Woman. Speak. Punished.

Pandemic and onward, the general sense for many working women has become a question of what on earth we’re getting out of any employment, besides punishment. Tired of being squashed into an internet-polluted “inspirational” landscape of girl boss b.s. that resonated with pro sports levels of boot camp exhaustion as some pink-flavored landscape of side gig exploitation in the “new normal” for U.S. employment, what somehow filtered through is a “speak and be punished” trend for any woman who won’t sit at the ridiculous end of two very different extremes.

You see, there’s a demand for bland that gets rewarded, sitting beside some of the most extreme and outrageous behavior that also gets rewarded. But try being somewhere in-between, where most engaged, aware, working women sit. Then you get nothing here but hate and rejection. The screening process for being considered worthy of earning, ever, at anything, is to be a mealy-mouthed cliché nothingburger cog in the wheel or a total main character narcissist. There is no room for “normal” and “paycheck” anymore, no matter the industry, no matter the job. Pick one of two lanes, you unworthy women, we’re erasing everything else.

You don’t have to really have done anything wrong. You just have to exist as someone who made a sarcastic joke in 2007 about a politician on the socials or posted a girls’ trip photo showing you all having Mai Tais on the beach while not being celebrities. In the first case, you’ll be considered too political to hire or employ, and in the second, you’ll be viewed as a substance abuser who can’t be trusted to get to work on time. It seems like the last thing anyone could ever accept is you having a personality or a life.

I mean, I’m not talking about drunk posting nudes on the socials at 3AM ranting about how you want to murder your childhood bestie for spilling your nail polish all over the dresser. That would probably go viral and win you a brand sponsorship, actually. Maybe it’s the only way to bring income in at this point? And does that say anything about where we are for women and employment? Hmmm.

I’m talking about reasonable and normal as wholly unacceptable now. How, in a place where the supposed president is permitted endless rants about killing political rivals, if you so much as express disapproval and frustration in your personal life with your friends or family members about that situation, or repost support of some navy fighter pilot-turned-astronaut-turned Senator who also objects to assassination rants, you are considered radioactive as someone overly-opinionated, disruptive, and too dangerous to hire.

Because it’s not as if you’re a citizen or a taxpayer or a voter concerned about your country. So why would you be so offensive and controversial and start so many fights and be so unproductive? Clearly you’re out of control, out of line, incapable of doing anything except wrecking everything, and should never be employed again if you think the top three branches of government have demonstrated so much support of rape and human trafficking that part of you is honestly hoping you die in your sleep and don’t have to wake up to that level of demonstrable and incessant misogynist cruelty tomorrow. That’s the screening process; care about girls and women, believe they should have any rights, or care about the state of governance and law in this country—man, are you some kind of bitch.

You didn’t get the memo, did you? Full sentences not allowed here. Mature and humane thoughts not your business, woman. Don’t bring politics into your profile as a human constantly damaged by them, our workplaces are too busy catering to autocrats to show any spine as to hire rational people deeply damaged by exactly those politics. Did you not say Dave’s ideas that he repeated from you were great at the meeting? Did you think you had the right to be involved in the policies of a country you’re a citizen of? You crazy cunt, that’s not what American employers believe in. Except when…

Stop me if this sounds familiar: if you really want a top job as a woman, you get plastic surgery to join the MAGA hate harem while spewing venom, endorsing conspiracy, and making sure women lose their right to choose. It’s the road to career riches and job security these days if you’re female. So…that’s also the screening process?

You see what I mean by extremes winning the paychecks, dominating the job market?

I mean, pretty much. The parameters for who you can never be as a woman earning money have been set so narrow, and yet so widely apart in the “acceptable” pathways, it’s a wonder anyone’s working. Probably in silence, attempting to erase any trace of their apparently flawed normality, until they are either so rich or so famous they can be permitted to speak again.

