Cha-chingggg!

By David Futrelle

Now I know you ladies like to complain about that pesky pay gap. But there’s no need to worry your pretty little heads (or bodies) about it, because some dude on Quillette has some great ideas on how to extract all the money you need from hapless cash-rich, sex-poor men. Even if — especially if — you live in a mining town, as so many of you gals do these days.

Take it away, Jerry Barnett, self-described “technologist, author, and campaigner.”

On the surface, in a mining town, the gender pay gap is huge, with the vast majority of money officially going to men.

“Officially.”

And yet, by Saturday morning, much of the cash has been transferred to bar owners, prostitutes, girlfriends, and wives.

But Jerry doesn’t seem to mind about the money going to bar owners. He’s more concerned about the money “transferred” to the latter three groups because of all the sex.

While most fair-minded people would no doubt agree that women should be free to take mining jobs if they choose, it’s unlikely that many women want such gruelling, dangerous, and unhealthy work when being a bar prostitute, a girlfriend, or a wife to a miner is available as an alternative.

I’m sure there’s nothing grueling or dangerous about being a sex worker in a testosterone-heavy mining town in the middle of nowhere.

Later on in the same post, Mr. Barnett tries to prove that men are “the low-value sex,” biologically speaking. As partial evidence for this claim, he cites … marijuana plants.

Even in plants (at least those species that produce separate male and female flowers), the females are forced to invest more. It is no coincidence that marijuana farmers destroy male plants, and retain the females for their big, resin-heavy flowers. Females are more valuable, almost everywhere.

Even later, he talks about cave men hunting the “largest mammals” to extinction so they could give the cave ladies meat for sex, thus making these big beasts “an early casualty of the human sex trade.” (Never mind that there’s no actual evidence of the meat-for-sex hypothesis; it’s just an evo psych “just so” story.)

Now, technically, Barnett didn’t mention mammoths by name. But “largest mammals?” Come on. I think this is close enough to count as a “we hunted the mammoth to feed you have sex with you” moment caught in the wild.

Really a lot of innovative thinking going on over on the Quillette there.

Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

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