Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Real Men Are Wallets?



This is a billboard in or near Winston-Salem, North Carolina:





It has been purchased by a company which wishes to remain anonymous.

When I saw the picture, I immediately started adding various words to the end of the first sentence.  I think "sex" would win.*





But that is not what the billboard intends to ingrain in our brains.  Rather, it argues that only those men are real who are the sole breadwinners of their families, not other men, and that only those women are real who properly appreciate the money the lord of the family brings in.

The billboard appears to imply that the women don't provide anything (childcare, cooking, cleaning, laundry services)  in return to bed and board, so appreciation should be forthcoming.

It's a very weird message, that in the billboard, and it makes me suspect that someone from the manosphere is behind it, because it stresses what many view as traditional** gendered division of family labor as the only REAL one.

Sadly, if it were true, then the majority of American men and women would not be "real,"  because the single male breadwinner model is not the most common in this country.

It's sad in another sense, too:  It turns men into their wallets, as if there was nothing else they could contribute.

According to Buzzfeed, the billboard is "controversial."  A protest was held against it and there are even plans to put up a billboard which gives a response to this one.  That's good business for the owner...

So some believer in patriarchy put up a billboard.  What does that matter, after all?

Well, if we followed this advice, everywhere and at all times, an enormous number of American families would fall into poverty,  the power in marriages would become very lopsided, abused women would have trouble leaving bad marriages due to lack of income of their own, the talents of many women would not be employed for the good of the society in general***, many more women would be poor in old age, because retirement income depends on time spent in the labor force, and all the corridors of power would, once again, be full of only men in pin-striped suits.








-----------

*  Heterosexual sex, but that's not as funny.

**  It's not the traditional model, but one which was created during the Victorian era as one response to the industrialization of work and which applied to only white middle-class families in certain countries.  Traditionally most women and men worked on the farms.

I should note, though, that the manosphere would not be content if all women went home, because then they would be leeches eating bon-bons all day long.  Trust me in this.  Women in the labor force are ambitious bitches taking away men's jobs, women at home are lazy bitches consuming the men's hard-earned moneys.

***  The billboard says nothing about stay-at-home parents, so logically it is supposed to be a suitable maxim for all heterosexual marriages, whether there are children at home or not.  This means that married female surgeons shouldn't be working, married female nurses shouldn't be working, married female teachers shouldn't be working and female politicians shouldn't be working.

But of course women wouldn't train for those kinds of careers in the kind of world the company behind the billboard desires.