Celebrities and the few female founders made good seem to take up a huge amount of oxygen in telling us all who to be all the time, so I guess make it to that level and then you never have to shut up but can still keep making money? Good to know the oh-so-accessible formula for earning my right to speak for myself while earning. Pro tips from the ridiculous tipping point we’re teetering on.

I mean, it is pretty clear employers don’t want real, regular, average humans in their workplace anyhow. Whoever we can unemploy with AI, and just slap more technology on any tech failure that arises from said technology, then put a little more technology in place to fix that, we’ll apparently go for it full throttle, no humans needed. Then tell everybody to use more technology to get another job.

Cool. So, if I called B.S. on that, could I be excommunicated as some misanthropic Luddite who just doesn’t understand how amazing this is and all the wonderful frontiers it ushers in? Because what I’d really love more of is being rejected one more time for having logic while toting a vagina.

No, no, you say, it’s not that bad. You can totally be somebody relatively sane with some education, experience, and skills, and you’ll find a job. You can be a freelancer or a business owner. So many people have, so many women especially do now with how much progress we’ve made in educational and economic endeavors.

Okay, what desert island have you been living on? And, for how many decades? Did you Jetsons-vault here from a retro cartoon fantasy of the future? Because I’ve got some news for you about women and paychecks you’re not going to want to hear, which will inevitably make me into the bad person you don’t dare hire one more time.

It doesn’t seem to matter the number of degrees or small businesses established or glass ceilings finally broken by a very few. The many are still squashed into boxes growing ever smaller as tradwives monetize what our grandmothers wanted to leave behind, as OnlyFans becomes the OnlyRoute to the OnlyPaycheck we’ll ever know again, and as traditionally female-dominated occupations like nursing are declared “unprofessional”. WHAT?! And you still give endless lawless permission slips to traditionally male-dominated, high-earning occupations like tech and finance, while saying this to me with a straight face. Of course you do.

I have to what exactly? Go online to Betty Crocker myself into a crock of a philosophy demanding likes for cash to dial women back centuries in whatever corset my husband would like to strangle me with…that’s the instruction manual for this road to riches? Or I can be super empowered by wearing lingerie and sticking things in orifices while trying to forget the degrees I have, which will never be worth anything in comparison to getting naked for strangers in a way that recalls The Deuce in the 70s? That’s the progress we’ve made.

And no hate to the women of OnlyFans; you gotta do what you gotta do. Sex work doesn’t deserve to be as misunderstood as it always is when consenting adults are present. At the same time, it seems to illustrate the exact devaluation of women that endangers and dehumanizes us every day. I know there are libraries of PhDs and studies on it, back when we had libraries and PhDs. It’s not my decision to make for others, yet always might be the only way left to earn money for me. So it disturbs me to hear women with decades of work experience and multiple degrees describe how it was their only way left to earn a living. Shouldn’t we be doing better than that somehow, as a society? And also honestly, memo to influencer “TradWives”: there are plenty of ways to be a family without flushing women’s rights down your sparkling clean toilet.

But these extremes make sense in a context that doesn’t value degrees, work, or essential occupations. In a nation that has constantly refused proper paychecks for teachers, yet historically has teaching as one of the few breakthrough paid work avenues for women, it’s a long road of starting from behind. And a long road of the devaluation of women and girls. As humans with legal rights, voting rights, healthcare rights. Etc. history stuff etc. that is looking like our present as well. Bummer. So, you think any of that might affect our situations as workers, earners, over decades or centuries? Hmmm…too thinky for you?

Now, let’s just see if we can smash that together with modernized extremes of predatory capitalism ever-more engineered to be a robber baron-dominated monopolistic landscape of no hope, and see what we can do about your paycheck today, okay? We’ll call it “freedom” and “the internet” while failing to put any boundaries around it because we’ve lost touch with why laws even exist in the first place! We wouldn’t want to harm this nascent data-thieving industry selling your identity to the dark web for millions while you’re stalked by every device and have to log into special keystroke-tracking software to write a blog about knitting for five dollars for one more desperate small business trying to make a splash that can’t pay you for fifty hours of work you’ve done on their behalf. We’ll call it “freelancing” and pretend it isn’t one more way to make sure every job is outsourced to the race to the bottom dollar while pressuring you to be some powerpreneur or you’re a loser. The erasure of workers’ rights hits harder for a lot of women, who were still trying to make it to that first job with any healthcare plan or benefits, then you canceled all of those for the next few generations to come.

