In all the discussions about feminism as an ideology, few of the articles about how to handle it involve economically exploiting the ideology to punish its adherents. There tends to be a little bit of tut-tutting about how liberals mint profits off of the ideology, but not much as it relates to scalping those same profits to discourage the adoption of the new life pattern.
Here are the big ones that I can think of:
- Student lending and for-profit education
- Sham courses at stupendous margins — get them hooked and paying interest for most of their working lives. There may be a default risk, but the government guarantees the face value of the loans.
- Facilitating legal-ish prostitution
- This has generated at least one high-growth startup success story in recent years
- Someone has to pay for those student loans
- Fertility treatments
- Get them in their late 30s and 40s — they’re at peak earning power, have some savings, and are willing to spend it all on high-risk gambles repeatedly until they run out of money and eventually creditworthiness
- Therapy
- High-end therapists and psychiatrists earn $100s an hour
- Prescriptions can be billed to insurance
- Even casual users of drugs like Xanax need dealers
- Romantic literature and film
- The most lucrative genre of media today
- Can be produced on a minimal budget, unlike male-targeted action films which need special effects
- Mix and match genres and characters with the same basic formula
- Legal services
- Convince women to get divorced, provoke them into suing and re-suing people until they run out of money or their targets run out of liquid assets
- Plastic surgery
- Women naturally decay and become ugly
- Promise them that they can look younger with surgery and implants
- Separate them from their money
- Childcare
- They can get government assistance for this
- All working women with kids need it to one degree or another
- Higher end working women are willing to pay premium prices for care that they see as ‘better’ or more up-class
- Retirement advice geared to women specifically
- Women tend to be worse at making financial decisions than men are
- They tend to be looking for an authority figure to manage their finances for them
- They will pay a premium for this service and respond well to female-tinged financial marketing messages
- Charity pitches
- Childless women tend to respond well to images of surrogate children
- Profligate pet care
- Toy dogs are surrogate babies
- They will spend enormous amounts of cash on their ‘babies’
- Drugs and alcohol
- They are always unhappy and feeling empty, so you just sell them the material to temporarily fill that hole
- Real estate
- Women will spend a lot more on real estate in ‘better’ neighborhoods
- They are very socially sensitive to what sorts of neighborhoods they live in (will pay higher rent)
- Fancy food
- Working women tend to not know how to cook, so you can reap profits from them by paying people low wages to cook for working women
- Even if it’s not actually ‘gourmet’ food, plausibly modeling the food after dishes portrayed as ‘gourmet’ on television and in magazines can result in higher profits
- Hyper-fitness
- Single women sometimes want to embody the androgynous fantasy of having the strength of a man and the sensual body of a woman
- They demand ‘personal training,’ diet books, etc. etc. to realize an ideal which is difficult to achieve for most
- Need becomes more acute as they age and become less intrinsically attractive
- ‘Wall’ years after ~28 best age to target
- Hyper-fatness
- The flip-side of hyper-fitness — sell them muumuus, clothing with lots of elastic, and fat acceptance seminars to make them feel less ashamed over their unhealthy condition
- Elderly, lonely women can be separated from their money trivially
- This can be somewhat illegal, but elderly women with money are so helpless that they are practically ATMs
The businesses that load the woman up with cash early in her life primp her to to have that cash be taken from her later in life.
Given that marriage rates are declining at a fast clip, all of these lines of business should grow over time, so long as feminism remains a popular ideology promoted and supported by the state.
To the extent that men are penalized by the state for being men, and ownership becomes less secure, more cash will temporarily go into the hands of women, who tend to have poor impulse control, a low future orientation, and make more emotionally-driven rather than logical decisions.
Sigh. Sometimes I think we’d be better off if women were legally under men’s control. But then, in reality, I’d settle if the law didn’t favor women over men. It’d put a damper on the things you just wrote about.
I know a couple whose mother is in assisted-care living. It’s so expensive my first reaction was, “They want to make sure they get all her assets before she dies and leaves it to you.” That seems to be the general goal of the medical industry, too.
Can you imagine the hit to the economy if women were returned to normalcy?
What some people refer to as ‘the economy’ is not really the economy.
We want to encourage saving and capital accumulation. Feminism encourages dissaving and the breaking up of family fortunes.
Indeed, these nursing homes and the medical complex do what they can to bleed estates white, even into debt.
True about the economy. It’s really a parasitic sector that thrives on various degeneracies. When I sit and think, my mind boggles at the colossal scale of parasitical economic activity in our country. It does fit in with “BUY BUY BUY” as the Greatest Good.
This list goes a long way toward showing precisely why women:
1. Have considerably lower savings than men.
http://www.today.com/money/womens-nest-eggs-far-smaller-mens-2D80529062
2.Fair worse than men after divorce, despite a legal regime geared entirely toward their financial advantage.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/25/divorce-women-research
Sadly, the list you provided above, though exhaustive, is far from complete.
Although you have mentioned prescription drugs in the Therapy bullet, their effects on female income cannot be overstated. The number one prescription drug ($7.5 billion in sales, annually) in the United States is Abilify, an anti-psychotic targeted toward depression sufferers, the vast majority of which are women. Maintenance costs for this drug, even with insurance, can run into the hundreds and thousands per year.
http://rt.com/usa/204563-abilify-top-grossing-medication/
As it is, the SSRI class of Depression meds (not including Abilify) by itself also counts for billions of dollars of western womens’ yearly spending.
Also, don’t forget the increased healthcare costs associated with Hyper-Fatness. Diabetes and high blood pressure meds don’t grow on trees, and heart disease is still the number one killer of women in the US.
