I pay and sometimes he pays depending on our overall financial and emotional situations.
ReplyDeleteThe dollar amount is not even, we do not calculate how much we spend on each other down the the penny or even to the meal. But it *feels* fair and there is a built in mechanism to avoid resentment:
If I feel like I have been paying for too many meals, I ask for the check to be split. If I feel like I have been getting too many things free, I take out my money. If we are also sharing an activity, I say Thanks for dinner, I'll pay for the movie or go-carts or whatever. And he does the same thing.
What he doesn't do is keep mechanically paying for things until he slowly grows to hate me, because we all have to take care of our own shit and manage our own feelings.
Did you post that to the right thread?
ReplyDeleteHide and Seek:
ReplyDeleteI also asked my friends how often they see the woman pay for the entire date cost of the meal or for both tickets, and every single one of them answered that they had either never seen it happen, or it happened maybe once in a month.
Good to know.
ReplyDeleteMy point was not that other people make the same choices my friend and I do, it doesn't really matter to our relationship whether they do or not.
My point was there is another way to structure relationships, one which recognizes and takes into accounts the things that bother us, such as men feeling like ATMs. There is a cultural script about how relationships are supposed to work and it's almost completely bullshit, but the good things is, *no one is actually enforcing it.* We get to do whatever we want and arrange our interactions however we agree to. Isn't that nice?
Yeah, no police are actually enforcing the idea that men pay for dates, but when a man starts insisting that dates be dutch as I started doing a few years ago, the quantity of dates they get sinks like AIG stock. The quality of the few women who were willing to pay their own way on dates was well above average, but the fact remains that most women believe they are entitled to have their way paid and I see no indication that feminists are less likely to believe this.
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm not ashamed to admit that my boyfriend pays for all our dates. Because the allowance he gets from his parents is greater than what I make at my shitty job; and most of what I make goes to my bills and interest payments on the loans that I took out to pay for my education. Loans which he never had to consider taking because his parents pay for his schooling.
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, my boyfriend pays for our dates. In fact, he offers to pay for as much as possible. And it's entirely fair that way.
My sister is in a similar situation. Her boyfriend's father started a company so that he could have the job he always dreamed of having; while she's in school with a lousy job to pay for student loans.
ReplyDeleteI bring this up because the fact that there is a wage gap between what men earn and what women earn determines who has more disposable income. That is, income that can be disposed of on things like dates.
Thanks for illustrating how feminist justify being leeches in their relationships. Now, for bonus points, let's hear you name one employer that pays men more than women for doing the same job at the same proficiency with the same hours and seriority.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting, that working for my money makes me a "leech". Tell me more.
ReplyDeleteWow, what fine reading comprehension you have, completely missing the words "in their relationships" that follow the word "leeches". Obviously I wasn't saying anything about how you derive your own income.
ReplyDeleteDates are only one part of a relationship.
ReplyDeleteSo what do you provide to your boyfriend that makes up for him paying on dates?
ReplyDeleteGenuinely not trolling, I'm just wondering what sort of answer you'd give.
LOL, in your own words:
ReplyDeleteSo, yeah, my boyfriend pays for our dates. In fact, he offers to pay for as much as possible. And it's entirely fair that way.
So, assuming that your story is true, you already admitted that he pays for more than just dates, thus making your point moot. You also consider this to be "entirely fair" because he is a fortunate son with generous parents and no debt while you racked up a bunch getting what was apparently a very poor education which didn't get you any further than a "shitty job" in a call center.
How many call centers expect their employees to have degrees? It would seem that you failed to obtain employment in your field and believe that you are entitled to have a fortunate son financially compensate you for your personal failures, and that this is why you feel that you shouldn't have to pay your own way. You aren't the first feminist to tell such a story in an effort to justify being a leech in a relationship, and I'm sure you won't be the last.
Cold, I was once in a long-distance relationship with a woman who earned more than me. She paid for most of our dates, she paid half of the airline tickets when I went to see her, while I paid none of her cost when she came to see me. Given that she earned more than me, and could afford it, I think this arrangement made perfect sense.
ReplyDeleteAre you now going to get outraged and say that this is how men justify being leeches in their relationships?
Of course, in almost all the relationships I've been in, and on almost all of the dates I've been on, we've both paid for stuff equally.
Incidentally, I took that calculator for a spin and apparently each time I have sex costs me $18.50. I'd say that's some pretty good bang for my buck, pun intended, but then again I'm skewing the results by maliciously exploiting my girlfriend. See, even though I make about twice as much per hour as she does(for working a completely different job) I allow her to pay her way on dates. How horrifically unfair of me.
ReplyDeleteNow, for bonus points, let's hear you name one employer that pays men more than women for doing the same job at the same proficiency with the same hours and seriority.
ReplyDeleteGoodyear. That's what the Lilly Ledbetter case, and subsequently law, were about. Now, the law has been changed to count each unfairly lower paycheck as an instance of discrimination, so that the statute of limitations isn't onerous. But yes, Goodyear spent 30 years underpaying Lilly Ledbetter due to her sex.
> See, even though I make about twice as much per hour as she does(for working a completely different job) I allow her to pay her way on dates. How horrifically unfair of me.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone say that was unfair? If that's what you two want to do, then more power to you.
See this comment upthread:
> We get to do whatever we want and arrange our interactions however we agree to. Isn't that nice?
Most dates isn't the same as all dates; you're saying you still paid something but that it wasn't 50/50. The more pertinent questions are would you have broken things off with her if she had insisted that you pay half, and would she have had a hard time finding any other man who would tolerate her only paying for her own half of relationship costs.
ReplyDeleteGoodyear. That's what the Lilly Ledbetter case, and subsequently law, were about. Now, the law has been changed to count each unfairly lower paycheck as an instance of discrimination, so that the statute of limitations isn't onerous. But yes, Goodyear spent 30 years underpaying Lilly Ledbetter due to her sex.
ReplyDeleteLOL, according to the case details:
Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236.
Let's see, that means she was paid $559 less than the lowest-paid male manager, and that he was paid a whopping $950 less than the highest-paid male manager. So, woman paid $559 less than man = victim, but man paid $950 less than other man = yawn. Never mind that managers often have their salary adjusted based on performance and that she may have simply been the worst-performing manager, or that $3,727 per month is a decent income even in today's dollars.
The lowest paid male manager was worst then she was per performance reviews.
ReplyDeleteIs it just me or do comments keep disappearing here? A minute ago it said this entry had 49, now it has 48. Or am I seeing things?
ReplyDeleteI deleted two comments from Cold that were gratuitous personal attacks.
ReplyDeleteI count three that you deleted, one of which was merely a statement of proven fact. Nobody needs to bring forward their personal details to make a point, but if they choose to do so then it should be fair game for criticism.
ReplyDeleteThe lowest paid male manager was worst then she was per performance reviews.
ReplyDeleteAnd you know this how? Common, don't hoard information, if you have access to these performance reviews then share them.
@Cold:
ReplyDeleteWhen you go on dates with your low-earning girlfriend, do you make sure that you go to places that you both can afford? When you have sex with her, do you pay for half the birth control? When you want to spice up your love life, do you pay for half the lingerie/riding crops/hand-cuffs/...?