In the exhaustion of endless side gigs as the only way to scrape by, littered with the wreckage of societal contracts and past-tense terms like “pensions”, so many avenues for revenue have been oversold as concepts and underbid in pay. Regular employment was made into a contract-only fire-at-will race-to-the-bottom of outsourcing abroad for peanuts, while the tech industry made that more possible by making sure that more traditionally female-dominated occupations from secretaries to personal assistants—pretty much any admin because for centuries you’ve asked us to organize and run your shit while paying us shit for doing it--became software and devices. You assured us all that our talents would be redeployed as we were exhorted to be eager lifelong learners willing to go into debt one more time so that we could finally get a job that any of our brothers could have accidentally walked into drunk thirty years ago.

Then, in the AI landscape, you have the gall to tell us we were all stupid and should have been plumbers. Electricians. HVAC techs. So now we are supposed to go into traditionally male-dominated occupations, and you expect no pushback because you are convinced of the demand, while you also reassure us one more time on our own dime and effort it’s time to re-skill again because we, the working women, did everything wrong.

And somehow, we always still are. There is the question of how much of the United States’ population the legalized white-collar cartel at the top rotten three branches of government is willing to rubber stamp for every tech, corporate, and lobbyist-meets-billionaire evil real-world plotline to permanently unemploy us all, now and forever. Women first, though, into those economically sinking half-built life rafts. Heck, if men can recognize some of these problems are shared across gender and political divides, can you understand how this is real? Does it honestly take men saying economic problems are real for that to be validated here?

Of course it does. I’m objecting to nothing real, because I’m female. I’m just complaining. I can’t understand how much improvement there has been. I’m making no kind of point at all, because I never have permission to mention the bleeding obvious while I bleed from a rogue uterine polyp for which there are no more ob-gyns left because you certainly solved medical care by destroying my right to choose and taking away the providers who provide far more than abortions, you divvies. You’ll bill me for it anyway, even if I have to nip the sucker myself with a turkey baster and some kite string, then cauterize it with a butane wand. But, no fear, I’m used to it after so many decades of gender-based medical malpractice, sponsored by politics.

But back to our regularly scheduled programming of being unemployed for having a personality, multiple degrees, decades of work experience, and also ovaries. Don’t list those on your resume! I’m thinking of making a mid-thirties male AI avatar named Chad wearing a designer suit and way too much cologne, with an extensive criminal record from the top money-laundering nations, and having him interview for me. As Chad, I should be at the top of the hedge fund tier by the end of the week.

You could have all the abilities, but if you don’t have the big swinging dick, I’m not sure you’ll be let in the door in the first place to some of those highest-earning occupations that, if we had laws, sanity, or a conscience, would land you behind bars in three nanoseconds. It might be very important to a country to keep you, woman, someplace like teaching and nursing—helper occupations where you support, nurture, instruct, and caretake. Which would be nothing like what your great-grandmother was told was her place in society. You just do it for poverty-level wages while she did it in total gratitude for essentially being owned under the law by whatever husband or male relative was allowed to decide her fate. Vote much?

