http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3675766.ece
(This link may not work for non-subscribers)
Sensational headline much? I thought I would do Janice one better and make her point even more clearly. According to Janice, middle class men are “useless” because they don’t read Martha Stewart and STILL get all pissy about screechy harridans living in the house with them.
Come on now, lads. What is your problem?
Turner’s article is all the usual tired clichés about men and housewives and why women are awesome and men suck, but I found this statement particularly delightful:
“…it seems easier to train a bonobo monkey to play Chopin than a human male to pick up his own pants.”
Oh my. Lucky Mr. Turner, eh? You know Janice, this is actually a really easy problem to solve. Your husband leaves his pants on the floor? Leave them there. It’s his house, he lives there, too, he clearly doesn’t give a shit, so why should you?
Why indeed!
Janice seems to be operating under a few assumptions that lay bare how she feels about her husband, her marriage and men in general, and sadly, I think she is indicative of an entire generation of women who really do think men are “useless”.
Her first assumption is that the home belongs to her and she has the absolute authority and right to dictate how it looks and how it runs. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that on the one hand Janice rails against the idea that women could ever have found leading a pampered, sheltered life in a cozy cocoon of domesticity that a man paid for fulfilling, and then on the other hand, she still demands the right to command that space with unconditional decree.
Pants on the floor? VERBOTEN! Pick them up, useless man, and put them where I tell you to!
It’s beyond me why Janice’s husband doesn’t tell her to fuck off.
Her second assumption is that whenever a man protests the requirement to meet his Princess’s household standards, he must be in the wrong. Janice has lots of love for the Scandinavian model, which forces men to take a portion of leave after a baby is born or lose it altogether. The personal preferences of the family in question play no part in the dictates of the government. What does the baby want? Goodness! Who would ever consider that? What does the mother want? Who gives a shit? Back to work, bitch. What does daddy want? Oh please. Who cares?
http://judgybitch.com/2013/01/23/i-dont-care-how-much-you-like-it-get-out-of-the-kitchen-bitch/
Here’s an ugly little reality that women like Janice refuse to even contemplate: most of the “work” that women do is complete and utter bullshit. What’s the number one job category for women?
Same as it was in the 1950’s: secretary. So basically, women have mastered the alphabet, and know how to use a telephone, a calendar and a keyboard. Wow! So much accomplishment!
Across all the Western, feminized world, productivity rates have soared, but wages have stagnated. Part of that is thanks to a movement within capitalism to return most of the proceeds of capital to shareholders and not workers, but an even bigger part has to do with women flocking en masse into the labor market and destroying the family wage. You see, there are way more jobs now than ever before, but there isn’t way more money. Instead of one man doing something relatively useful and productive and earning a wage he could use to support a family, there are now endless towers of cubicles filled with women filing shit alphabetically and updating their Facebook status and taking a wage for doing so. Wages that would otherwise have gone to their husbands. And therefore to themselves.
It cannot possibly come as a surprise to anyone with a heartbeat and a single brain cell that our world runs on the power of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Every single useful thing we have or hope for comes from the STEM fields, which have always been and continue to be completely dominated by men. Need a marketing strategy for scented candles? Hire a woman. Need the human genome sequenced? Oh, oops. You’ll need men for that.
Oh, of course, there are a few women in the STEM fields. Our society has almost always made room for female genius to rise. There just aren’t many of them to be had. #sorryfeminists. The Nobel Prize was established in 1901, and since its inception women have flooded into colleges and universities and we’ve had every opportunity to shine. 553 Nobel prizes have been awarded to 835 individuals, and that includes the wishy-washy Peace and Literature prizes.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/all/index.html
And how many have been won by women? 44 prizes awarded. 50% of the population has secured just over 5% of Nobel Prizes. When you get rid of the peace and literature prizes, the number falls even lower. 16 prizes. Not quite 2%.
Way to go, ladies! Whatever will the world do without your genius?
So we’ve wrecked the family wage, destroyed the labor market, created a generation of fat, depressed, unhappy, stressed out children and for what? So women can utterly fail to compete with men in any meaningful way and then declare men “useless”?