Unless you can truthfully answer "yes" to all these questions, you're the leech in the relationship and you should worry about your girlfriend looking into its financial aspects.
@Cold:
ReplyDeleteHere you go, Mr. Never-Heard-About-Google:
http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/testimony.cfm?id=3564&wit_id=7438
And before you start calling her names, please remember that she was under oath when she spoke to Congress. If she'd committed perjury, she would have been in great trouble.
@girlscientist:
ReplyDeleteMy, aren't you curious about my romantic life. Well for your information she's not particularly low-earning, we do go to places we can both afford, the government paid for my vasectomy by way of my taxes except for the tray fee which was about $40, and our love life is sufficiently satisfying that we see no need for lingerie or props. Are you satisfied now?
And yes, you will have to forgive me for not taking the word of a self-interested plaintiff at face value. I accept that if she said under oath that she got a "Top Performance Award" in 1996 then it must have happened or else she would have been charged with perjury, but the rest of it is just the word of a self-interested plaintiff and people get away with lying under oath all the time.
No elaboration is given as to what that "Top Performance Award" actually meant, and even if it did mean something significant it was given two years before she retired. It doesn't say if she got a pay raise that same year, and it doesn't provide the necessary information to substantiate what dorksfordean said. Furthermore, it's not my job to use Google to verify other people's claims.
@Cold: Well, you were awfully judgemental to other people in this thread, so the least you could do was prove that you had a leg to stand on.
ReplyDeleteLedbetter's case went through 3 courts before she testified to Congress, and I'm quite sure she was vetted again before she testified there. If she really was such a bad employee, I'm sure Goodyear could have found the lawyers to make their case and Congress would have found a better person to advertise their case. Nobody wants to find out that their poster child wasn't as pure as they made them out to be to the press. For example, Rosa Parks wasn't the first Black woman who refused to go to the back of the bus, but she was the first one that the civil rights movement felt comfortable about trotting out to the press. Of course, even when your poster child is perfect, problems can still arise: just look at what Michelle Malkin did to Graeme Frost, and what David Brock did to Anita Hill. But I'm willing to bet that the Democrats were very careful to have someone check Ledbetter's performance reviews. Better safe than sorry.
Cold, unless you're making the (utterly unsubstantiated) claim that Ms. Ledbetter was by far the worst manager Goodyear had, then it doesn't matter whether she was their best, or simply mediocre. Furthermore, the amount of the paygap doesn't matter.*
ReplyDeleteWhat does matter is I've met your challenge to "name one employer that pays men more than women for doing the same job at the same proficiency with the same hours and seriority."** You assumed that nobody could proffer an example; I was able to, with three seconds of thought, find an example from among America's largest corporations.
While you could fairly (though incorrectly) argue that it's not a tremendous problem, you should also do the civility and intellectual honesty of this conversation a favor and have at least a slice of the humble pie I just served up.
*For the sake of this argument. Obviously it does matter in terms of the damages to which Ms. Ledbetter is entitled, and the heinousness of Goodyear's actions, and so on and so forth.
**The challenge was, of course, rigged. Workplace sex discrimination can and does operate through unjustified imbalances in promotion, leading to women unfairly being less senior than their male colleagues; then, even the nominally acceptable difference in pay between jobs can be a mechanism of discrimination. Ditto differences in training, mentoring, and the absence of reasonable maternity and paternity leave.***
***Before you start talking shit, notice that I included both. And unless you don't like an economy where people can raise children and also work, you're going to need both rather than neither.
The corporation you named said that she was paid less due to poor performance, while she said that they paid her less due to her gender. It doesn't appear that any hard evidence was presented during the case; just testimony which makes it a he said, she said affair. Unless the jury had access to some compelling evidence that has not been mentioned in any of the documentation on this case, they decided it in error as the plaintiff's word shouldn't be worth any more than the defendant's.
ReplyDeleteSo no, you have not yet served up any humble pie, although you are the first to actually answer the challenge with something. You did not prove that Goodyear currently pays women less than men(my challenge is worded in the present tense) nor did you prove that Ledbetter's self-interested claim of being of equal or better proficiency to her male counterparts is actually true.
The person who pulls out the wallet isn't always the one "paying." So the observations of waiters about who pulls out the wallet don't always reflect what's really going on.
ReplyDeleteIf the couple is married or sharing finances, or she gives him money before they leave the house, then maybe they are both paying, or maybe she is paying, regardless of who appears to be paying.
My brother-in-law hated to be seen in a group where a woman paid the check, and my mother would humor him by handing him money under the table. He can't be the only one.
Oh, and then there's the added problem that paying a good manager less money simply for being a woman means that they run the risk of losing her to a competitor who is willing to offer her a better salary since she is such a good manager. That's kind of the whole point of performance bonuses in the first place. So really, her claim of being paid less due to her gender isn't even of equal credibility to Goodyear's claim that it was because of her poor performance. She has essentially claimed that Goodyear hated women so much that they put their own profitability at risk just for the satisfaction of paying her less, and that is far less likely to be true than Goodyear's claim.
ReplyDeleteThe challenge was, of course, rigged.
ReplyDeleteOnly in the sense that the challenge calls for you to provide an example of an employer who is willing to flush money down the toilet just for the satisfaction of keeping women down. This is going to be difficult for obvious reasons, but you made it unnecessarily difficult for yourself. If you want to make a serious effort to meet my challenge, then large, publicly traded corporations are the worst possible place to look for a solid example as their shareholders put the highest priority on the bottom line.
As someone who litigated cases both for plaintiffs and for defendants in employment cases, I know from personal experience that even in cases of the most egregious and obvious discrimination, the employer will always say that the plaintiff was fired/demoted/not promoted/paid less on account of poor performance. To claim that a plaintiff's testimony is self-serving while the defendant's is not is nonsensical at best, intellectually dishonest at worst. With exceedingly rare exceptions, ALL testimony is self-serving. That includes testimony by men.
ReplyDeleteAlso, no matter how compelling the evidence, a person who is clearly biased can still choose to ignore or reject it.
I never said that the defendant's word isn't also self-serving. It should be no surprise that they say it was on account of poor performance because that is the most logical reason from the point of view of someone who cares about making money, which is the whole point of a business.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks for enlightening me as to how you derive that six-figure income about which you bragged so much in your comments on a previous post, as well as further justifying my overall negative opinion of lawyers.
Only in the sense that the challenge calls for you to provide an example of an employer who is willing to flush money down the toilet just for the satisfaction of keeping women down. This is going to be difficult for obvious reasons, but you made it unnecessarily difficult for yourself. If you want to make a serious effort to meet my challenge, then large, publicly traded corporations are the worst possible place to look for a solid example as their shareholders put the highest priority on the bottom line.
ReplyDeleteShareholders in large, publicly traded corporations have very little ability to control the bottom line. There are laws that limit the power of shareholders, actually, and besides that, actors in the market do not always act rationally. While corporations pursue the bottom line in the manner in which they produce consumer goods or render services, their managements have showed themselves more than willing to spend considerable amounts of money on ego-boosting stuff that doesn't further, and at times actually hurts, business. If corporations truly looked never to overpay ever, then there wouldn't be all those corporate executives, whose compensation is as obscenely excessive as their management is incompetent.
