Why women's rights are wrong
Posted: August 8, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Correction (from Vox Popoli):
In the unlikely event that anyone wants facts
It turns out my column today was slightly inaccurate. Weekly real wages peaked in 1972, not 1973 as I wrote, at $331.59 (in 1982 dollars), which equals an annual salary of $34,979.36 in 2005. In the last 32 years, wages have declined 16.3 percent to an annual salary level of 29,280.68. This long-term decline resumed again in 2004, as the Congressional Joint Economic Committee reported that real wages declined another .4 percent last year despite the economic recovery.*
Meanwhile, the average married women's contribution to family income has increased from 26.7 percent to 35.2 percent in the same time frame, a 31.8 percent increase. In other words, fully half of a wife's contribution to household income is eaten up by the decline in wages, which stems from the increase in the labor supply.
From 1973 to 2004, the percentage of women working rose from 44.7 percent to 59.2 percent. The effects of this increase were obviated somewhat by the declining percentage of men who worked, from 78.8 percent to 73.3 percent. The reason that this effect is a generally negative one is that unlike in the case of immigration, these new workers were already consumers, so they did not bring the concomitant increase in consumption (and demand for labor) that immigrants do. Considering that this had a definite effect on the number of children being raised, it should probably be characterized as a net demand-reducing development.
*The situation is actually worse than it looks here because the Federal Reserve's CPI manipulations seriously underestimate inflation and therefore the true decline in real wages and purchasing power is greater than these statistics would indicate. But we have to work with the tools available to us.
Responses?
Posted: August 8, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
The greatest media scribe of these latter days, Bill Simmons, is known for a certain pithy mantra. "The lesson, as always: Women ruin everything." While one does not usually expect to find deep sociological truths in the sports pages, so great has been the degradation of the acerbic art once known as the editorial, so filled with fear are the vanilla-minded commentators, that one finds more veracity on a single page of ESPN than in opinion pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal combined.
Now, at this point, it is customary for women to immediately reject any assertion that women's rights are wrong as the Talibanistic ranting of an embittered man who has been denied ready access to attractive women's bodies. In the interest of dismissing this red herring, I merely note that few men fortunate enough to possess a turbo Porsche and a record contract at 23 have any reason to be bitter about the hand that life has dealt them.
In fact, I very much like women and wish them well, which is precisely why I consider women's rights to be a disease that should be eradicated. For what is rather more difficult to dismiss are the simple and easily verifiable facts that indicate women have seldom been less able to pursue their dreams and less able to achieve their desires than today, the Golden Age of Feminism.
Consider the two great laments of the modern American woman. For the unmarried woman, it is the reality that she must marry later in life than ever before, if she is able to marry at all. For the married woman, it is that unlike generations of women before her, she cannot afford to stay home with her children unless she is fortunate enough to have married to a man of the financial elite.
Both of these developments can be traced directly to women's rights. Men's increasing unwillingness to marry stems primarily from two causes -- the feminized family court system that transformed marriage from a mutually beneficial contract into a financial and emotional liability, and the removal of paternal responsibility for the sexual behavior of young women. Ergo, the need for marriage has been eliminated while its liabilities have increased. As Blue America and de-Christianizing Europe increasingly show, in the absence of religion there is now very little impetus for marriage.
And few indeed are the women who understand that their present need to work is inextricably tied to the societal expectation that they will do so. When women began to enter the work force en masse in the latter half of the 20th century, the overall supply of labor increased, obviously. As per the iron law of supply and demand, over the last 60 years, this increase in supply has somewhat outstripped the growth in the economy and the attendant demand for labor, which is why real wages are still lower in 2005 than in 1973. Combined with the ever-increasing tax burden, this decline in real wages is why both husband and wife must now work when previously the husband's labor alone would have sufficed.
(The decline in wages would be much more obvious to the casual observer if men had not begun retiring earlier at the same time women entered the work force. To state that young women are working today so their grandfathers can play golf is reasonable shorthand for what happened.)
But the greatest evil of women's rights is demographic. Europe's demise is all but assured, thanks to them, as women's individual choices taken in the collective have stricken European society and brought on successive waves of feminist-friendly Islamic immigration by reducing Europe's birth rates far below replacement levels. And women's-rights advocates are now finding themselves in an ironic intellectual bind, as the onset of sex selection technology has them arguing that while a woman has a right to choose abortion, she can only do so for approved reasons.
This is because scientists are estimating that there are 100 million women missing from India and China and as the technology becomes cheaper and more widespread, this rate of loss is increasing. A U.N. official named Khalid Malik has warned that at present birth rates, with only 826 girls born per 1,000 boys, China will be missing 60 million more women within a decade. And in India, when a family already has two girls, a third pregnancy results in 78 percent of unborn girl babies being aborted.
The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls. They can at least console themselves with the thought that, in the long run, it doesn't matter what they do, because the women's-rights ideology is an evolutionary dead end, and it is increasingly apparent that societies embracing it will not survive.
