Feminism and the Basic Income

[yallerdawg]

Why we should all be feminists…and why all feminists should support the basic income.

Source: Medium, by The Basic Income Guy


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Toxic masculinity explains the following: Sexual assault and rape; sexual harassment; unwanted touching; verbal abuse aimed at a woman for her appearance; assumptions about what she may or may not like, including (but not limited to) the assumption that her politeness is conclusive evidence she wants to go to bed with you; assumptions about her intelligence and knowledge (which often plays out in the form of treating genuine intellectual disagreements, not as that, but as a sign that she is too unintelligent to see your point); etc. These are all products of a system which places women lower on the pecking-order of humanity than men, and in which women are simply there to be acted upon (liked, married, complimented, corrected, satisfied, sexualized, etc.) by men.

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One result of toxic masculinity is, to my mind, the implicit view that the work women do is less valuable than the work men do. This can clearly be illustrated in pay. I assume, of course, that in a capitalist system like ours pay is meant to illustrate the value which one’s work is taken to add. What you are paid depends on how valuable what you do is taken to be. I do not, however, believe that there is any relation between the value placed on one’s work by the market, and the actual (inherent) value of the same work.

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It might seem that we, as a society, couldn’t possibly go lower in our disregard for the work women do, right? Wrong! While pay for women in the earlier cases are lower than men’s, some of the work done by women are quite simply unpaid. To be more correct, they are simply not even viewed as work. While women have now entered the work-place in truly historic numbers, they still make up the overwhelming majority of stay-at-home parents. In the US, for example, only 16% of stay-at-home parents are dads. In the UK it is just 12%. Could the fact that we don’t, as a society, value the work women do explain why we don’t see staying home to care for kids as work, or as pay-worthy work?

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Paying moms (and now dads) for stay-at-home parenting is the next front where society needs to change its approach. Football provides something valuable: entertainment. Stay-at-home parenting provides something much more valuable than entertainment: good citizens, good humans. And, yes you don’t have to stay at home in order to produce good children; and staying at home to care for your kids doesn't guarantee that they will turn out great. But studies consistently show that stay-at-home parenting produces much better results than Child Care. From functional, well-adjusted adults to productive members of society, stay-at-home-moms are arguably the only thing standing between us and complete chaos or society-wide maladjustment and malfeasance.

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Read it all and more at: https://medium.com/basic-income/why-we-should-all-be-feminists-fbd5f3480bbf