“Class warfare” and “male bashing”: Tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Even though I do not currently live in the USA, I am paying relatively close attention to the political conversations that are occurring there. After all, what happens in the USA deeply affects the rest of the world, even though some people who live there seem relatively oblivious to this fact.

One of the oddest things to (re)emerge in the US political discourse of late is the allegation by some conservatives that “class warfare ” is occurring whenever anyone suggests raising tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.

I find this term ridiculous for two reasons. First, “class warfare” is not what is happening in the USA. Not by a long shot. And I would suggest that any wealthy person who feels they are a victim of “class warfare” should research what real class struggle looks like in societies that have gone through the immense upheaval of land redistribution and/or the massive nationalization of private enterprise. Then they might know what real class warfare looks like. And they will well understand that no one in the mainstream of American political life is advocating class warfare.

The second reason I find the cries of “class warfare” absurd is that these claims actually attempt to invert the existing power dynamic. The reality is that the life of the rich, when compared to the life of the poor, is hardly an oppressed existence. And I would suggest that any wealthy person who feels truly oppressed should spend a week working in the fields of California alongside migrant pickers, or with hotel maids in Las Vegas making beds and cleaning toilets, or manning the drive-thru at a fast food restaurant, or shingling asphalt roofs on a sweltering day.

I would suggest that any rich person who is feeling oppressed should spend just one week in the shoes of a person who is a member of the “working poor,” and who, despite working full time and doing a good job, remains poor. In most of the U.S., if you work at a minimum wage, full-time job (if you can even get that many hours!), you will earn the grand total of $15,080 per year. Good luck living on that – and trying to support your kids! So, if you are wealthy and feeling oppressed, go work for a week in that kind of job. And perhaps you can while away the monotonous hours at work fantasizing exactly how you are going to spend your weekly wage of $290! (But remember: you must first pay your rent, utility bills, gas, food, childcare, insurance, etc…)

Conversely, someone earning $100,000 per year earns over six times as much – $1,923 per week. And that should leave you with some spending money! If we are going to entertain conversations about “class warfare” and economic injustice, I am not sure that it is the wealthy politicians to whom we should be listening.

Poverty as a feminist issue. But why am I addressing this issue here, in a blog devoted to issues of feminism and gender justice? Because around the globe women are hugely over-represented as living in poverty. According to Casper, McLanahan, & Garfinkel (1994), women have always been poorer than men in virtually every society – throughout human history! Globally, when we are talking about “the poor,” we are also (and especially) talking about women, many of whom have children. According to the United Nations (http://www.unwomen.org ), the world’s women perform 66% of the world’s work, produce 50% of the world’s food, but earn only 10% of the world’s income, and own only 1% percent of the world’s property. We simply cannot talk about wealth and poverty without including the gender dynamics of this issue.

And even in the United States poverty is a heavily gendered experience. As children, boys and girls are equally likely to be poor. But beginning at age 18, women are 1.5 times more likely to be poor than are their same age male peers. While this gap narrows some during the working years, by old age, women are more than twice as likely as men to be poor. (Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/10/women_poverty.html )

According to a recent study by the University of Michigan, 31.6% of households headed by single women are poor, compared to 15.8% of households headed by single men and 6.2% of married-couple households. (http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty).

So it would seem that the “enemy” in this economic “class war” is in large part comprised of over-worked, underpaid, and undoubtedly exhausted women – many of whom are also raising kids and caring for older relatives. And we’re talking about a lot of elderly women here as well. So the next time you hear some wealthy politician in a fancy suit railing against “class warfare,” take a moment to remember these low-income women, and consider the fact that the politician most likely drives a car that cost more money than each of these women will earn in the next four years!

So let’s drop the term class warfare, shall we? Let’s stop bashing the poor.

Reminiscent of another idiotic term. Speaking of “bashing,” there is another term I think we need to drop ASAP: male bashing. Just like class warfare, the term male bashing fails to describe anything even remotely close to reality, and it too represents an attempt on the part of the powerful to obscure the existing power dynamic. The term male bashing attempts to assert that patriarchal men have now somehow become the victims of the all-powerful, man-hating, persecutory feminist.

But I think it is time for a reality check about just who is bashing whom!

An extensive web search clearly shows that the concerns about “male bashing” are almost entirely limited to the ways in which men are often depicted as buffoons in advertising and on sitcoms. We men are not buffoons! these “anti-misandry” protestors proclaim. And it is wrong to depict us as such!

Okay, so seeing men being depicted as idiots on t.v. doesn’t really bother me, but I could see how it might offend some of my more sensitive brothers.

But the every-day and very real bashing of females is far, far worse. According to Amnesty International, around the world at least one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime, and gender-based violence kills and disables as many women between the ages of 15 and 44 as cancer, and its toll on women's health surpasses that of traffic accidents and malaria combined. (http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/women-s-rights/violence-against-women/violence-against-women-information?id=1108440)

And according to the United Nations, the situation may be even worse. Their figures indicate that up to 60% of women experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime. In addition, 102 countries around the world have no specific laws against domestic violence, and marital rape is not a prosecutable offence in at least 53 countries. And in the USA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceeds US$5.8 billion per year: US$4.1 billion are for direct medical and health care services, while productivity losses account for nearly US$1.8 billion due to absenteeism. (http://www.unifem.org/gender_issues/violence_against_women/)

I think it’s too bad that some people feel upset when we men get called silly names on t.v. I really do. But then I think about these rather harmless slights in comparison to the millions of women who are raped each year, the thousands of women worldwide are killed each year in so-called “honor killings,” and the tens of thousands of women (at least!) who die each year at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends. And it becomes hard not to feel that a protest against “male bashing” in the media is, to quote Shakespeare, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So just where do these idiotic terms come from? They come from the staunchest defenders of the status quo who feel immensely threatened by anyone who is attempting to do things differently. But rather than honestly voice their opposition to the redistribution of resources, and rather than work to create positive images of men in the media, these hand-wringers and ballyhooers resort to the idiotic cry of “class warfare” and attempt to confront the pseudo-scourge of “male bashing.” To me, their outrage at these supposed injustices that they – the powerful – are experiencing actually undermines the legitimacy of their arguments, and it makes me question their integrity. Their intellectual dishonesty in so greatly misrepresenting the social situation makes me think that they don’t actually want fairness at all. It makes me think that all they want is just to preserve unfair economic and gender advantages through bombast and emotional manipulation.

And all of this gets me to thinking about Shakespeare again. I think those who cry “class warfare” and “male bashing” may well be the sort of people who believe that in life “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” And now whenever I see a fancy politician decrying the supposed oppression of the rich, or I see a privileged man arguing against “male bashing,” I am reminded that some people cannot be trusted, and that sometimes, as the Bard wrote, “there's daggers in men's smiles.”