CHAPTER 11
Why Don’t Working-Class Men Just Take “Pink-Collar” Jobs?
MANLY DIGNITY is highly important to working-class men, and they’re not feeling it.
Breadwinner status is a big part of this: Many men (of all classes) still measure
masculinity by the size of a paycheck.^214 Since 1970, professional-elite wages have
increased dramatically, while the wages of high-school-educated men fell 47%.^215 The
percentage of men so discouraged they are not looking for work has tripled since the
1960s.^216
Look, I wish manliness worked differently. But most men, like most women, seek to
fulfill the ideals they’ve grown up with. For many blue-collar men, all they’re asking for
is basic human dignity (male varietal). When it comes to masculine dignity, men of all
classes are united in their opinion: they’re all for it. But members of the PME have been
remarkably tone deaf in their scorn for the dignity aspirations of working-class men.
Instead, while elite men still enjoy a virtual stranglehold on highly paid high-status jobs
themselves, some in the PME have recommended that blue-collar men take pink-collar
jobs like genetic counselors, occupational assistants, or nurse practitioners. Highbrow
discourse on Bloomberg.com and elsewhere identifies the key problem for working-class
men as their outdated notions of masculinity.^217
“They are little man-boys who need ‘manly’ jobs and go crying to their mamas when they
have to answer to a ‘woman in a pants suit’ or need to perform a task that doesn’t
involve lifting 100 pounds or cutting through steel plates,” one man opined in an email.
Said another, “Swallow your pride/dignity and go back to school, get a 21st century job.
Economies change. Real men and women with integrity don’t expect to be handed a job
or scapegoat others who get something they don’t,” commented Jerry Day.*
I’m all for men of all classes developing new and healthier masculinities, but to have the
elite telling working-class men to abandon the breadwinner masculinity privileged men
still enjoy... that’s not going to persuade working-class men of anything except that
they really, really, really hate feminism. When elite men start flooding into traditionally
feminine jobs, elites will have the standing to tell working-class men to swallow their
masculine pride and do so, too.
And yet we do all need to recognize that twenty-first-century jobs will differ from
- Why Don’t Working-Class Men Just Take “Pink-Collar” Jobs?