"It should be no surprise that they say it was on account of poor performance because that is the most logical reason from the point of view of someone who cares about making money, which is the whole point of a business."
ReplyDeleteExcept they don't only care about money, and making money isn't the only perk of being in charge of a business; and even when it is, people don't always pursue that goal in a rational way.
"Anyway, thanks for enlightening me as to how you derive that six-figure income about which you bragged so much in your comments on a previous post, as well as further justifying my overall negative opinion of lawyers."
*Shrug* What difference does it make? You already detest me simply for being female, so it doesn't matter what I do for a living. This comment has about as much effect as if an anti-Semite told me he doesn't like lawyers. Not to mention the fact that your opinion simply doesn't matter to me.
"Oh, and then there's the added problem that paying a good manager less money simply for being a woman means that they run the risk of losing her to a competitor who is willing to offer her a better salary since she is such a good manager."
ReplyDeleteThat's certainly what happened with Black people, right? No one ever underpaid them for the same work, or overcharged them for the same goods, as others did or got?
Discrimination works when everyone does it and so everyone in the discriminating class benefits by it. It works even better if there's a strong culture against letting people know what others earn or pay.
If everyone pays all blue-eyed people less, then the cost of doing business goes down. If some people start paying blue-eyed people more, and they start demanding equal wages, then everyone pays more for no more work. Cost of business goes up.
I don't detest anyone for simply being female and claiming that I do without proof is libel. If my opinion truly didn't matter to you then you wouldn't respond to it, would you?
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, when I buy shares in a corporation I only care about money, and I would rather own a rising stock in a corporation that pays a huge salary to its CEO than a falling stock in that pays only a modest salary. Now if the CEO takes a huge salary while my stock plummets, THEN I'm going to use my shares to vote against the continued employment of that person, but otherwise as long as I'm making money I don't care if the CEO gets paid a lot. Multiply me by a few million and you have the reason why CEOs make so damn much.
You can't pay any employee less than the minimum amount for which that employee is willing to work, or else you lose that employee. The only way that you can pay black-skinned or blue-eyed employees less without losing them is if you were previously overpaying them, which means you are still overpaying your other employees. It's not in the economic interest of an employer to overpay employees, especially not for such a silly reason as having the "right" skin or eye color or gender.
ReplyDelete> I don't detest anyone for simply being female and claiming that I do without proof is libel.
ReplyDeleteNo it's not, you sanctimonious dweeb. It's impossible to libel an anonymous internet commenter.
Cold - "Yeah, no police are actually enforcing the idea that men pay for dates, but when a man starts insisting that dates be dutch as I started doing a few years ago, the quantity of dates they get sinks like AIG stock."
ReplyDeleteYes, this is probably true. If you put more limiters on what you want from a date, you are going to return fewer results. But we aren't talking about the difference between getting a car and getting a car you want where you might be willing to sacrifice your tastes, we are talking about sacrificing things you strongly believe in order to be in a relationship. That does not seem like a great way to ensure future success of said relationship.
I'm very, very picky about people I spend time with, not just people I have sex with but *everyone* I choose to interact with. That means I spend more time alone than I absolutely have to, but when it is time to judge the quality of my relationships, being selective pays off because I don't have one friend I don't respect or one lover I do not trust implicitly.
If you *decide* that the compromise you're making is okay, then it totally is. But please don't frame it as a compromise you are somehow being *forced* to make. It is not.
It's impossible for an anonymous internet commenter to successfully sue for libel, but it's still possible to make a false statement that is damaging to that commenter's (online)reputation which is the very definition of libel.
ReplyDeleteCold, several points.
ReplyDeleteA culture of discrimination allows businesses to save money by underpaying disadvantaged groups. For example, telephone operators were uniformly female because they were cheaper, even though they did "same job at the same proficiency with the same hours and seriority." Because women expected less pay, underpaying them was possible and in fact an efficient cost-saving measure.
The free market does not operate to increase equality in the face of social norms; in fact, it can perpetuate those norms. This is well demonstrated throughout history. The extremely free labor market of the 1880s failed to attenuate either the growing racism or the rampant sexism of the period, for example. The free market simply doesn't work the magic that you claim. There has been real inequity in pay for women and minorities under free market systems, and there still is.
As for the Ledbetter case, she was unaware that she was underpaid. She couldn't jump ship to escape discrimination that she did not know of. It simply isn't possible.
Regarding your commentary on the facts of the Ledbetter case: it's certainly true that we don't have access to all the evidence the jury saw. Therefore, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that the jury saw something. You've claimed this was a "he said, she said" situation--if that's so, why didn't the jury find for the defendant, with their better-equipped corporate lawyers? The presumption in this case ought rest with the jury's findings--unless you disbelieve in the jury system altogether.
About my "rigged" comment--you're missing my point. One of the easiest ways to discriminate is by hiring women and minorities for lower paying positions, or not promoting them as much. Of course this does render the company marginally less efficient, but that doesn't stop it from happening. Your original challenge assumed that the only way to discriminate is by paying equally ranked employees unequally. However, denial of promotion can be just as discriminatory, even though it doesn't meet your challenge.
Finally, as for your original inquiry, let's take another tack. The EEOC reports 73,058 Title VII filings in fiscal year 2010. Unless you're going to argue that every single one of those filings is without merit, then real wage discrimination is taking place in America today.
"You can't pay any employee less than the minimum amount for which that employee is willing to work, or else you lose that employee."
ReplyDeleteUnless all places of employment underpay those people.
"It's not in the economic interest of an employer to overpay employees, especially not for such a silly reason as having the "right" skin or eye color or gender."
Sure, if you're the decision maker and you have the right skin or eye color or gender. It makes huge sense for me as a blue-eyed person to say blue-eyed people should get paid a lot more.
If traditionally in my society blue-eyed people already handle all the money and make the decisions, we are the ones running the company, then we all as the company owners benefit. Screw the people with other eye colors!
Your claim only makes sense if we were all dropped on this planet yesterday with equal wealth and health and training. But we weren't.
Mr. Cold that is a libertarian assumption about the behavior of humans. People do things for all sorts of reasons that have little to no bearing on their finances.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, it has been shown in a study to have a baby in your twenties is a bad economic decision. Yet women still have children in their twenties. In fact a now MIA poster in another blog post was going to insist on his wife bearing children in her twenties.
In a perfect economic world, yes your premise would be accurate but this is reality and people do get paid less and have no idea that they do get paid less and the fact that women have been traditionally paid less has not been any guarantee that women will be hired for a job...especially in upper management.
Cold: "I also asked my friends how often they see the woman pay for the entire date cost of the meal or for both tickets, and every single one of them answered that they had either never seen it happen, or it happened maybe once in a month."
ReplyDeleteThis doesn't surprise me actually. Nearly every time I pay for my boyfriend and myself in a restaurant or bar (which, incidentally, is nearly every time we go to a restaurant or bar), I pay with my debit card (with my clearly female name). After running the card, probably 95% of servers will place it in front of my boyfriend and thank him.
I think many more women pay on dates than servers notice.