Women are not men. We do not have the same talents or interests or desires or motivations and the past 70 years has shown, if anything, that we are nowhere near to catching up with men, although the culture has done an amazing job of convincing both men and women that it’s the end of men and the rise of women!
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
Yeah, right. My iPhone, dishwasher, antibiotics, vacuum cleaner, computer, car with auto-starter and every other useful thing I own begs to differ. The end of men? We better hope not. And this is not to say women aren’t capable of genius. We are, in our own ways, that complement and do not compete with men. We’ll chat about that tomorrow. For now, let’s be grateful all the men have gone off to work today. Women haven’t shown themselves to be capable of doing what men do. Why, some might even call them useless.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Very clever, very funny & very very true.
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Apparently she changed the title of the article… it now comes up as “Is a man doing sweaty stuff sexy? Hell, yes”
Or at least that’s what comes up when I click on the link. It does contain one of the lines you quoted, so I’d have to guess she managed to piss more than a few people off and they had to change the title.
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Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
The paper copy is out and about though and there’s no taking that back.
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What makes a woman even think she’s entitled to train a man in the first place? And how about we start training women?
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Preaching to the choir, Someone.
What a ridiculous view of relationships between adults. Training. Does she use dog biscuits to reward him? Slices of pizza?
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Reblogged this on The Human Scorch's Blog and commented:
Because she says it better than I ever could.
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I’m a stark believer that work is for men and ugly mannish women who lack the ability to land a husband/slave.
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Shawn,
My husband is not a slave. He is a man who wants the very best for his children and for us, that means being at home with mommy while they are young – not crying in a daycare center.
I am at home, dependent, because we have small children. There is only one circumstance under which I would continue to stay at home: my husband lands a job that requires an intense amount of his time. My job will then be to make sure his domestic life is taken care of and our chidren continue to recieve the attention they deserve and need.
If he continues on as a mid-manager, then I will be returning to work within two years, always prepared to give up my position to support him, because supporting him is our best strategy as a family.
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the website version requires a subscription to access. do you have a different version that people can read? would like to see the bullshit she’s producing.
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I’ll post it.
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I have a hunch that the paper’s editor doesn’t take much stock in the value of the story, other than it’s use as a gimmick to sell papers or get page views.
The author on the other hand, believes her own BS, as chock full of clichés and generalisations as it is.
Spoilt housewife/SWPL/First World Problems.
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As much as I hate Janices man-hating omments, I, a straight man, don’t believe woman are not capable of doing everything men can do, and don’t share many, if not all of our desires.
Ever been to a comic book or anime convention? In those venues, I have often had the same conversations with women as I do with men.
My sisters (also straight and feminine in attitude) favorite films are the Rocky series; I actually tear up watching Titanic…that is, manly tears, of course 🙂
The reason women haven’t accomplished what men have in academics, is because up until relatively recentally, they have been put in a lower place by men.
So, I don’t think women are incapable of doing what men do, but, I do obviously hate the way men are now placed in society, and media. Commercials where the woman always know better, while the man is the dumb fuck who doesn’t know any better always piss me off, but I’m sure many woman don’t see men in that light.
On a side note, I find it odd that women find it necessary to try to teach young girls, through various media, that they are every bit as capable as men, while at the same time, stating that they naturally are. Every time I see some sort of vocal girl power character on TV or film, it always comes off as so facile, and off puting, its no wonder shows with such characters always fail to succeed, and I can’t imagine what young girl with any semblance of intellgence would buy into such a heavy handed caricature and not look the other way in laughter.
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Yup. You called it, JB. I left my pants on the floor just last night in the bathroom when it came time to corral Miss Happychicklet and put her to bed. Got up this morning, realized it, hung ’em up. Done. But unlike Ms. Turner, my wife hadn’t had a big old bowl of bitchflakes for breakfast, so it wasn’t even a thing.
Look, feminists. See how easy that was?
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Cracker of a post – had a good chuckle!
