So I recently posted this on a local Facebook page: “I’m looking for a woman with carpentry skills and tools to build a sound-absorbing enclosure for a generator. Please leave a message.”*
Three men and three women replied.
Two of the men made light of my preference for a woman (“I could be a woman depending on the hourly rate” and “Can I identify as a woman?”); the third asked why I specified that it be a woman.
Two of the three women considered the possibility that perhaps I had been injured by a man in the past and so was uncomfortable having one on my property/in my house (“Perhaps she has a reason for not feeling comfortable around a male. You don’t know her situation” and “No need to judge for someone wanting a specific gender, you don’t know her story!”; the third replied to the first man’s response with “That isn’t even funny.”
I was reminded of the general response to the ‘Would you rather meet a bear or a man in the forest?’ question, specifically the overwhelming cluelessness of men as to why most women chose the bear.
Over the past few decades, with great difficulty and at great risk, we have brought ‘domestic violence’ (basically, men hitting, punching, beating up the women they married) out into the open. We’ve brought rape out into the open. We’ve brought megabrothels and pornography out into the open. How is it that the fact that (very many, but not all) men hurt women still, still, remains almost completely off (most) men’s radar? And the fact that, therefore, all women fear (pretty much all) men? (Because, as Sloan tells Don in that excellent episode of Newsroom, ‘No, you can’t always tell.’)
Is it that men don’t think that hurting women is problematic? Because hurting is okay? And, or, because women aren’t really full-fledged people? They’re just walking wombs to bear their kids or just legs with holes for fucking? (And not, oh, I don’t know, doctors and judges and architects and mathematicians and biologists and anthropologists and politicians and—oh, wait: maybe all of the women these men know [because they’re in the trades?] are just mothers and cunts. Dudes, ya gotta get out more.)
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*I’ve had 50 years experience working with both men and women, and I’ve read the literature on sexism for the same length of time. My personal experience is that women are far more apt to take me seriously, listening to what I say and request; women are far less likely to be condescending and ‘mansplain’; women are more reliable, actually responding to a phone call or email; women clean up after themselves; women do not ‘hit on me’. The literature indicates that this is not by a long shot just my experience and, furthermore, it suggests that women have to be twice as good to get half as far. So, in short, I’d rather hire a woman than a man any day for anything.
