This is a comment by Gingko on the post “On the Disposibility of Men“.
“But the article also pains me because it asks a bigger question, one that I first started thinking about on the comment boards of The Good Men Project: ‘Why are men disposable?'”
“Because, well, someone has to be if that work is going to get done. This is how the ealry stages of industrialization look in every country. Remember when you read the Jungle in high school? What do you think the death toll was like building the transcontinental raliroad? Women were disposable in their own way until we got the childbirth deathrate down.
“It’s progress, although maybe not in the direction you’d like, but it’s progress that this is getting less gendered. For decades Army leaders were leary of letting women soldiers get too close to combat, too close to real danger, because they feared what the public respsonse would be to “women coming home in body bags”. Well, time has told what that response is, and it’s not the hysterics the generals expected. Of course our war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan have been overwhelmingly male, but the point still stands, because it’s progress that the public tolerates any female war deaths.”
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Photo credit: Flickr / DVIDSHUB
While I agree with the concept of this comment, I disagree in that this work is “progress” or somehow ties in to what the industrialization of other countries looked like. The sheer magnitude of this operation makes it unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The absolute richest countries in the world dumping massive heaps of toxic waste to the absolute poorest people in the world, waste that totally destroys the ecosystem and therefore their future, kills and diseases their men and deepens the country’s poverty? This isn’t the path to how countries have developed over the years. To quote from the… Read more »
Weren’t many of the workers in the new factories of the industrial revolution women and children?