To address your comment:
“It’s beyond me why Janice’s husband doesn’t tell her to fuck off.”
…Well, in many western countries that’s now counted as ‘domestic violence’.
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I, a straight man, don’t believe woman are not capable of doing everything men can do, and don’t share many, if not all of our desires.
You mean like the desire to get a group of men together and chase a ball around and try to keep it away from another group of men?
Some women enjoy that kind of shit. Some women like watching men chase the ball but have no desire to do it themselves.
Most women would rather not watch OR chase.
Some men have zero interests in chasing balls. But most seem to really, really like tracing the trajectory of objects in motion.
Hmm. I wonder why? Could those be deeply ingrained desires and instincts that afforded us some very real survival skills back on the savannah?
Profoundly different roles come with profoundly different desires. It’s tough to erase centuries of evolution.
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Don’t know if anyone here remembers the huge backlash the Harvard president had when he mentioned “innate differences” between genders “just might be the reason” fewer women succeed in science and math careers. I thought he was exactly right at the time, but this issue always seems to generate hypersensitivity (as the feminists point to outliers as ‘proof’ of generalities).
Studies suggest that on average men have more neural density in the area of the brain associated with spatial processing than women. By contrast, women on average have more neural density in the area of the brain associated with language processing than men. It isn’t surprising that, all other things being equal, certain fields of studies will probably be dominated by a given gender due to advantages associated with those structural differences.
There is also substantial evidence for hormonal influences on brain development, confirmed in humans and animals. It has even been determined that women with unusually high testosterone levels perform better on spatial tasks.
I have a solid, pretty comprensive math and science background by comparison to most people. In college, basically every free elective I had was invested in engineering class credits (I took Materials and Differential equations when I could have taken basket-weaving, or whatever, for example). I did well overall. I’ll just offer my own anecdotal experience that I believe it’s undeniable women and men have different approaches to certain sciences and mathematics. That observation has been the confirmed also by the observations of every woman I have known with a physical science (not counting biology, which is more memorization than spatial and computational reasoning) or mathematics background. The people who argue against those observations are primarily (again, in my experience) people with very little basis for comparison (journalist majors, humanities majors, marketing majors, et al).
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i think the biggest reason isn’t that they can’t, they just don’t want to necause they’ve mever needed to. there are a few exceptions, but that’s it
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Not if he says it with a smile….
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WHy would men have more need for math and science then women? It isn’t like there haven’t been enormous incentives, profit potential, up to and including even quota systems over the past 25+ years trying to steer women along that path.
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I’ve always seen desire as a product of individual will – free choice – hence women boxers, straight men hair stylists, etc.
An individual is capable of willing themselves toward any goal, despite gender or genetic disposition, and even if society deems them unfit. Even if they are physically or intellectually unfit, if you really want a certain career, you deserve an equal shot.
Look at what’s happening in the military. Women are now being recognized as capable of being on the front lines, because they have proven that they can handle themselves during the various ambushes that have occurred since this war started.
Come on, is war not an ultimate test of what one is capable of when push comes to shove?
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Bullshit. Women have proven themselves capable of taking advantage of male soldier’s willingness to protect them at the expense of their own safety and lives.
Female soldiers are straight up opportunists.
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@Liz, i’m ralking about over the course of human history
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“Studies suggest that on average men have more neural density in the area of the brain associated with spatial processing than women. By contrast, women on average have more neural density in the area of the brain associated with language processing than men.”
Just to play devil’s advocate, are those studies on men and women or on boys and girls? Brains change as you learn stuff, like London taxi drivers with their fancy enlarged hippocampus.
Maybe we are biologically different, but we exaggerate those differences when we mark out activities as gender appropriate early on. I know it’s an age old feminist argument but it seems impossible to separate what men/women like to do from what boys/girls are taught they should like to do.
