DOGE is About Sex

Or am I just constantly thinking about sex? Many such cases.

Earlier this week, I wrote Average Men Don’t Have the Cards, about how many (albeit not all) single women would prefer to stay single than to date or marry someone they don’t find attractive, and that usually, their standards are high in the area of mental chemistry, not looks or income.

Later in the article, I mentioned that most male opposition to women having the ability to work for their own income is driven not by genuine concern about children’s upbringings, the birth rate, or anything else vaguely altruistic, and is purely a sexual strategy. Ho-hum men will have the cards again if women have no means to provide for themselves. Most men cloak this strategy in language about family values, but occasionally one will go mask-off and gleefully look forward to a world where dull, doughy, lower to middle-income men are hot commodities for all women.

I don’t think it’s about the children, somehow.

Around the time my article went viral, another take hit Twitter which meshed with my thesis in a way that felt almost too on-the-nose, as if a Twitter Discourse Cabal was pulling the strings.

Confused? Congratulations on your sub-three hours of screen time (or apologies for the fact that you’re sucked into the Instagram vortex instead of the Twitter one.) TLDR: Last year, a bunch of Australian women who worked at a woman-owned skincare company did a goofy (and yes, kind of annoying) TikTok, which irritated right-wing men so much that it’s now being blamed for Trump’s election and the Trumpcession. Does this still seem weird, unrelated and illogical? Allow me to take you down the rabbit hole.

Enter Elon Musk and DOGE. What seems like an over-the-top, maybe-ketamine-fueled attempt at reducing federal waste is actually relying on the subconscious perception of DOGE as a sexual strategy. Romantically unsuccessful men aren’t competing with attractive men—they’re competing with women’s ability to choose to stay single (either in the interim or indefinitely) and support themselves. To put it simply, their enemy isn’t Chad, it’s Whiskers (and a salary that affords her the ability to care for Whiskers.)

Even though the vast majority of employed women aren’t working for the federal government, DOGE depends on the exact fury outlined in my article (the same fury directed at the Australian TikTok women) to gain support. The idea is simple: if we take away the ability for women to work for their own income, they will once again be forced to settle for you to survive. How appealing!

Me explaining this to you- bear with me

Of course, Elon Musk doesn’t really need support because he was never elected in the first place, and he probably doesn’t care about the sexual prospects of romantically unsuccessful men. He is probably strictly self-interested, likes power, and could be benefiting financially. He also probably has some weird dom/sub thing going on with Trump, although I’m having a hard time telling who’s in which role. But Musk and Trump must know why so many single young men support the efforts of DOGE. They think he’s going to get them laid. He probably plays to this desire deliberately to gain approval and praise. It explains why Musk, who champions himself a “family man,” apparently reduced parental leave at Tesla to just two weeks (4-6 months is pretty standard at big tech companies.) Why would a “family man” do something like that? Easy. He doesn’t want mothers working.

But let’s go back to the Australian TikTok. Back when it first went viral, I saw my fellow liberals express genuine confusion as to why it signified something so visceral for right-wing men. Perhaps all my time on right-wing Twitter has given me too much of an understanding of this, but basically, a lot of men (specifically, single and frustrated ones on the right who have a negative view of women) have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace. They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who has for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs. In their mind, almost every working woman has an “email job,” specifically one that wasn’t available to men, and provides no value. Something like “Vice President of Pronouns.” They believe if AI replaced these unnecessary jobs, women would be rightfully forced to settle for schlubs (no self-improvement required on behalf of said schlubs) to avoid being destitute.

are you okay

I’d be the first to admit some jobs don’t need to exist. I’ve written about that before. But those jobs aren’t exclusive to women. When I asked my Twitter followers to describe their most bullshit jobs, plenty of the slackers were men working in tech, and even some blue collar workers. Most jobs don’t require constant work for eight hours a day, although I’d be hesitant to say society would be better off if all those jobs were eliminated or given to AI. And what do you know—the same people hellbent on getting women out of the workplace are cheering on AI replacing the “email jobs.”

Despite the chatter a few years ago about how software engineers were the only “real” (ie: male) jobs in tech, and the rest of the jobs were vanity projects given to women for funsies, junior-level software engineer roles (engineering is between 70-80% male) are being jeopardized by AI. The types of jobs that AI can most easily replace aren’t necessarily the more “female” ones. Data analysis, bookkeeping and financial reporting are some of the most at risk. Sure, some of these jobs belong to women, but many others don’t. Most importantly, “a job that could be replaced by AI” doesn’t necessarily equate to “silly job that nobody needs to be doing.” Customer service has increasingly been automated, much to customers’ chagrin, because customer service is pretty important. But AI is unlikely to replace an in-person training session called Fatphobic Microaggressions in the Workplace and the Weaponization of Pretty Privilege.