Bee
ReplyDeleteI would say that 95% of the time servers place the bill with me, the other 5% they place it between us. Because we are married and our household funds accounts are joint, unless I'm in the washroom I use my (meaning joint) card.
What bothers me about this particular mra stance is the first women willing and wanting to pay for a date would be? Feminists. Those dam feminists ruining everything… but my perfect submissive love slave should act like a feminist when the cheque comes.
All MRA arguments boil down to, "I believe all women are whores, and resent women for being whores, but of course will never actually deal with women as if they weren't whores, for fear of discovering that not all women treat sex like a profession."
ReplyDeleteHey, Amanda! I was considering recommending your post on the financial benefits of racism to white entrepreneurs, but figured that it would just sail over Cold's head. Anyway, that one was really good!
ReplyDelete(http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/hiding_behind_the_free_market_is_just_cowardly/)
My love and I have biweekly paydays on opposite weeks. Who ever gets paid this week pays for groceries, going out etc. We take turns. I earn slightly more than he does but we both are satisfied with our work. There are times when I have given him cash to carry before we arrive at a place. As noted before, many servers just assume the man is paying and it can be more efficient if he just takes care of the transaction. We both know its silly. So should you. Any way things aren't always as they seem ,so be careful when you generalize. also dont go out with people you feel used by.
ReplyDeletesee, this is what happens when they don't teach enough Behavioral Economics in Microeconomics 101.
ReplyDelete"rational actors" in economics doesn't mean people act 100% rationally, it means that they tend to in predictable ways to achieve whatever goals they have.
This does not exclude subconscious discrimination.
It also does not exclude taking advantage of social norms and pressures to lower operation costs, for example the way the Chaebol hired only women because South Korean culture made young women so much easier to control and severely underpay.
And lastly, when your choice is to be underpaid or not paid at all, a "rational actor" will be underpaid, because the alternative is a sudden lack of access to basic necessities.
Result: pay-discrimination for historically disadvantaged groups.
oh, and I've also experienced having my debit card returned to my boyfriend in restaurants.
ReplyDeleteand before I was in this relationship, I generally tried to split the check or pay for the meal, but I sure as fuck wasn't going to argue about it. I've seen people do that, all the way up to slapping their credit cards out of each other, and quite frankly, I'm not willing to participate in that sort of slapstick. If I offer to pay and he refuses, he doesn't get to complain that I didn't pay.
huh. my boyfriend costs me somewhere around $200 a fuck. that's what I get for buying him expensive espresso machines...
ReplyDeleteSigh. It's funny to me how conservatives "link" people with the overt and obvious hope that people don't click the links and read what is actually said. Eri, your strategy of forcing people to copy/paste in hopes they don't click the link and see that you're describing my argument in bad faith couldn't be more obvious. No HTML in 2011? You're easier to read than a creepy dude whining that women don't want to date "nice guys" like him.
ReplyDeleteFor those who actually care about honesty, here's the article. What you'll immediately realize is that Eri, by objecting to my post, is arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shouldn't have been passed, because it's "racist", and that segregation is apparently the best way to stop racism. Fascinating argument, largely rejected by thinking people.
@Amanda: Eri linked to your post to illustrate how wrong Cold was earlier to say that the free market solves discrimination problems without legislation. Cold was arguing that it didn't make sense for Goodyear to underpay Lilly Ledbetter, because it would cause her to go work for another company, and that companies are always gender/race/religion blind. Eri linked him to your article to show him he was wrong.
ReplyDelete@All
ReplyDeleteIt's ERL. Sorry about the confusion.
@Amanda:
As girlscientist noted, I actually approved of your post. The tone of my point was fanboyish glee, not sarcasm. I hadn't been aware of some of the mechanisms by which discrimination opened up opportunities for economic advantages, and you helped me to understand them.
I don't that you read my shit skills with an href tag as evidence that I'm opposed to the Civil Rights act. I am and always have been in favor of the act, civil rights, and government action to protect those rights. I'm frankly at a loss to see how you read my original post as a criticism of you in any way. It wasn't, and I'm sorry that it somehow conveyed that misunderstanding.
All MRA arguments boil down to, "I believe all women are whores, and resent women for being whores, but of course will never actually deal with women as if they weren't whores, for fear of discovering that not all women treat sex like a profession."
ReplyDeleteLOL Amanda, it never ceases to amuse me how you pretend to be a rational skeptic but then make crazy universal statements like that one which aren't even remotely true. When I'm considering whether a skeptic event is worth attending, the first thing I do is make sure that you are NOT on the list of speakers.
Mr. Cold that is a libertarian assumption about the behavior of humans. People do things for all sorts of reasons that have little to no bearing on their finances.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, it has been shown in a study to have a baby in your twenties is a bad economic decision. Yet women still have children in their twenties. In fact a now MIA poster in another blog post was going to insist on his wife bearing children in her twenties.
I was clearly speaking about the behavior of BUSINESS, not humans. Businesses are run by humans, but the kind of decisions a human makes for a business are not identical to the decisions they make for themselves. Otherwise, there would be almost no restaurant industry since for the vast majority of the population it costs more to eat at one than the value of the time they save by not having to perpare their own meal.
Eri linked to your post to illustrate how wrong Cold was earlier to say that the free market solves discrimination problems without legislation. Cold was arguing that it didn't make sense for Goodyear to underpay Lilly Ledbetter, because it would cause her to go work for another company, and that companies are always gender/race/religion blind. Eri linked him to your article to show him he was wrong.
ReplyDeleteExcept that I never said that the free market SOLVES discrimination, in fact I never even USED the words "free market". What I said is that it is against the economic interest of any business to overpay their employees, which is precisely what they would be doing to their male employees if they were able to pay their female employees less money for doing the same job with the same hours and proficiency without losing them.
Just because it is against someone's economic interest to do something doesn't mean that they absolutely won't do it; if that were true then the banks wouldn't have created the conditions that lead to the 2008 collapse. Sometimes people act in their PERCEIVED economic interest which is different from their actual interest, and occasionally they even knowingly act against their interest by giving a job to a family member who isn't actually the best-qualified candidate, although that is far, far more likely to happen with a small business than with a large, publicly traded corporation.
Tying that back to the Goodyear case, the fact remains that if Ledbetter was truly such a great-performing managed who deserved higher pay, then it was in Goodyear's interest to pay it even if they were keeping each manager's salary confidential from the others? Why? Because people who are unsatisfied with their pay tend to keep their eyes open for higher-paying jobs in their field. I make nearly twice as much per hour now as I do when I first started working in my current occupation because I kept an eye out for what other employers were offering, which is how I know that my first employer grossly underpaid me despite the fact that I have a penis.
Is it possible that Goodyear acted against their economic interest and paid her less just for being a woman? Yes. Is that more likely than the possibility that they paid her less simply for being an inferior manager? No, unless direct evidence can be presented.
Cold, you may not have used the term "free market," but you argued the issue from implicit and false free market principles. It simply isn't true that businesses always pay the "right" amount, or the absolute lowest that the market will bear. Sometimes they will pay privileged workers more and underprivileged workers less. This has been demonstrated explicitly in a wide array of historical contexts, and you've done nothing to show that it cannot have occurred in the Goodyear case, simply insisted that it would be silly. Fair enough: in theory, it oughtn't have occurred. But it did.