There was a Freudian guy in the 50s that did a bunch of studies to do with gender differences in play; basically suggested that boys like to build tall buildings and knock them down and girls like to build enclosed spaces/nests – related it entirely to the features of their genitalia. Of course, no mention of whether the boys had previously acquired more knowledge about how to build tall stuff and subsequently got more pride out of doing so. A lot of the stuff on gender and video games is the same; assumes some fundamental different, suggests girls don’t like to be competitive or violent; never mind whether they’ve just not been encouraged to learn how to be (as boys are).
There are also ethnographic studies of women working in ICT that linked their eventual career path to being a “tomboy” during childhood. Did they like “boy’s toys” because they were genetic freaks/gender dismorphs, or did their parents just not do the whole “gender policing” thing in terms of what they played with? The problem with hormones and causal links is that testosterone is (from my understanding) situationally reactive. i.e. men aren’t automatically strong or competitive because they have testosterone, testosterone is produced when they need to be (status threat etc.) and then affects muscle mass, attitude etc. But as a humanities student, I would say that, wouldn’t I.
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As a man who was raised in a relatively sports-free household and who has no desire to chase the ball or to watch, I’d say that notion of biologically determined “desires” is a bit dodgy. If I’ve ever felt any desire to play sports, it would’ve been to fit in socially, not because I would have intrinsically enjoyed it. The idea that men are fundamentally competitive and that women aren’t is a bit dubious. What isn’t competitive about women’s fashion culture? It’s just channeled in a different direction.
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Joe,
Babies show gendered preferences for different toys!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20232129
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There will always be a nature versus nurture debate. We’re all the product of both biology and the environment together afterall. But the brunt of evidence (both human and animal studies) suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain organization occur extremely early in life, essentially from the start that environment, whatever the environment, is acting on differently wired brains in girls and boys.
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Just found the related Scientific American article I remember from Christmases past, here:
http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm
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I’d agree with your last paragraph on films/TV. I enjoy watching believable sci-fi. I cannot believe a story when a waif of a girl is knocking down men like nine pins. Trying to portray women as mean super heroes promotes unachievable goals. It sets girls up for disappointment when confronted with reality.
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That’s true, and I used to think like that when watching ‘action’ movies – until I came to realize that the men (although muscular, tough, etc) were doing & surviving very ridiculous things too, like – surviving massive explosions, jumping 50+ ft onto concrete and limping off ..and fully healed in 10 seconds, and still chasing down the able-bodied target, etc. ie. it’s all ridiculous fantasy, so the super-tough waif is just another ridiculous spin on it.
I do understand your point though!
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I’m sure not every woman on the battlefield is an opportunist.
It’s a big sacrifice to willingly join the military and place your life on the line. I would like to think an individual would do something like that to protect lives.
You’re painting women and men with broad strokes, and you’re not taking into consideration any given individuals personal desires.
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When I wrote that, I wanted to cite certain shows, such as the failed Bionic Woman. The commercials for that show were so biased with their pandering toward woman, it was laughable. One much repeated commercial showed a mom driving with her young girl child in the back seat, when suddenly the Bionic Woman runs quickly passed the car, with only the little girl noticing. The little girl than comments something like “Mommy I didn’t know girls could run that fast”. Before that commercial I was going to give it a chance, But that ad totally killed any interest I could have had in that show, and probably alienated many other male viewers, as well.
Women thinking girls need to be told that they can too can have the confidence to accomplish what boys do through various media actually comes off as an insult to the intelligence of young girls, and females in general. And aren’t your patents supposed to encourage young kids to accomplish their goals?
On the downgrading thumbs down of my above comments as anonymous, why so much hate against the concept that men and women are more similar than most people think?
Some commenters above supposed that maybe women do want the same things as men, but perhaps are simply taught to desire other things, or maybe just express that similar desire through other means. Does no one agree that woman are as capable as men?
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Great article and excellent points
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Fred Reed’s classic on white males..
http://www.fredoneverything.net/WhiteMales.shtml
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I’ve seen inane drivel like this before. It is just inane self important middle class tosh written by up-their-own-arse Chelsea taxi driving fuckwits who think that just because they’re not one of the proles or liberal or left wing it makes them wise. Best just ignore shit like this because these idiots do nothing for society anyway.
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