Oh, should you gain those helper skills, those nurturing, healing, supportive, instructive qualifications that shape minds, save lives, discover new avenues in science and communication, then you will be rewarded with the elimination of the Department of Education and Bear Carcass Kennedy heading up the anti-vax euphemistically-labeled “Health and Human Services”. And speaking of health, as a cigarette ad apparently unironically tried to tell us, “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

Yes, by god, we’ve certainly come a long way. Not only will we benefit you by encouraging you to go into female-dominated underpaid occupations smacking of old-school gender concepts of appropriate behavior while seizing the federal departments they operate under and turning them into private clubs for professional king worshippers who only employ women as MAGA femme bots, we’ll even take away the concept that your skills are skills! Just for good measure. We’ll call nursing “unskilled” while somehow allowing politicians to still hold jobs, even though they are not capable of half the help or healing that an experienced nurse can deliver in five minutes flat. Honestly, does anyone in the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches understand what skills are? Because lately, it isn’t seeming like it. It would figure, since so many of them have so few skills except snake oil peddling.

So, nothing’s a trap. Everything’s been fixed. Feel the fucking progress, bitch, am I right?

And, as we all know, that’s just what a very nasty woman would say. And you can’t have those at your precious company, or even say you knew her once, because you prefer to pay out the frat club of media-menacing wrecking balls who can’t even handle a few punch-up white straight male comedians doing their jobs in sticking up for the rest of us. How am I ever going to get a job if you take away the few top-of-the-food-chain dudes who might consider me a valid life form? Colbert, we hardly knew ye.

Yup, so it’s back to Average Schmuckville, population Amy, elevation six feet under, that whistle-stop ghost town at the intersection of “what” and “is this bullshit”. You’ll notice if you don’t blink it’s been plastered in pink putty with word signs like “good vibes only” and “live laugh love” by the entrepreneurial enclave of selling toxic positivity as a substitute for systemic functionality, an especial favorite of female power-freelancers hawking work-kit programs online who promise that “you doing you” is the road to business success. If you look closer, you’ll notice the graffiti they tried to scrub off which we’re not saying population Amy might have committed with a spray can of sanity. “Fight, rage, scream” was vetoed as a slogan, deemed gender inappropriate for anyone not right wing-ding enough.

Yes, we’re always encouraged to do exactly that, share-share-share and be so unique and different and empowered, but only in standardized template milquetoast ways. See if this sounds familiar: “When I finally started sharing my 5k runs for charity, it was really scary. I didn’t know if my (fill in the blank with boss, recruiters, clients, etc.) could ever accept me. It was just so personal. Then, someone on the internet insulted me and I really questioned my path. I thought I shouldn’t share anything about the real me. But one day, a, b, c, person said it was exactly why they hired, promoted, recommended me, because it showed a more personal side of shared values and commitment.”

Really? That’s the danger level, that’s the journey of “overcoming” we’re siloed into? That’s the extent of so-called “challenge” in a career or business that people can absorb without blowing a gasket and rejecting you from all paychecks forever?

That is the way we all die poor. Our critical thinking, forceful arguments, activism, and any differentiation from pre-approved, workshopped, copy-pasted clones is disallowed, as we are herded like cattle into a narrower and narrower pen of what is permitted to be discussed while having income. It is the way the demand for women as nurturers and gentle, supportive caretakers is maintained along stereotypical gender divides. It reaches into our time, energy, and wallets, and clobbers us one more time for being any different than our own grandmothers. Share the fake-brave, be all about “community” and support, have a cliché “personality” in a premade assembly kit path where everyone has walked before, and be permitted to earn money. That’s about the equivalent of this “female powerpreneur” crap. Sure. You do “you”!

Employment and earning are always and forever predicated on an acceptance of gender stereotypes. Not just jobs, but even words, must fall along those lines. Skills, experience, sanity, the ability to learn, observe, solve problems…it will never qualify you for anything if you don’t willingly play a rigged whiffle-ball game advertised for grown adults as the road to achievement as long as you play in stilettos and a miniskirt. You might even be allowed to wear a suit if you can be a cog in the pink-colored world of thoughtless regurgitation of pre-approved non-challenges miraculously solved by being fake-daring in uncontroversial ways. You then have somehow sustained enough of the brain damage and moral insult to think of this as “encouraging”. And yet I’m always torn between boredom and disgust.