ReplyDeleteFurther, you're continuing to ignore the finding of the jury. I don't need to present direct evidence when I can show through the verdict that a panel of twelve of my peers found the evidence dispositive.
Finally, and perhaps I'm simply being impatient, but you haven't addressed my data from the EEOC. Do you assert that all 73,058 claims of discrimination are without merit, or do you accept that real discrimination is still occurring?
Did Cold just use the "I am the world" derailing argument? Yep, he did. Dude, you are not the world.
ReplyDeleteYou may choose to be that way but another human will not be that way. Which is why humans consistently make idiotic business decisions regardless of the size of business.
@Erl Daschund: Dude, don't bother. He just doesn't want to address any argument that doesn't go his way, and he casts aspersions on people whose experience don't fit with his prejudices. It's obvious that he's intellectually lazy. We can answer his comments until we're black and blue, it won't change a thing.
ReplyDelete@girlscientist: I know, I know. I should really get over my "Someone Is Wrong On The Internet" issues. But . . . well, you know the urge.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I am getting a bit of a headache, and have to go do real life stuff now, so see you guys later.
The combination of lust for women, with hatred of women, expressed at that website (costofsex.com), is pretty strange. The misogynists don't want a world without women, they just want cheaper relationships. The social effect of misogyny is a lot like the economic effects of Wall Mart.
ReplyDeleteOh, cold, must you be wrong about EVERYthing?
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, there would be almost no restaurant industry since for the vast majority of the population it costs more to eat at one than the value of the time they save by not having to perpare their own meal.
For single people living on their own, this is often not true.
Also, people go to restaurants in order to eat well-prepared food that they don't know how to cook, or that would be really inconvenient and time-consuming to make. I don't know how to make good Thai food, or Indian food, or, really, much of anything beyond grilled cheese sandwiches, but with a simple visit to GrubHub I can get all the Thai or Indian or Mexican food I want for a reasonable price. Delivered to my door!
If I want a lemon meringue pie, I could spend hours trying to make one, and make a mess of it, or I could just get one at a bakery.
Damn. I'm making myself hungry.
Anyway, dude, for someone with such faith in capitalism you seem a little rusty on the whole division of labor thing. There's a cool book you might want to read sometime. It's called Wealth of Nations, by some dude with a wig named Adam Smith.
It simply isn't true that businesses always pay the "right" amount, or the absolute lowest that the market will bear.
ReplyDeleteDid I say that businesses ALWAYS do anything? No, I didn't, in fact I specifically said that sometimes business don't act in their own economic interest, either because they incorrectly perceive it or because, primarily in the cases of small business, the director's personal biases come into play. In a large, publicly traded corporation, however, that latter situation becomes highly unlikely.
I shouldn't even have to explain that it is in the interest of each employee to be paid as much as possible, and it is in the interest of each employer to pay as little as possible, no matter what the race, gender, or whatever of the employee. Those conflicting interests form the basis of most job market dynamics.
Sometimes they will pay privileged workers more and underprivileged workers less.
Are you talking about individual privilege or group privilege. Obviously any individual worker who is being paid more is privileged by being paid more, that is a meaningless tautology. If you mean group privilege, then you know know that I only recognize the existence of two privileged groups in western society: females and the upper class. That's it; talking about any other group being privileged is a non-starter with me unless you can link to a detailed, lucid, and well-sourced article that makes a compelling case for the existence of another privileged group.
and you've done nothing to show that it cannot have occurred in the Goodyear case, simply insisted that it would be silly.
I never said it CANNOT have occurred, only that I consider the likelihood of it having occurred to be very low and that in my opinion it DID NOT occur. I'm not the one who bears the burden of proof here.
Further, you're continuing to ignore the finding of the jury. I don't need to present direct evidence when I can show through the verdict that a panel of twelve of my peers found the evidence dispositive.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever been called for jury duty? I have; I could easily have gotten out of it but went along with it to satisfy my curiosity. At selection, I had a chance to assess the intelligence of the others in the room and found that most of them were below average. More importantly the intelligent ones, myself included, were not selected apparently because we demonstrated ourselves as being intelligent and somewhat knowledgeable of the legal system when questioned. I have spoken with others who have also been at selection and heard similar stories, so I know it's not just me.
So, having learned that juries are composed of people of below-average intelligence, WHY would I believe something to be true just because a jury thought so? Juries don't even do a very good job of assessing reasonable doubt; if they did then there wouldn't be so many cases of convictions being overturned. If they can't do that reliably, then how are they going to perform the more nuanced assessment of balance of probability?
Finally, and perhaps I'm simply being impatient, but you haven't addressed my data from the EEOC. Do you assert that all 73,058 claims of discrimination are without merit, or do you accept that real discrimination is still occurring?
You seem to be of the opinion that the legal system is fair and that claims are decided fairly. That's nice, but I don't share it. I consider the legal system to be rife with both corruption and incompetence, therefore you will never convince me of much by simply mentioning the existence of claims that were decided a certain way. I am convinced by direct evidence, and by little else.
Now, despite the fact that I regard jurors as my intellectual inferiors, it is not lost on me that they sat through the whole trial and saw all the evidence from both sides while I am just going by summaries available online. Therefore, I don't want to be TOO quick to second-guess them, but the fact is that *I* have not seen any credible evidence that Goodyear deliberately paid Ledbetter less just for being a woman, just self-interested testimony.
Did Cold just use the "I am the world" derailing argument? Yep, he did. Dude, you are not the world.
ReplyDeleteDid you just commit the strawman fallacy? Yes, you did.
You may choose to be that way but another human will not be that way. Which is why humans consistently make idiotic business decisions regardless of the size of business.
How many times do I have to repeat that just because something is in the economic interest of a business, that does NOT make the probability of the business doing that thing 100%? There are always exceptions, but exceptions by their very nature have a probability that is below 50% which is the cut-off point in a civil case. That means if you want to assert that the exception actually took place, YOU bear the burden of proof.
Cold:
ReplyDeleteI am convinced by direct evidence, and by little else.
No you're not. You accept things that fit your prejudices, and reject those that don't.
Again, back to that "evil feminist quote" list you provided. You didn't look up the original source of the quotes there -- that is, the "direct evidence" that those quotes are accurate and not distorted by being quoted out of context.
Instead, you relied on hearsay -- the word of another person, the person who compiled that list -- without checking for accuracy, or knowing anything about the research skills or simple honesty of the person who compiled the list.
When you wanted "evidence" that men almost always pay for dates, you asked guys on an MGTOW forum who claimed to have worked in restaurants and took their claims as truth.
Otherwise, there would be almost no restaurant industry since for the vast majority of the population it costs more to eat at one than the value of the time they save by not having to perpare their own meal.
ReplyDeleteFor single people living on their own, this is often not true.
I'm a single person who lives on my own, the value of an hour of my time is above average, AND I am surrounded by cheap restaurants, yet it is still cheaper for me to make my own meals. Now perhaps if I was a bigshot lawyer like Amused claims to be and made over $100 an hour, I was a horribly inefficient cook, and/or the nearest grocery store was much further away than the nearest restaurant, THEN it might be the case that eating in a restaurant is cheaper than preparing one's own meals, but this is certainly not the case for the vast majority of the population.
