Going to Getugly was censored and then blocked from Facebook for the past week. My previous post goes into the gory details and demonstrates that what gets designated as contravening Facebook’s highfalutin ‘Community Standards’ has little if anything to do with their own morally excellent criteria and a whole heck of a lot to do with ideological conformity.
Without going into the specifics again, the particular comment that apparently transgressed all norms of human decency criticized those who seek to advance the social and political agenda of feminist ideology for their habit of bypassing any observations or insights that conflict with their preferred conclusions.
In other words, if there is a discrepancy between reality and feminist conceptions… it is reality that must be sacrificed.
Which leads me to the issue that inspired all of the ruckus and censorship in the first place: The ‘gender pay gap’. Or more specifically, the unabashedly Orwellian manner with which feminist ideologues have taken the very argument that thoroughly debunked their original premise and not only now claim it as their own… they claim that it was always their own and that it still proves the reality of systemic discrimination against women in the form of the ‘pay gap’.
Confused? Well, I suspect that was the ultimate intention all along. But I can break it down for you:
The continuing relevance of the ideology of feminism and the political power of its leadership in society is entirely dependant on the widespread perception of women as victims of systemic, culturally entrenched discrimination and oppression by men. Unfortunately for feminists, it is a premise that is at odds with the objective reality of contemporary Western societies.
Women being paid less than men for the same work was at one time a clear and indisputable example of genuine discrimination based on sex. If it could be shown that decades after the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 60’s and 70’s nothing has changed… it would be a major validation for the persistence of feminist activism and a justification for diverting more power and resources to feminist causes and organisations.
As a strategy for justifying their continued relevance and to draw power and influence to themselves, feminist ideologues generated statistics for the earnings of men and women in the workforce which revealed a higher level of income for men on average than women. These findings were used by feminists as propaganda to implicitly and explicitly promote the perception that women were still being paid less than men for the same work :
Barack Obama re-election campaign, 2012: ““The son of a single mom, proud father of two daughters, President Obama knows that women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn’t just unfair, it hurts families,”
Forbes Magazine, 2016: “And the National Organization for Women website states : “For full-time, year-round workers, women are paid on average only 77 percent of what men are paid… Women still are not receiving equal pay for equal work…”
Huffington Post, 2012: “According to “Graduating to a Pay Gap” publicity materials, “The AAUW today released a new study showing that just one year out of college, millennial women are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to their male peers. Women are paid less than men even when they do the same work and major in the same field.”
Scary Mommy website: “It pays to look like Donald Trump — which is to say the wage gap is real and women of all races make less than white men for doing the same work.”
Linda Hallman, former executive director of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), 2015: “Think about it: Women have to work almost four months longer than men do to earn the same amount of money for doing the same job.”
Feminist activist Judy Bindell, The Guardian, 2017: “The fact that men are paid more than women for doing the same or similar job is well-known.”
The Conversation magazine, 2016: “The gender pay gap is similarly stubborn. Laura Bates, founder of the wonderful but depressing Everyday Sexism Project is especially clear on the facts in this contentious area…. This is not dependent on education, skills, or experience – women are paid less for doing the same work as men immediately post-graduation, for example.”
4. Almost immediately, this claim was debunked as a misrepresentation of the statistical evidence. People like Christina Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell, Milo Yiannopoulos and many, many others tirelessly demonstrated that the statistics were based on the median incomes of the entire working population without accounting for the different types of jobs people had, number of hours worked, education level, how long individuals stayed in the workforce etc.. In fact, they showed that when these relevant factors are taken into account the pay gap evaporates or even shows a slight advantage for working women.
But as the list of quotes above demonstrates, feminist ideologues and those who pander to them in the political class were not about to let objective reality get in the way of a useful narrative. They continued to push what Causeway Capital Management CEO Sarah Ketterer called in the Wall Street Journal “The ‘Wage Gap’ Myth That Won’t Die” even as the credibility of the claim became less and less viable.
5. Now even feminists appear to have recognised the failed strategy of insisting that statistics support their desired conclusion when they clearly don’t. But rather than taking a moment to reassess the quality of their concepts and the integrity of their arguments… they are doing what feminists, Leftists and ideologues in general always do when they lose the argument: a) Pretend that none of that happened; b) Ignore that their cause and the quality of their reasoning has been completely discredited; c) Come up with a completely different argument and once again proclaim themselves to be 100% right and everyone who disagrees to be stupid.
