Men's Memes: Women in debt and passive language

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Women in debt and passive language

Women in the UK are burdened with more than twice as much (139%) debt than men, according to the results of a new survey.

When you read or listen to sex issues reports in the media always be aware of how they are using language to imply responsibility or lack of for the actions of the people they are talking about.

For example, lets say that there is a woman called Susan, and she spent her youth partying and not studying or working hard towards anything in particular, and found herself in a low paying job as a toilet cleaner in her 30s. Now, who is responsible for Susan's situation. Susan herself, of course! But the way that modern thinking runs, we must HIDE this fact, or even imply that the situation has be thrust upon Susan against her own will by outside forces.

Now, look at the way the link at the top of this post is worded. "Women are burdened with more than twice as much debt."

Does saying someone is "burdened" acknowledge that they created the situation, or does it aim to hide the fact or imply that outside forces are responsible for pushing this debt on her against her will?

I would say the latter.

Later on in the article, a spokesman even says that women are being 'clobbered'. This is most definitely passive language. The woman as victim of outside forces.

Its not online yet, but there was a very good example of this passive use of language in the Daily Mail's report on this research. In it the spokesman said that women are more likely to go into debt because of the wage gap, and because of the fact that despite earning less money, they live in the same 'cost environment' as men.

Putting asside the myth of the wage gap for the moment, just think about what hes saying about women living in the same 'cost environment' as men. What this weird phrase is actually trying to do is say that women are SPENDING as much as men (in many cases) yet not earning as much to pay for it. Whilst there are a certain number of fixed costs that we all have to pay, the level of how much we spend on things varies dramatically. We don't all have to buy 100 pairs of shoes, dine out twice a week, have expensive holidays, have the latest expensive decor in our homes etc. So this phrase of women having to live within the same 'cost environment' has to be the most laughably bizarre example yet of translating the active into the passive in order to hide or deny women's responsibility for their own situation.

Ironically, its this flight from personal responsibility that is most likely the cause of women having more debt.

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."