Also, people go to restaurants in order to eat well-prepared food that they don't know how to cook, or that would be really inconvenient and time-consuming to make.
Yes, that's exactly my point. When people make choices for THEMSELVES, as opposed to their business, they are much more likely to consider intangible things like personal enjoyment of well-prepared food. If we all conducted our personal lives exactly like a business, focused on the bottom line, then restaurants would only exist for the highest earners and there would be no film industry, no videogame industry, and no music industry whatsoever. That's why pointing to people's PERSONAL lives in an effort to refute my point about BUSINESS is a faulty analogy.
Anyway, dude, for someone with such faith in capitalism you seem a little rusty on the whole division of labor thing.
I don't have faith in anything, but the fact is that we live in a society that practices a form of capitalism and is subject to market dynamics, hence I speak about them.
@David:
ReplyDeleteYou accept things that fit your prejudices, and reject those that don't.
And that has probably more to do with why he wasn't selected for jury duty than his self-proclaimed superior intelligence.
I imagine Cold orbiting the Earth in some kind of armored satellite, desiring and hating the blue-green orb that scrolls endlessly beneath him, and issuing threats of thermonuclear war.
ReplyDeleteCold, if we acted like a lot of businesses do, we all would go running around throwing our money at already overpaid CEOs and trying to wheedle money out of any low-paid workers we ran across.
ReplyDelete...except that his radio transmitter is broken. What a pity.
ReplyDeleteNo you're not. You accept things that fit your prejudices, and reject those that don't.
ReplyDeleteIt's human nature to do that and it takes conscious effort to resist doing that. I exert much more effort than the average person not to do that, but I'm not perfect.
Again, back to that "evil feminist quote" list you provided. You didn't look up the original source of the quotes there -- that is, the "direct evidence" that those quotes are accurate and not distorted by being quoted out of context.
You found ONE quote in the entire list that was out of context, and the source for that quote was a old issue of a magazine that I assumed was not available online. Furthermore, I never even used that quote directly. I didn't write that list and I consider it to be outdated, which is why I joined the effort to produce a better list.
When you wanted "evidence" that men almost always pay for dates, you asked guys on an MGTOW forum who claimed to have worked in restaurants and took their claims as truth.
Right below that poll I mentioned that I had asked the same question of my friends the previous day but that I figured it couldn't hurt to poll the forum as well. My offline friends are of a variety of persuasions and have no reason to lie to me, but I never claimed that the results of my polling them was anything more than anecdotal evidence. If you have access some some reliable, scientific study on how often women pay their own way on dates then by all means, share. Lacking that I go with the next-best thing, which is the word of people I trust. I'm a "trust, but verify" kind of guy when dealing with friends, but when it's not possible to directly verify then all I can do is trust cautiously.
And that has probably more to do with why he wasn't selected for jury duty than his self-proclaimed superior intelligence.
ReplyDeleteYou can believe what you like, but I was there and you weren't.
I imagine Cold orbiting the Earth in some kind of armored satellite, desiring and hating the blue-green orb that scrolls endlessly beneath him, and issuing threats of thermonuclear war.
I imagine that you watch too many sci-fi movies. Don't get me wrong, I'm a sci-fi fan myself, but sometimes there's too much of a good thing.
@Cold: You're adorable.
ReplyDeleteCold, again, you didn't check any of the references in that list before posting it. So you're more of a trust-but-don't-bother-to-even-try-to-verify guy, it seems.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, you reject the jury verdict in the Ledbetter case based on nothing except your notion that jury members are stupid. Do you reject all jury verdicts out of hand, or just this one?
I can think of a few jury verdicts I don't accept, but only because I've actually looked into the cases myself. Like, say, the original OJ verdict.
Someone named Cold has some serious issues with the concept of logic and reality and basically everything.
ReplyDeleteLet us break it down cuz I have a lazy Sunday afternoon to while the time away with such silliness.
Lack of knowledge of what "I am the world" means was the first glaring example: you made a claim that obviously people would not be paid less because they would be off to look for another job as soon as they could...after all YOU did it that means everyone does it. See what that is? Not a strawman but a "I am the world" attempt at derailing. Which failed spectacularly like almost everything you post does.
As for your laughable claim regarding jury service-unlike you, I work in the judicial system. Not the attorney side of it but court's side. And the jury selection process is not a system of picking "below average" persons to decide cases. It is a system that attempts to weed out those who will be biased. If you were not picked, it had little to do with going for stupid people and more to do with the size of a jury that is picked (and contrary to popular belief, most juries are six to eight persons not twelve.) So having a room of 50 possible jurors means that the first 20 will be the most likely pool that will have people picked. I have seen juries with doctors, engineers, construction workers and all sorts of persons. In fact, generally the ONLY type of person who will be rejected right from the get go is an attorney or judge. The reason for this that an attorney I asked gave me that I thought was stupid was they assume that the rest of the jury would follow the attorney or judge's view since the jury would defer to the greater knowledge of the system that attorneys and judges have.)
Also, if you took two seconds to actually read some of the decisions reversing the jury's decisions, you would find that the problem lies not in what they decided but in what went on prior to the trial. If you have a factor of police misconduct (Mapp v Ohio), a factor of prosecutor misconduct (the Duke Lacrosse case is a recent high profile example), a lack of proper jury instruction or a number of other things, you have reversal depending on what the original judge did. Not on what the jury did since they are only to decide on the evidence presented in court. If that evidence is lacking, you have them making a decision that does not follow what actually happened.
So you are making a bunch of assumptions based on your overblown sense of self about juries that has little bearing on reality and shows an obvious lack of knowledge of the legal system.
*laughs even harder at Cold's supercilious postings*
ReplyDeleteI exert much more effort than the average person not to do that
ReplyDeletelol
I imagine that you watch too many sci-fi movies.
ReplyDeletePerhaps. In addition, I guess the fantastical ideas suggested in the "cost of sex" test, that men will take a rigorously mathematical look at their relationships and decide to abandon the opposite sex based on their calculations, have put me in that frame of mind.
Cold, again, you didn't check any of the references in that list before posting it. So you're more of a trust-but-don't-bother-to-even-try-to-verify guy, it seems.
ReplyDeleteI checked as many as I could, but when the source is a magazine that was published decades ago I tend to assume that it's long-gone. You can keep harping on that one quote all you like but does nothing to negate the rest of the list.
Meanwhile, you reject the jury verdict in the Ledbetter case based on nothing except your notion that jury members are stupid. Do you reject all jury verdicts out of hand, or just this one?
It's not so much that I reject jury verdicts but that I don't give them as much weight as some people, especially in civil cases which I don't believe should even have juries. "You should belive this because a panel of people with below-average intelligence decided that it was at least 50% likely to be true" is not a convincing argument to me. Is I said before, it is not lost on me that these jurors sat through the trial and saw everything and for that reason and ONLY for that reason I am willing to give some consideration to their decision, but I absolutely will not take their verdict on faith.
Lack of knowledge of what "I am the world" means was the first glaring example: you made a claim that obviously people would not be paid less because they would be off to look for another job as soon as they could...after all YOU did it that means everyone does it.