How many female assassins, fighters, leaders gain popularity in books, movies, and television/streaming? Not everyone wants to star in a Hallmark movie as their real life, so the kick-butt throat-cutting babes can make heartstrings sing in a sense of solidarity we’re never permitted in the real world.

And do you know, in the real world, only the women rabid with right-wing hatred or already at the top of the American heap somehow have any permission slip to be different than basic? You must call for slaughter and promote conspiracy, then you are golden. Or, claw your way to fame first, then you get a certain amount of leeway to say, have a personality. Come from whopping amounts of wealth, and be worshipped anyway for what you never achieved. You must be aiding and abetting the worst, or you must be on some inside track to be allowed to step outside the shrinking pink squashing of women’s employment prospects at all being linked to being real people, with abilities beyond worshipful sycophant, silent martyr, lying stereotype, accessory charges or just plain accessory in any shop window, alike all the others made in the factory.

Yeah, they are all still telling you to smile. And women do it to other women every day. Yeah, they are all still telling you that if you just got a makeover, you might finally have a chance with that guy or that company. Yeah, they are all still telling you to volunteer to help others when you’re feeling down, and while there is nothing wrong with volunteering, if you are down because you lost your job, building that resume with volunteer work will never land you a job. Your job is volunteer. As tribute. To a country that says it’s fine for the commander-in-chief to blather on about killing political rivals and actively fighting to protect sex predators, but that very same government will make sure for decades on end at every level and in every way possible that no one involved with childhood rape in a massive human trafficking network will ever face a day behind bars.

You think it isn’t linked? The connections between high and low, governance and daily life, law and content, policy and employment, public discourse and your paycheck? Think again. Or, think at all.

But do not think for yourself. Do not speak up. Do not speak out. Do not disturb, or be damned forever as some witch who must be burned for the good of the community. Or, your own family. Or, any given workplace, school, or religion. After all, that always worked out, singling out women who were a bit different or alone, blaming them for the harm you caused them, cursing them for the problems you created for them, while presenting yourselves as saints, leaders, very good people. If you just get rid of those odd women stepping outside the acceptable lines, all your self-created, cruel problems are solved. Ask Salem in the 1600s. They were total paradise and never had an issue again after killing a bunch of marginalized women in an ideologically based kangaroo court of vigilante wisdom. Fact check me.

You haven’t changed. No, you don’t get to say, “it’s not everyone” and get away with that with me. It’s enough in enough proportion to still be an everyday problem for lifetimes already. And you don’t get the out with the lie that “it’s the way you talk about the problem”. No, it isn’t. Delivery mechanism doesn’t matter when the value system is still crap. Politeness is not the key to someone accepting an argument, or an entire population of people, that they don’t see as valid anyhow.

So, what truly is the value or the possibility in these squashed pink boxes of how you’ll finally “allow” me in when you never have once in my whole life no matter what rules I followed? I can never be small enough, silent enough, polite enough, skilled enough, educated enough, matching every moment and preference in the economy and in the minds of 330 million other people. I will never be good enough to have an income. Make the objection what I say, make it how I say it, while refusing to look at how I can think through a problem or the decades of work I’ve already done. Make the objection about getting one more certification or degree that I pay for, and by the time I get it, crashing the economy one more time anyway. Tell me I went into all the wrong educational and employment paths, then make it my job to get decades of every qualification you want in five minutes so I can finally catch up to where you’ve decided I should have been years ago when years ago, you told me I wasn’t allowed and go somewhere else.

Follow the rules, get punished. Break the rules, get punished. We’ll always set the bar somewhere else and play keep-away with even minimum-wage work for which you can never pass the “bland enough” screening, even though you aced the background check and every other test measure. So go to the extremes, but even then, only in proscribed ways where you are taking your clothes off for strangers or becoming a surgical and ideological clone invested in carving up a country in hate and chaos. Happy employment!

