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The article makes some inflated or specious arguments which serve to weaken the overall point but on the whole I agree 100%.
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I had some interesting experiences recently.
The other day, a female clerical employee asked my opinion of some kitchen personnel - a male supervisor who had worked there for a few years, and two women who were recently employed.
The male supervisor, Billy, is an industrious man from a hardscrabble background. He is very direct and aggressive. He definitely subscribes to the Aestu school of leadership - "I'm not a dick because I'm a dick, I'm a dick because I care more about getting this done than your precious little feelings." If something doesn't get done, on time, correctly, he'll come back and confront people about it. When he is pedantically demonstrating something menial he will ignore any remarks. When he is not actively doing something, he will sit in a chair and position himself so he can see the entire room and nothing is behind his back.
He definitely chafes me often enough, but in the final analysis I respect him and have patience with his personality because I see brusqueness as a lesser moral fault than vacillation.
The female supervisor and chef they recently hired on is a J-freak. She is one of those people who will agree with anything anyone says, whether she agrees with or even understands or not. Her gregarious nature is a facade for underlying mental laziness and unreliability. The other day, lunch was to be served in 15 minutes. This female supervisor was nowhere to be found, leaving the experienced staff that happened to be on at the time (usually not the case) to do the necessary preparation on their own initiative.
Something I've also noticed about this woman is that she seems to have no concept of preventative maintenance. She does not care if floors or other surfaces are cleaned after use. She does not maintain a careful rotation of perishable goods. Unlike Billy, she is not vigilant against potential hazards like precariously balanced platters and boards.
All of these flaws are clearly less important than her less-threatening nature to the largely female management. Anyway, I ventured my opinion, saying that I found Billy "abrasive" (a remark which elicited a nod and choir from the admins), but underlined that remark by saying I found that to be a necessary part of his highly effective style, that these women didn't come off as "99.99% reliable".
More than that, I felt that this woman had managed to run the kitchen for a day wasn't a reflection on how this person's lack of seriousness would impact its long-term operation. Billy had always had a carefully-developed knack (one of which he was outwardly proud) for nipping any problems in the bud and heading off any and all potential complaints about presentation. This woman didn't have that quality.
But down the line...would anyone associate future failings with this woman's more genial character?
Who knows?
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My search for a live-in goes on.
Today, I invited over and spoke to this woman almost exactly my age from Wisconsin. She was extremely attractive - movie star looks, no exaggeration, not only cute, with smooth skin and and good proportions, but an almost mathematically perfect face and body and graceful bearing. She was reasonably intelligent and articulate, but almost totally uneducated and with no skills (I know because I asked).
By her own account, she roams the country, getting by on her personal/physical charm and temporary employment. In a labor market like this of course she can always smile and get a job. She didn't need my offer anyway, for the same reason: in one of the most oppressively problematic housing markets in the country, social bias protects her from facing the same challenges everyone else does. She can smile and boom - place to live, lack of deposit, employment history, etc...? No problem.
But then there are those who would have you believe that being female is somehow a disadvantage.
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A while back, I took this stupid gerontology class. Out of a class of ten, all but me were women. The class environment was pervaded by amateurishness and lack of rigor. The fact that the schemes they described were unrealistic and were at every juncture predicated on grossly unfair social bias (example: getting patients the "service they need" by cajoling to have them bumped up to top-rated facilities for problems that were completely psychosomatic) didn't matter to them.
There was this one woman. You might say she was from a "hardscrabble" background like the Billy character I described, except that she was fat, lazy, indolent and basically useless. So I call her background trashy. Her mother was dying of stomach cancer and the doctor refused to allow her solid food. This woman cried and cried that her mother "had an emotional need" for the food and bitched enough to have the doctor overriden. Her mother got the McDonalds (literally, that) and of course suffered all the consequences. This same woman would cite the anecdote of her mother and start crying in class when I disagreed with her views on other issues. This wasn't seen as inappropriate or irrational. That is part of the "female centric culture", this attitude of turning a lack of discipline into a virtue.
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Back when I worked in San Francisco, for this private high school, I worked in the Financial Office. Next door to us was the Outreach office. They solicited donations. In practice, every time I walked in, the three women who worked there were literally lounging, sitting in circles on cheap den furniture drinking coffee and engaging in small talk.
They would of course solicit donations, winning favor because they were women. At one point the CFO asked me to read back through all the yearly audits for my education. In every audit for decades they were criticized for shoddy record-keeping and told to pick it up. Nothing ever changed. The CFO's predecessor, a man, was fired after a year for the same. This new CFO was, by choice, not a non-profit man by career, but a corporate professional brought in because "non-profit execs are perceived as lazy".
So there was this kid who was the son of an industrious, no-nonsense supervisor at the school. He was the laziest bum I ever met. Nor did he have any great personal charm. He was definitely the case of the "lazy, effete degenerate". But he won favor with the administration because they found him less intimidating, and was handed easy, no-sweat assignments. Meanwhile, of course, if there was something that just had to get done (making phone calls to recalcitrant vendors or doing reconciliations on time) or required trust or reliability (taking cash and checks without supervision) I was asked to do it. Of course, he got paid more anyway, being an alum and not intimidating to the equally lazy boss.
I was well-liked - I was not feared or hated in the way I am often perceived in other contexts, not limited to WoW - but that didn't overcome many people's wariness of quietly effective people and preference for "effete" men who do not offend female sensibilities.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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