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what it means and I know that I didn't do it. My statements about the nature of how businesses operate are based on actual, first-hand experience as well as the contents of textbooks and articles on the subject. You have made the wild and false speculation that I imagine that everyone in business is of the exact same mind as me and passed it off as fact, which is a strawman fallacy. Deal with it.
As for your laughable claim regarding jury service-unlike you, I work in the judicial system.
And you think telling me that makes me MORE likely to believe what you say? Sorry but the opposite is true; I have enough experience with the judicial system to know not to take anything you people say at face value. Yes, that's a prejudice of mine, but it's one that I consider to be justified and of course it always takes a back seat to actual evidence, should you ever provide any.
If that evidence is lacking, you have them making a decision that does not follow what actually happened.
If the jurors actually understood what reasonable doubt meant, then a lack of exculpatory evidence wouldn't actually hurt the defendant that much. In actual fact it does hurt the defendant greatly, at least if the defendant is a man, but that's because jurors generally aren't good at assessing reasonable doubt.
Cold:
ReplyDeleteI checked as many as I could,
Given that the very first quote on the list is fictional, I rather doubt that is true.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinnon.asp
Can you show me even ONE link to the original source of any of these quotes?
I'm checking the list now, and will be doing a post about it.
You mean you will actually take a break from mocking the fringes of the MRM and implying that they represent the movement in general, and you will actually make a post of substance? I'm looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteI don't own a copy of Professing Feminism and I haven't been able to find a complete copy online. The butchered version available on Google Books is missing page 129. Like I said, I checked as many as I could but that wasn't one of them.
I'm quite happy to have you do my research for me, but I can't offer you anything in return for it other than the honorable mention that you declined.
Um, no. I was pointing out that you were making a claim that has no basis in reality-just because YOU ran off and got a better paying job does not mean that anyone else would. Some people do. Some do not. And others make claims that what they do, everyone else does.
ReplyDeleteDo you understand what reasonable doubt is? I have a preponderance of evidence that shows you do not.
Can you show me even ONE link to the original source of any of these quotes?
ReplyDeleteSure, here is the source, from a .gov domain no less, for the following quote from Hillary Clinton:
Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.
So? Sometimes women are victims of war even more than men.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_rape
ReplyDeleteBeing killed > being raped.
ReplyDeleteCold, I found the quote in Professing FEminism online with no problem. The quote is not from MacKinnon, but from two critics of feminism paraphrasing what they believe is the argument of MacKinnon and Dworkin.
ReplyDeletehttp://books.google.com/books?id=5IKHbZacWJYC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=%22In+a+patriarchal+society+all+heterosexual+intercourse+is+rape+because+women%22+professing&source=bl&ots=7eQMcIuakL&sig=pRQAhcJDO3Wh0d7JRy9adbNnW7g&hl=en&ei=dHlYTaqdNYLHgAfWt_ihDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false
Besides Hillary, do you have any other links?
I'm just interested to see how many quotes you actually checked before putting the list up.
My suspicion is zero, and that you simply looked up the Hillary quote after being challenged. (I mean, if you'd checked enough to find out that the very first quote was wrong, wouldn't you have noted that when posting it? Or thought twice about posting such a list?) But even if you are looking them up now I would appreciate any links you have.
I know that many, perhaps even most, of these quotes are in fact accurate. But I've found three imaginary/misleading quotes so far, which suggests that whoever put it together did a pretty shoddy job of it, and that MRAs circulating the list have never bothered to check it out themselves.
Um, no. I was pointing out that you were making a claim that has no basis in reality-just because YOU ran off and got a better paying job does not mean that anyone else would. Some people do. Some do not.
ReplyDeleteAh, the bright minds that the judicial system hires. My own experience was clearly offered as an ILLUSTRATION of how "people who are unsatisfied with their pay tend to keep their eyes open for higher-paying jobs in their field." That's a true statement, but it seems like the meaning of "tend to" escaped you thus resulting in your impression that I thought I was the world.
You might want to look up this concept of "asymmetry of information". See, if I'm an employer and I have the miraculous power to read every employee's mind, then I can simply pay each of them the bare minimum to keep them with me and only if I become aware that they are looking at the wages of others in their field will I consider raising their pay.
In reality, however, nobody has these powers and hence as an employer I would have to deal with an asymmetry of information. I don't know which employees are hunting for higher-paying jobs elsewhere and which ones will continue working for me indefinitely no matter how little I pay. Therefore, I have to seriously consider the prospect of my best employees leaving me if I don't pay them enough and act accordingly, even if in actual fact they have no intention of ever leaving.
Actually your proffer was basically you doing as I said.
ReplyDeleteThat's nice that Google offers the full text now, but at the time that I looked for that book they only offered a butchered "preview" that was missing about half the pages, including page 129. Hence, I gave the author the benefit of the doubt for that one. In hindsight that was a mistake.
ReplyDeleteI didn't join the new list project on a lark; I did so specifically because I'm not satisfied with that out-of-date list and I want a better one that includes all the hateful quotes made since the 90s.
Don't think that I'm not aware of your game in asking for links. You know perfectly well that the sources are mostly copyrighted works that can be easily acquired through bit torrent and file sharing sites but which cannot simply be hyperlinked. Nobody is stopping from going to a library to check the actual books, which puts you at no legal risk. You can also download them if you want, but you do that at your own risk.
Actually your proffer was basically you doing as I said.
ReplyDeleteOh you mean because I still used myself in the illustration? That doesn't change the fact that employers generally do operate that way or else they wouldn't even bother with performance bonuses. By repeatedly claiming that I think I am the world, which is entirely false and which adds nothing of value to this exchange, it is YOU who is making a deliberate effort to derail.
Cold, here's a radical idea: why not simply omit the quotes you can't verify? And if you have doubts about some quotes on a list, why don't you just, you know, not post that list?
ReplyDeleteBack to the original topic of the post, though, I have to admit it's somewhat telling that while many of the female posters here have done the calculation for either themselves or on their boyfriend's/husband's behalf, none of the aforementioned male Significant Others have popped in to provide their own calculations. I have to wonder if the prices they'd give--if they could do so confidentially, of course-- would be significantly higher than what many of the ladies here would prefer them to say it is.
ReplyDeleteNow, before anyone asks--Me? I got 0 on all counts, since I don't have a girlfriend, am not looking for one, and don't need sex enough to "Game" a girl or find a hooker. Feels good man.
…when a man starts insisting that dates be dutch as I started doing a few years ago, the quantity of dates they get sinks like AIG stock.
ReplyDelete…each time I have sex costs me $18.50. I'd say that's some pretty good bang for my buck…
...leeches...
…being a leech…
Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier, thanks.
When a woman starts insisting that dates be dutch, the quantity of dates sink. The quality of the few men who were willing to defy gender roles and have an equitable relationship was well above average, but the fact remains that most men believe that empowered women are emasculating and I see no indication that MRA's are less likely to believe this while demonizing feminists and reinforcing the gender normative by calling feminist men "beta" males.
