Would you give up your freedom for a job, food and a bed for life?
This is a question The Guardian asked in a review of the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, one of many reviews that extolled “the nightmarish alternate reality conjured by the film”. Vulture quoted the writer and director explaining “For Cassius, I needed to tie the idea of exploitation into something that he felt in his body when he saw it.” This is a film that explores the idea of people consenting to lifetime slavery in exchange for food and a bed. An additional horror aspect is that the slaves are then injected with another life form against their will which permanently changes their bodies and causes them to lose any status and privileges they had earlier, even those strictly limited ones as a slave. Predictably, but no less bizarrely, every reviewer and the film creator saw this as a commentary on class and race but not sex.
How very happy so many people are to talk about oppression of every kind – outside the home. As Silvia Federici pointed out in 1974 regarding the struggle to get caregiving and housework economically valued, “We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.” The same people who decry stripping the autonomy of men will still rage that housewives were privileged to live in a warm house with food that they didn’t even have to work for. This rhetoric is enabled by classifying all unwaged labour as not real labour at all. The men that militantly shout Sex work is work! have apparently no interest in screaming Birth labour is labour! or Raising children is raising capital!
This double standard is especially true for family members. A 2017 article in The Atlantic went viral as the author described My Family’s Slave. Social media was outraged that his family had used a lifetime of labour from a woman who wasn’t actually a blood relative. If she had been his real grandmother or aunt, as he had pretended to childhood friends, her life would have been considered normal. According to the author, “Her parents wanted her to marry a pig farmer twice her age, and she was desperately unhappy but had nowhere to go. Tom approached her with an offer: She could have food and shelter if she would commit to taking care of his daughter, who had just turned 12.” The choice she preferred is the only one considered slavery.
“Misogyny is horrible but it is not terrorism” is what the Hill Times chose to write about the Toronto van attack that killed 11 and injured 15, a dismissal they certainly didn’t produce for any attack that did not target women specifically. But killing women has never been ‘real’ murder in the media, has it? It is well recognized that domestic violence is the strongest predictor of other violence but this link is ignored because attacks against women are just crimes of passion or sex. The devaluation of women and children as persons is essential to the subsequent devaluation of the labour they are assigned.
Yes, but why am I going on about this old news? Why now when women are gaining so much power and men are falling behind? Because perceived power reversals are when things become the most dangerous.
Let’s take a quick look at what has been coming out of mega-influencer, the United States. No fault divorce is in the crosshairs of many politicians and media moguls there. Access to abortion and even birth control are banned or threatened. Child support laws are threatened. These three items spell a recipe for legally enforced domestic labour, rape and baby production slavery but there’s more.
Mothers are going to prison for having miscarriages. Besides the issue of suspected abortions, the US has “foetal assault laws”, created to punish people who attack pregnant women but now used against mothers who have accidents. If a woman gives birth to a healthy child and it is killed by someone else? Mothers are going to prison for the murder of their own children by other people, sometimes getting sentences longer than the murderers. That’s through a law called “failure to protect”. This is a so-called crime being enforced in a country that makes it impossible for mothers to protect their children, with inaccessible health care and shortages of things like baby formula. There was also a global shortage of epidural catheters – a shortage that meant unbearable and traumatic pain for a great many women but was not seen as important to the people overseeing supply chains. But there’s more.
Why are so many men suddenly against no fault divorce? 70% of divorces are initiated by women even though women suffer more financially after divorce. But this economic fact is only the case because women’s labour is economically unvalued. If women’s domestic labour had value attached to it, even at minimum wage, it would have been worth 10.9 trillion in 2019, This makes divorce extremely costly for the men who are suddenly left without this unpaid labour. And it’s not just any men this is happening to. Divorce rates are actually rapidly falling in the US. But between 1990 and 2018 they doubled for people over 50 and tripled for people over 65 and that trend is still increasing. These are the generations that refused to talk about the value of domestic labour when the women’s liberation movement fought for it to be valued.
If you watch trolls commenting on woman’s social media, sooner or later you will see a man yelling that women are going to end up dying alone. Women don’t usually die alone but married women have always predominantly died after their husbands. The combination of a longer life expectancy for women and social pressure for women to marry older men has ensured that women who complete years of unpaid childcare and unpaid care of their parents will end their healthy years providing unpaid palliative and disability care to their husbands. If the situations are reversed, the same caregiving is usually not forthcoming from men. The anger at no-fault divorce is coming from old men and it is because women are finally walking away from this part of the unpaid labour they have been providing. In a country with no reasonable medical care, in generations where men left the labour of building and maintaining social networks to women, the impact is terrifying. Men are dying alone. In a culture that has encouraged older men to make their health the responsibility of the women in their family, they are also dying early.
Child marriage is still legal in the US. 43 states have legalized child rape for those who purchase a marriage license. In 7 states there is no age limit for marriage ( ̶marriage purchase of babies for rape is legal). People are horrified that child labour is back on the table but child marriage is child slavery and legalized child rape. They should have been horrified a long time ago. The ACLU is an organization which lobbies intensely for the liberty to distribute media of the torture and rape of children as entertainment and for children’s ‘right’ to participate in their own exploitation. They are unsurprisingly one of the strongest proponents of child marriage but they also claim to criticize child labour.
Oh, and the right to no fault divorce? Children don’t have it. They can get married but they can’t file for divorce, get a restraining order, access abuse shelters or get abortions or any other medical care. They have never had those rights. Neither are they likely to end up with their children if they manage to get a divorce when they are older because they spent the years they should have spent becoming financially independent as slaves. Rights are lost in this order: children, then women, then men. If you weren’t outraged by what happens to children in the US under child marriage, a fantasy affecting men in a movie should not be a shock.
The point of transcendental endo-idealism is that each hierarchy gets folded into a greater endogroup. What happens to the negative image will happen to everyone when they eventually become the negative image, as nearly everyone will. If for no other reason, this is why the rights of every person should be protected as your own – because they are. There will be no one left to complain to if men are ever sold into slavery and injected with foreign life forms because people didn’t complain when it happened to children and women.
Happy May Day!
I know I was going to talk about neo-nihilism this month and I still will get to it but there is a backlog of things I want to talk about right now. Let me know if there is something you want to see sooner than later!
Updates are coming to Abstracting Divinity in the next couple of days. Just editing and formatting now. I hope you are all having a wonderful summer!
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Heather Marsh 