As a far as general categories are concerned, you can also add the following:
-The cost of financial mismanagement:
Women have a higher tendency to mismanage their credit card debts. Detrimental habits such as maintaining a monthly balance, making more impulse buys, making only the minimum payment and carrying a higher interest rate all seem to have a higher incidence in women.
http://www.creditinfocenter.com/debt/women-have-more-debt.shtml
-The cost of Fashion
Women of middle and upper class income have been indoctrinated by print, online, and visual media into the cult of the designer label. Not being a woman or transvestite, I had passed the majority of my life blissfully ignorant of how much name-brand women’s clothing and accessories cost. That is, until I started to ask my girlfriend about it, and received the following bits of info: ~ Cost of a single (low-end) bra at Victoria’s secret $40.
~Cost of designer shoes: $100-200 per pair, with high-end labels like Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin starting at $600/pair and over.
~Cost of purses: mid-high end designers like Coach and Gucci (popular with middle class women) have standard purses starting at $300-500, and top flight brands like Hermes having models costing tens of thousands of dollars.
~She took me around Dillards’ womens’ section trying to discretely show me price tags, with shirts going for $40-110, and simple dresses going for $90-$250.
Keep in mind that women never own just one or two of the previously listed items, but often maintain multiples of each, adding new pieces as seasons change and new fashion trends emerge (which they do – yearly and even seasonally).
-Opportunity cost lost to TV and Social Media
Women spend an inordinate and disproportionate amount of time perusing both TV and Social Media.
http://www.businessinsider.com/2014-social-media-demographics-update-2014-9
-Vacations and Live Entertainment
While the details on the habits of single women are a bit sketchy, the vast majority of (80%) of travel decisions are made by women.
http://gutsytraveler.com/women-travel-statistics-2/
According to the article, there is a huge market for travel experiences geared specifically toward women. Personally. I have seen a number of my girlfriend’s single friends treating themselves to cruises, getaways and spa treatments, all of which they likely couldn’t afford.
Moving to live entertainment, while I am unclear on the gender split of music tickets, I would venture that women spend considerably on that as well. I’ve heard that regular section Madonna tickets can go for as high as $300 a piece. I can with certainty say that the Broadway/Musical industry is almost entirely powered by the patronage of women, both married and single.
-Jewelry
Although men buy a lot for themselves and their women, it is obvious that the lion’s share of the market is directed to women. It is certain that working women spend a considerable amount on Jewelry.
Women are the only ones who go to musicals on Broadway now, also.
Before designer brands (and even today to some extent) more women made their own dresses, which were probably of higher quality overall and longer-lasting than most of the affordable designer clothes of today.
Go into any mall and you’ll find 90% of the stores are for women. The last I visited had two stores for men.
And within stores as well. Mid to upper tier department stores might have a floor and a half dedicated to women’s stuff while the men’s department gets a quarter or half a floor.
Another one:
-Vehicle and Home maintenance:
Unwilling and/or unable to complete a majority of these tasks themselves, women must pay a professional premium for the maintenance of cars, homes and appliances. In the past, a woman would have relied on the ability and expertise of some man in her life to mitigate these costs. The “strong and independent” career woman often has no such luxury.
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/women-spend-300-billion-year-auto-repair-156616
I should have have included this. A bunch of people are pointing out industries which I missed.
The very fact that we can point out this many reveals that feminism has been nothing less than a Faustian bargain for women. They get to make their own money, but that financial surplus gets easily squandered away or even captured outright, in a death by a thousand cuts from this coterie of “women’s” industries. In addition, they pay for this “freedom” from men at an ever increasing cost to their physical and mental health.
Remember this study?
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969
How about this one?
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763405001326
(remember, women make up over 2/3 of that rising rate)
Here’s a new one:
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/suicide-rates-among-increasing-adolescents-especially-for-females/
and another,
“…in recent years, the death rate for adult white women 15 to 54 years old has increased even as the rates for black and Hispanic women have declined…”
http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Health-News/white-women-death-rates/2015/03/05/id/628434/
and another:
http://womensenews.org/story/reproductive-health/150113/national-initiative-tackles-rising-us-maternal-deaths
Seriously, the only way the feminist movement could do a quicker job of demoralizing, dehumanizing and destroying American women is if they just went about it old school Red Army style and put them in gulags.
The problem with that route, of course, is that it’s a little too damn obvious. So, instead we have feminism, the gulag (most) women don’t even know they’re in; the gulag they’ve been taught to see as paradise.
If women ever do wake up to the scam, they’ll come crawling back to men, begging for patriarchal oppression and all the love, health, comfort, happiness and fulfillment that comes with it.
I suppose their lack of any long-term savings is why feminists always vote for single-payer health care, or for unstable isotopes that decay into single-payer. Then when a feminist develops her first non-trivial health problem, the single payer decides that the most cost-effective treatment is to let her die.
The death panel only wants what’s best for you.
Ollie, Dave, as Instapundit frequently says, that which can’t be paid for won’t go on forever. My ex wife is an excellent example. Well educated RN here in Texas that has serious depression issues. Self destructive ones. She refuses to get help. No meds for her situation. The point is, she is a mentally ill spendthrift. I have given up trying to help her. She makes a lot of money, sure, but she spends it on nonsense. So, yeah, your article is relevant.
Sounds like my ex-wife. Try to get her to divorce you. If you initiate, she’ll make you pay.
Not mentioned so far is the reason governments are so supportive of feminism, for each of these transactions also raises sales and consumer tax clips for the various levels of government.
“What some people refer to as ‘the economy’ is not really the economy.”
It strikes me that this is one of the rare economic matters where anti-capitalist and pro-capitalist right wingers might find some agreement.
Should be explored further.
Another obvious one – hair. Most women I know spend hundreds, maybe even thousands, on their hair each year.
Yes. Much more expensive than the barber. Manipedi also, even for poor women.