In the end, it's not that hard to understand. A little girl who is not born will never vote, work or raise a little girl of her own.
-Vox Day
Now, at this point, it is customary for women to immediately reject any assertion that women's rights are wrong as the Talibanistic ranting of an embittered man who has been denied ready access to attractive women's bodies. In the interest of dismissing this red herring, I merely note that few men fortunate enough to possess a turbo Porsche and a record contract at 23 have any reason to be bitter about the hand that life has dealt them.
In fact, I very much like women and wish them well, which is precisely why I consider women's rights to be a disease that should be eradicated. For what is rather more difficult to dismiss are the simple and easily verifiable facts that indicate women have seldom been less able to pursue their dreams and less able to achieve their desires than today, the Golden Age of Feminism.
Consider the two great laments of the modern American woman. For the unmarried woman, it is the reality that she must marry later in life than ever before, if she is able to marry at all. For the married woman, it is that unlike generations of women before her, she cannot afford to stay home with her children unless she is fortunate enough to have married to a man of the financial elite.
Both of these developments can be traced directly to women's rights. Men's increasing unwillingness to marry stems primarily from two causes -- the feminized family court system that transformed marriage from a mutually beneficial contract into a financial and emotional liability, and the removal of paternal responsibility for the sexual behavior of young women. Ergo, the need for marriage has been eliminated while its liabilities have increased. As Blue America and de-Christianizing Europe increasingly show, in the absence of religion there is now very little impetus for marriage.
And few indeed are the women who understand that their present need to work is inextricably tied to the societal expectation that they will do so. When women began to enter the work force en masse in the latter half of the 20th century, the overall supply of labor increased, obviously. As per the iron law of supply and demand, over the last 60 years, this increase in supply has somewhat outstripped the growth in the economy and the attendant demand for labor, which is why real wages are still lower in 2005 than in 1973. Combined with the ever-increasing tax burden, this decline in real wages is why both husband and wife must now work when previously the husband's labor alone would have sufficed.
(The decline in wages would be much more obvious to the casual observer if men had not begun retiring earlier at the same time women entered the work force. To state that young women are working today so their grandfathers can play golf is reasonable shorthand for what happened.)
But the greatest evil of women's rights is demographic. Europe's demise is all but assured, thanks to them, as women's individual choices taken in the collective have stricken European society and brought on successive waves of feminist-friendly Islamic immigration by reducing Europe's birth rates far below replacement levels. And women's-rights advocates are now finding themselves in an ironic intellectual bind, as the onset of sex selection technology has them arguing that while a woman has a right to choose abortion, she can only do so for approved reasons.
This is because scientists are estimating that there are 100 million women missing from India and China and as the technology becomes cheaper and more widespread, this rate of loss is increasing. A U.N. official named Khalid Malik has warned that at present birth rates, with only 826 girls born per 1,000 boys, China will be missing 60 million more women within a decade. And in India, when a family already has two girls, a third pregnancy results in 78 percent of unborn girl babies being aborted.
The women of America would do well to consider whether their much-cherished gains of the right to vote, work, murder and freely fornicate are worth destroying marriage, children, civilized Western society and little girls. They can at least console themselves with the thought that, in the long run, it doesn't matter what they do, because the women's-rights ideology is an evolutionary dead end, and it is increasingly apparent that societies embracing it will not survive.
In the end, it's not that hard to understand. A little girl who is not born will never vote, work or raise a little girl of her own.
-Vox Day
Correction (from Vox Popoli):
In the unlikely event that anyone wants facts
It turns out my column today was slightly inaccurate. Weekly real wages peaked in 1972, not 1973 as I wrote, at $331.59 (in 1982 dollars), which equals an annual salary of $34,979.36 in 2005. In the last 32 years, wages have declined 16.3 percent to an annual salary level of 29,280.68. This long-term decline resumed again in 2004, as the Congressional Joint Economic Committee reported that real wages declined another .4 percent last year despite the economic recovery.*
Meanwhile, the average married women's contribution to family income has increased from 26.7 percent to 35.2 percent in the same time frame, a 31.8 percent increase. In other words, fully half of a wife's contribution to household income is eaten up by the decline in wages, which stems from the increase in the labor supply.
From 1973 to 2004, the percentage of women working rose from 44.7 percent to 59.2 percent. The effects of this increase were obviated somewhat by the declining percentage of men who worked, from 78.8 percent to 73.3 percent. The reason that this effect is a generally negative one is that unlike in the case of immigration, these new workers were already consumers, so they did not bring the concomitant increase in consumption (and demand for labor) that immigrants do. Considering that this had a definite effect on the number of children being raised, it should probably be characterized as a net demand-reducing development.
*The situation is actually worse than it looks here because the Federal Reserve's CPI manipulations seriously underestimate inflation and therefore the true decline in real wages and purchasing power is greater than these statistics would indicate. But we have to work with the tools available to us.
Responses?