In this case they have taken the argument that these statistics show only the median difference in pay between men and women in the workforce overall… which, as I mentioned, is the argument that was used by their opponents to debunk their original pay gap premise… and repurposed it by tacking on a wacky new interpretation which they say makes the pay gap real and which they claim was always their argument from the start: It was never that women get paid less than men for the same jobs (objectively verifiable discrimination based on gender)… but that the jobs in which women tend to dominate are ‘undervalued’ (a completely subjective, hypothetical abstraction) apparently because men are jerks or something.
You are on the right track if all of this reminds you of the famous passage from Orwell’s 1984, “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
This is the embarrassing but completely predictable result anytime you hitch yourself to a conclusion rather than pursuing what is true. If your justifications for your conclusion are shown to be lousy it means you’re now on the hook for another argument to rationalize your continuing commitment to it. And since your first argument was probably your best one, it’s inevitable that whatever you cobble together as your second crack at it will be even lousier and that much further removed from logic and reality.
Of course, like all ideologues, feminists don’t care much for logic, reality and truth. In fact, such concerns are a hindrance to the ultimate priority of preserving their treasured, ego gratifying conclusion that they are eternal victims of tyrannical oppression by intrinsically mean, evil and all-powerful men.
Here is a sample of comments about the Q&A video which demonstrate how thoroughly feminism’s ‘outer-party members’ internalize the messaging and the ‘new’ history provided to them by the ‘Party’ :
Robyn: What both the questioner and ‘Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson’, along with most of those who have commented here, have failed to recognise is the ‘gender pay gap’ dose not relate to individual roles. Whether the gap is due to a uni-variable or a multi-variable as Peterson highlighted is totally irrelevant.
The gender pay gap refers to the MEDIAN pay for males and females. The median pay for males is higher than the median pay for females – therefore the gender pay gap is the difference between median male earnings and median female earnings! Do I need to explain what the median is?
Going to Getugly: People who announce “no one understands this except me” strangely seem completely unprepared to justify that flattering self-assessment.
What was your motivation for claiming that something that is self-evident, something that everyone is well aware of is something that only you know about? i,e. – “What both the questioner and ‘Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson’, along with most of those who have commented here, have failed to recognise is the ‘gender pay gap’ dose not relate to individual roles.” What point are you trying to make? What point are you attempting to make by making the fallacious assertion “Whether the gap is due to a uni-variable or a multi-variable as Peterson highlighted is totally irrelevant”? What point are you trying to make by pointing out the obvious: “The median pay for males is higher than the median pay for females – therefore the gender pay gap is the difference between median male earnings and median female earnings!”?
Nicky: Gender pay gap is not just about equal pay for equal work. That’s a strawman
Going to Getugly: “Gender pay gap is not just about equal pay for equal work.” But that WAS explicitly what it was about a few years ago when these statistics were first used to support the concept of a pay gap.
The fact that the only way you can generate a ‘pay gap’ is if you lump everyone in the workforce together and take the overall median pay between males and females was DISGUISED or not acknowledged by feminists for YEARS. That’s because the original premise for which they were trying to manufacture evidence was that women were paid less than men for THE SAME work.
Feminists denied or ignored the fact that theses statistics were deliberately misleading until their claim was so universally debunked by people like Christina Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell and many, many others that it became embarrassing.
Now they’ve adopted a strategy which you have apparently bought into that is straight out of Orwell: Ignore the fact that the stats didn’t prove the conclusion that they wanted; pretend that highlighting the difference in ‘median’ pay was the point all along and invent a ludicrous premise to justify claiming that those stats now prove the desired conclusion.
In other words, rather than letting objective reality dictate their perception of the world… they generate subjective narratives to allow themselves to continue believing in the absolute perfection of their preferred interpretation regardless of what the objective world is doing.
Nicky: Funny that I’ve been a feminist for 20 plus years and have never argued that its just about same job, same pay. I guess I never received the memo lol. Regardless its not us trying to misrepresent the statistics in this discussion. That’s for sure.
Yeah. That’s for sure.
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