As I’ve written before, a great deal of what we perceive as general misogyny online is actually class resentment. The women on the receiving end of the ire are generally white upper-class working women over thirty, for the same SJW-ish reason I mentioned before: disgruntled bottom-half men see these women (but not their male counterparts, who work equally cushy jobs) as a class of privileged oppressors. This might make zero sense to you, a normal person, but this completely unhinged reply to me kind of sums it up:

They believe that women in corporate roles are being bankrolled by men’s tax dollars—basically, all men exist as the perpetual child of Omelas, tirelessly working in miserable existences while their blood, sweat, tears and hard-earned money is funneled to marketing executives named Mackenzie (Mackenzie likely pays far more in taxes, by the way, but we don’t need to get into that.)

I’ll play devil’s advocate for a second. Maybe there are some “DEI” adjacent jobs that don’t need to exist. It would be ignorant of me to say that while some jobs are bullshit, absolutely zero of those bullshit jobs relate to social justice initiatives. But DOGE is only gutting federal jobs, not jobs at corporations (although arguably, these guys are cheering on a recession in the hopes that it will also force corporations to lay off extraneous employees, assuming that they’d all be female.)

As

Matthew Yglesias

said on Twitter in response to my article, “I have seen a DOGE-adjacent perception that the federal civilian workforce is all ladies doing email jobs who need to be disemployed so they settle, but this seems to be at odds with the demographic facts.” He is, of course, correct. The federal government is only 45% female. Plenty of male federal employees—including men who aren’t working in slacker email jobs—have been laid off due to DOGE. They even attempted to fire air traffic controllers, until the Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, stopped them. Musk is selling frustrated men a fantasy that he isn’t going to manifest. And because he’s not beholden to any election, it won’t really matter when everyone realizes it’s bullshit.

Yes, men are more likely than women to be in jobs that require strength and endurance—things like being factory forepersons, security guards or farm workers. Speaking generally, most women don’t want to do this kind of work. On the flip side, women are more likely to work in caretaking roles that men don’t want to do—like being preschool teachers, maids, personal care aides, or nurses. Women don’t want to work at an oil rig, men don’t want to wipe butts. Men and women are different, and this shouldn’t be controversial. Lower-paying “dirty” jobs are going to be different for men and women.

Meanwhile, when it comes to email jobs, the higher-paying ones are more likely to go to men—roles like CEO, software developer, analyst or lawyer (and what do you know, the nebulous “marketing manager” role skews male.) Despite lucrative product management roles being maligned as fake DEI projects for lazy women working at the pool, product managers are 66% male. Product marketing—another department considered useless and feminine—is 61% male. Meanwhile, email jobs that skew female include things like office clerks, receptionists and secretaries—fairly low-paying roles! As an upper middle class woman who has worked a variety of bogus, cushy tech jobs I can assure you that the vast majority of my coworkers—including people in the same roles as myself—were men. I even worked at a company with an office ball pit and arcade games, which my male coworkers treated as an adult Chuck E Cheese all day while each bringing in over $100K annually. Just imagine the outrage if they were women, and a video of their game-playing, ball-pit-diving antics in the workplace had made it to Twitter!

Let me put it this way: if you had to drum up a privileged class of people who make more money doing cushy, comfortable work, it would be white collar men, not women. Yes, overpaid female executives exist, but your perception of them as the emblem of the ruling class is driven by TikTok rage bait, not by reality.

But the frustrated men are not thinking about these numbers. They’re assuming, for some reason, that DOGE (or even just a haphazard recession) will specifically target women, or at least disproportionately target women, to the point that in order to survive women will have to quit their scheme of “negative prostitution” and start doling out sex and companionship to men they wouldn’t otherwise want. These men won’t have to become more interesting, work out, or do anything to improve themselves, outside of bringing in a middling salary and existing, or so they think.