ReplyDeleteMissdk, do you seriously expect people to believe a word of this story? A lot of men will insist on paying for dates because they have been brainwashed with outdated chivalry crap and think it is their manly duty, or because they think if a woman offers to pay her way it is actually a test of his chivalry and he has to insist on paying in order to pass, but if anything more than a tiny fringe of men had a serious problem with a woman even OFFERING to pay her own way, I think I would have heard about it at least once by now.
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, I think you're lying through your teeth, not that I expect anything less from feminists.
It's also clear that you have done only the most cursory examination of MRAs since any kind of intellectually diligent examination would have informed you that our preferred term for feminist men is "manginas" and that we consider our own ranks to be mostly "beta" males mainly because true "alpha" males have it pretty good in our society and are unlikely to be motivated to join our fold.
Also, the terms "alpha", "beta", and "omega" come from the scientific study of pack animals and are used analogously in human evolutionary psychology. It has nothing to do with any kind of "gender normative". On top of that, the growing trend among MRAs is to reject that hierarchy and classify ourselves as "zeta" males. Again, you would know that if you had actually done some real research into our movement.
Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier, thanks.
ReplyDeleteI looked way back to see exactly what Shaenon was saying earlier, and noticed that she said this:
Also, who buys a new car on a yearly basis? I will punch you if I find you.
OMG David, do you see that? Shaenon made a direct, physical threat against anyone who is rich and buys a new car every year! Are you going to grab Shaenon's IP address and report it to the FBI, or at least make a post about this dangerous psychopath?
Oh wait, you won't because Shaenon is a woman and therefore it's just a harmless joke when she talks about punching people.
Cold.
ReplyDeleteGrasping at straws aren't you? You are a great example of how mra's think..
Point out obvious signs of intellectual laziness is grasping at straws now? Tell me more...
ReplyDeleteAccording to cold: "for the vast majority of the population it costs more to eat at one than the value of the time they save by not having to perpare their own meal."
ReplyDeleteSo all the times your gf or wife prepares a meal, it saves *you* money.
So that should go in your little calculator.
Actually my girfriend isn't a very good cook so I do all the cooking. Apparently you didn't get the message that men are also able to cook and have never heard of Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay, or Hidekazu Tojo.
ReplyDeleteMen and women both cook. Women still do more cooking at home, though. Range of minutes spent cooking per day, based on the American Time Use Survey 2003-2004:
ReplyDeleteUnemployed women: 65-51
Employed women: 46-38
Unemployed men: 43-31
Employed men: 33-21
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10266102/Whos-cooking-Time-spent-preparing-food-by-gender-income-and-household-composition
I'm not married to Bobby Flay or Nigella Lawson so the gender proportion of professional cooks/chefs isn't really relevant.
So, Cold, you should make sure your girlfriend factors all of the meals you cook into *her* cost-benefit analysis of y'all's relationship.
ReplyDeleteJust make sure you count her contributions at your hourly rate and vice versa, because that's what she's saving you (and you're saving her).
ReplyDeleteI'm absolutely shocked that cold blithely ignored my correction of his anecdotal and flawed understanding of labor markets and decision making in the market.
ReplyDelete@Cold: "I don't detest anyone for simply being female and claiming that I do without proof is libel. If my opinion truly didn't matter to you then you wouldn't respond to it, would you?"
ReplyDeleteOh, is it now? When did you learn all that jurisprudence, in all of your three hours of jury duty, at the end of which you were unanimously disqualified for your super-inflated ego, Everest-sized bias and obvious lack of impartiality? Anyway, hints at litigation won't work on me, pal. I know this is apparently MRA modus operandi, but you are barking up the wrong tree here. If you believe you've been libeled, go ahead, sue me. Make the necessary motion to get my identity disclosed and go from there. After all, any moron with a filing fee and a map to the courthouse can file whatever he wants. I can't wait to send you discovery demands and take your depo. Then I'll make a thorough search of your writings on the Internet, and we'll let the judge decide whether or not you hate women. And of course, after I get your case dismissed, I'll countersue for malicious prosecution. That should be a fun exercise.
@Hide-and-Seek: "So, Cold, you should make sure your girlfriend factors all of the meals you cook into *her* cost-benefit analysis of y'all's relationship."
Don't forget the wear-and-tear of furniture and household fixtures, as well as apportioning the rent and utilities to the extent only Cold uses them.
I never said I was going to sue you, you paranoid twit. Making false statements about me that are damaging to my reputation, even if it's just the reputation of an online persona, meets the definition of libel regardless of whether or not I sue you or am able to sue you. I'm calling you on your blatant intellectual dishonesty and drawing attention to the fact that you have no qualms about engaging in libel against me and other MRAs, not threatening you with a pointless lawsuit that would require me to disclose my actual identity. And people wonder why I have so little respect for lawyers...
ReplyDeleteI'm absolutely shocked that cold blithely ignored my correction of his anecdotal and flawed understanding of labor markets and decision making in the market.
ReplyDeleteI'm absolutely shocked that David ignored Shaenon's direct, physical threat against rich people who buy at least one new car every year.
Meanwhile, I had no reason to think that your post was directed at me since it doesn't address any actual argument that I made. Well, ok, I suppose from context it can be concluded that I was the most likely addressee, but why would I bother responding to a rebuttal to an argument that I never made? I never said that people ever acted 100% rationally(anyone who has worked even a day in retail knows that's not true) and I never said that business never exploits systematic iniquities. However, IF a business is going to exploit such an iniquity, it will manifest in ONLY women(or some other supposedly disadvantaged group) being hired for a certain kind of job. It doesn't even touch my point, which is that it is against the economic interest of an employer to pay extra money to some employees doing the same job with the same hours and proficiency simply for being male when they could instead simply pay them the same as the women and replace them with women if they leave on account of being paid less than the minimum for which they are going to work. Really, if a complete strawman argument is the best you can do against my point then you have nothing.
Men and women both cook. Women still do more cooking at home, though. Range of minutes spent cooking per day, based on the American Time Use Survey 2003-2004:
ReplyDeleteUnemployed women: 65-51
Employed women: 46-38
Unemployed men: 43-31
Employed men: 33-21
How do you know that's not simply because men are more efficient cooks than women on average, or that employed people are more efficient than the unemployed, perhaps on account of having to quickly make breakfast and then head off to work?
When I talk about cooking with my fellow employed men, a lot of the conversation revolves around how to get the job done faster. To that end we spend a lot of time talking about efficient techniques for chopping vegetables and about which time-saving tools are worth buying.
When I see women cooking, I notice that they tend to enjoy the task more and don't feel like there is any need to hurry, which is fine. One doesn't need to hurry at a task they enjoy doing, but it's dishonest to use the fact that they took longer to conclude that they must be cooking more. It may still be true, but you need to come up with something better than time figures.
That's probably it, Cold. Employed Men are obviously twice as efficient in their vegetable chopping than Unemployed Women. They can also boil water in seconds using only the power of their minds.
ReplyDeleteI think you missed the word "hint" in her reply Cold.
ReplyDeleteShe was saying that if you want to hint at it, she is ready to tear you a new one.
we spend a lot of time talking about efficient techniques for chopping vegetables
ReplyDeleteHmm. This might be good for a t-shirt.
Insert "to do more than" in my last comment. Dang trying to talk and type about two different subjects at the same time.
ReplyDelete