Did you ever want any woman working, or did you always want us just to fall in line? With whatever line you drew right through a long list of possibilities we thought we’d created. There are just so many normal ones, with normal thoughts and feelings and regular lives that are imperfect but still perfectly valid that can somehow be invalidated if you can just keep the con going long enough that we’re bad, we’re wrong, we’re stupid, we’re lazy, we’re too expressive, we’re too emotional, we’re just unstable, we want too much, do too little, and just don’t understand how good we’ve got it. You’ve been busy invalidating every path while telling me to beg for permission one more time that you will find some other reason to never grant.

The lack of justice, the wild extremes, the loss of autonomy over our bodies, the rapid track backward into the past when we were still coming from behind, the zero-level support of those around us from birth ‘til we die; you think it’s not linked to your paycheck, and mine?

The infinite demand for who I can never be next and make a living is not something I can live with. It’s not a survivable event. There’s no way to play this one, because there’s no way at all anymore. You can’t make a nutball pretzel of the permanently impossible in six different dimensions, then blame me one more time for not being the everything you decided you wanted yesterday but might not want tomorrow. And that’s where regular women sit, looking for paychecks, at the juncture of “how” and “to survive”.

I can’t be either of the extremes you are asking. How can anyone possibly not breathe enough to qualify for the submissive fake-power flavorless nonentity of non-controversy, blabbing more internet nonsense into the oatmeal-sphere where women disguised as doormats exist to reassure you all of their nonthreateningness to your precious company goals you’ll set everywhere but where we could reach? If we had a pulse, we’d basically be disqualified.

Nor do I feel capable of flinging myself into the extremes of the MAGA-bot female factory to gain power, flog crypto, abuse common sense, and remain morally unrecognizable as anything containing human decency. Since I also can’t embrace the idea of nudity or sex as my income, it seems that basically I can’t transform myself into a body-based woman for money, but I don’t know why, given that you always told me how fat, ugly, and old I was, starting at about age two. Why wouldn’t I have the confidence for that blatantly horseshit perspective making the internet rounds that “every body is beautiful” while people are violated and killed for theirs every single day? The extremes seem to demand so much of women’s appearance, proportions, wardrobe, makeup, in order to qualify as worthy financially. I could hardly afford the starting line anyhow.

It's a shame you can’t just get an education and make a living. It sure would make sense. It’s a shame you can’t have decades of experience and make a living, either. That might be relevant in some timelines, but not in this one. It’s a shame that skills can’t matter because we’re going to decide they aren’t. But we sure are willing to employ computers, so there’s some good news for you!

It’s a shame that no matter what problem you solved, you just don’t have the right education, experience, or skills to be a candidate for a paycheck. You’ve got kids and parents to care for anyway, though, so there’s no time for that job they never wanted to have you at, so really, it’s just a blessing in disguise if you look at it with the right word sign. Which is probably hanging over the endless piles of laundry heaped on a dirty floor while the allowed income earners have come home and need you to make dinner, which you already should have done and which the right self-help book will tell you can be easily scheduled by gratitude mantras and meditation. If you could only manifest the right mindset, all your problems would be solved.

It’s a shame you just don’t understand how merit-based this whole thing is and how far we’ve come, according to cancer-causing corporations funding Congressional campaigns. It’s a shame your understanding is so limited of the lack of barriers women face these days. What is your economic problem? No one else has one. We’ve solved everything.

And if you don’t think so, if you don’t think it’s perfect or progress or remotely approaching sanity, don’t say it. We have to question your capacity to learn and do new things and stay relevant and on top of the latest trends if you haven’t learned already that everything was fixed long ago. We don’t do onboarding or training programs or flexwork or hybrid jobs, because the movie “9 to 5” never happened and now it is certainly not needing a lyric update “from 9 to 9” because we do not have employment problems here at all, and especially for women, because you have the degrees we ridicule and the small businesses we kill in pandemics and with tariffs, so please just shut up or get plastic surgery to start being something less than Medusa so you can stop turning people to stone with your ugliness and then maybe we would give you a job…god you are just so clueless and we are not asking for much. Shut up, it’s fine. And now smile, because you look so much prettier that way.