Is this…good? Like, do guys actually want a woman to have reluctant sex with them so she can receive food and shelter? I always assumed no. I mean, most guys are wary of gold diggers for this reason, right? Only 32% of men in my recent survey said that they would entertain a monogamous relationship with an attractive woman who only wanted them for their money and status, and that percentage oddly didn’t change when filtering for virgins or men who haven’t had sex in over a year. But hey—not every man supports DOGE, or even thinks “negative prostitution” is an thing. Perhaps it’s just a fraction of that 32% who do—and that’s still a lot of men.

I actually got into a civil mini-debate with some guys on Twitter about the idea of women faking attention for the purpose of obtaining resources, and I was surprised to see that some men don’t think this is a real thing. They believe a woman being with someone for the money they can provide is genuine attraction, the same way it’s genuine attraction to be with someone because you find them hot or funny. I feel like this obviously isn’t true—you couldn’t argue that a 23-year-old sugar baby has genuine attraction to the oldest and ugliest of her clients, right? Do they think a stripper who takes a client to a private room is experiencing genuine attraction? Or maybe these guys believe that any woman who has sex with any man is doing it out of true desire. More disturbingly, perhaps they don’t understand that women can have desire at all.

Perhaps this is, as the youth say, “cope.” But I think it also might just be a fundamental difference in the way men and women view sex and attraction. Some men view their resources as an extension of themselves, akin to a woman’s looks. I obviously disagree, in that your looks are, well, part of you, and money is, quite literally, something else that is outside your body, unless you happen to be engaging in some very risky diamond-smuggling activities. If you had a child who made a friend, and that friend only liked your child so they could use your pool and play your child’s video games, would you consider them a real friend? To me, the difference is obvious—but what I think doesn’t matter. Many men don’t think there is a difference between genuine attraction and phony attraction for the acquisition of resources, or they trick themselves into thinking there isn’t a difference. If a woman needs them to survive, they don’t see that as reluctant settling—they think in that case, how women experience attraction has fundamentally changed.

But they haven’t. As I mentioned in the aforementioned article:

“It’s no wonder that jokes about suffering through sex with your husband flourished back then in a way that seems antiquated today. “Lay back and think of England,” for example, was a phrase coined in 1912 by Lady Hillingdon writing in her diary about her husband’s unsatisfying visits to her bedchamber. Perhaps all the “boomer humor” jokes from men about hating their wives were more multifaceted than we give them credit for—maybe their wives hated them too.”

Maybe they don’t care. Maybe a woman suffering through sex with them is fine, and they’d prefer that to not having sex (even though—let’s be real—they could pay a sex worker to do that today, and there’s a reason they’re not doing it. Revealed preference, many such cases.) But either way, DOGE isn’t going to make it happen. A recession isn’t going to make it happen, nor will AI replacing a bunch of jobs—they’re more likely to find themselves destitute than they are to experience a newfound identity as a 1950s Chad. And that’s another area where men don’t have the cards: if they can’t make their own money, they can’t trade in sex or companionship for someone else’s resources, unless they’re willing to make some pretty major compromises on, say, the resource-provider having a penis (and even then, I’ve seen gay beauty standards—not sure you’d all make the cut.)

But let’s entertain the fantasy for a moment. Let’s say that Musk and Trump magically manage to excise women from the labor force in a way that means 1940s-era enforced monogamy is back on the table. Men will still have to impress someone in order to attain a wife—likely, those women’s fathers. No, they won’t have to be exceptionally charming or handsome, but there aren’t many dads eager to betroth their daughters to GroyperRapist1488.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with singles today isn’t that men aren’t tall enough, or that women have too many tattoos, or that everyone is too ugly. Most people simply aren’t meeting at all, and a recession or enforced monogamy isn’t going to make it easier for people to meet each other. Despite my article being maligned as misandrist neener-neenering to the bottom 50% of men, it wasn’t meant that way. Most of the men who find themselves single and frustrated don’t actually hate women, and aren’t undeserving of a partner—they’re plagued by social anxiety and a lack of charisma, which are reinforced by not interacting with enough people. The fewer women to whom they talk, the more terrified they are of rejection. It’s a vicious cycle that only gets worse without action taken to reverse it.

But as I said before, unlike height or age, this is something that can be changed. I’m not in the business of giving dating advice, especially not to men, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that getting off the phones, reducing porn and video game usage, and meeting more people in real life—men and women, platonic and romantic—is the only thing that will help these men. Trump and Musk won’t save them or give them rizz, even if they did manage to eliminate the female workforce. The only thing that will help is logging off, and meeting as many real-life people as possible, slowly eliminating anxiety through repeated exposures to social interaction. And DOGE isn’t going to help you do that.