I’ve been accused of having “femi-nazi†tendencies and of underestimating the influence of feminism. One reason I believe feminism is inherently limited in its influence and appeal is that it tends to focus on female careers. The simple fact of the matter is that the majority of females, like the majority of males, neither have nor aspire anything as highfalutin’ as a career. Both women and men in the labor market are likely to have employment more accurately described as jobs.
Moreover, even when feminism does not focus on careers, it inevitably still focuses on jobs in the paid labor market. The truth is that the paid labor market can be both unsavory and unkind to many individuals of both sexes even apart from questions of discrimination on the basis of gender.
I put up a previous blog called Scott’s Slipping Down Life. Some readers thought the most important part of it was the question of Scott’s sexuality, i.e., whether this man who often is supported by other men and prostitutes himself to them is really heterosexual (as he claims), bisexual, or homosexual. What I found far more important is that he is a man approaching forty who not only has nothing worthy of the title career but has trouble holding down even humble jobs.
Is Scott’s trouble due to having to compete on an equal basis with women in the labor market?
Has affirmative action for women prevented him from earning a living because the jobs he would have had are going to females to make a good impression on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?
In a word, No. When Scott works normal jobs, he almost invariably works the sort of strength intensive jobs in which he competes for the most part with other men rather than affirmative action amazons. He easily gets these jobs as he has very well developed upper-body musculature. He easily loses them, not because a Wonder Woman appears on the scene but because he shows up drunk or doesn’t bother to show up.
Scott has a weak relationship to the labor market for reasons that have nothing at all to do with feminism. Heck, in one small, even trivial way, feminism may even have helped Scott at one point! Playgirl magazine began publishing at about the time the second wave of the feminist movement was making a lot of waves and was sometimes touted as a magazine for liberated women although I understand that roughly half of its readership (viewership?) is in fact male. Many years ago, a buddy of Scott’s sent a photograph of his handsome buns to that magazine and Playgirl published the picture. Scott may have received a little cash from that.
I have a close female friend who is also often buffeted by the rigors of the labor market and, once again, feminism is neither here nor there although many of those feminists who glorify the nine-to-five job could, and should, take a reality check from her experience and that of similarly situated women and men.
When I first met the friend I will call Estelle, she worked as a telemarketer for a company that sold carpet cleaning. She showed me a copy of the script she read. It consisted of a couple of sentences.
Not too long after that, she no longer had the job although I can’t recall whether she quit or was fired.
I do remember that she left one telemarketing job because she got into a hassle with the supervisor who was upset because crabs had been found on the toilet and was accusing various workers there of having transmitted them.
At one point, she had a telemarketing job in which she called businesses up to sell them postage meters. I wanted to help her with her sales and asked my boss at The Caribbean Star if he would like one. He already had one. I phoned my ex-husband, a professor at Tulane University with the same question and got the same answer.
A depressed Estelle soon told me she had been fired because she had not made enough sales.
Her mood was brighter when she informed me that a dry-cleaning company had hired her. She was upbeat after being on the job for a few days. It was a welcome break from telemarketing because “I don’t have to deal with crabby people all day long.â€Â
Not long after that, she was complaining about the job. She has back problems and being on her feet so much aggravated them. “You have to go real fast,†she added. “My supervisor has terrible breath.â€Â
She quit after a couple of weeks.
I sent Estelle some cash to help her make ends meet.
She got a job selling magazine subscriptions but lost it after a few days because she could not make enough sales.
Estelle worked in a warehouse doing assembly and held the job for about a month. She did find at the assembly and liked it just fine but the warehouse finished the project it was doing and laid all of its workers off.
She got another telemarketing job and did extremely well, even earning a Telemarketer of the Month Award, but then the company closed up.
What is to be learned from Estelle’s experience? Paid work is frequently not the least bit exalted or exalting. As Arianna Huffington astutely noted in her first book, The Female Woman, “There is nothing glamorous about being a file clerk – even at Ms. magazine.â€Â
Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and others may have many years and extraordinary resources go into developing the talents and skills for their jobs but in much of the labor market the training consists of a brief “put it together like this†or being handed a telemarketing script.
Everyday jobs are not about million dollar deals and shining in the spotlight but may be about one supervisor griping about the state of the office toilet seat and another offending a worker with severe halitosis.
Perhaps even worse, the labor market can be a dispiriting place in which more time is spent looking for a job than working at it.
Nothing glamorous about it.
