Those of you who have been following my work know that I am an equal-opportunity satirist and that I will attack the right and the left, feminism, academia, corporate America, the Church, and especially the baseball owners. I am especially tough on the Ivy League because I am a survivor. The same goes for the financial services industry and academia, because I am also a survivor of both. I know where the bodies are buried. But, more importantly, we need a good laugh.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the continuing scam of private equity firms, a segment of the economy I worked closely with. And just because I consider myself a capitalist of sorts does not mean that I believe, in any sense, that it is a perfect system or that it should be free from regulation. These bastards need to be carefully watched at all times because many of them are up to no good. And as tough as I have been on modern feminism—a thoughtless revival of prehistoric pagan tribalism, complete with human sacrifice—I would like to spend today discussing how I believe feminism and women have been exploited and victimized by capitalism. For those of you who are having trouble believing I wrote this, these are, in fact, my words. No one has taken control of my computer.
When feminism crafted its notion of self-actualization and “liberation,” it bought the equivalent of a bucket of shit from corporate America. The fact that global corporate culture was so quick to embrace it should have tipped feminists off. Any time a salesperson eagerly agrees to your price, you are being fleeced. And so corporate America, beginning in the 1970s, came to recognize that women were a fantastically cheap source of labor. You are not going to hear big corporations say that women are cheaper. They use other verbiage, such as an “underused population” that can be brought into formal employment and “household services” that can be commercialized. Then they preach about the rise in GDP if more women join the workforce. McKinsey, the highly overpriced consulting firm that is always a solution looking for a problem, published a report under the headline that advancing women’s equality would add $12 trillion to global growth. No shit. More workers, less pay for workers, more money for the bottom line, and higher reported profits.
There is a sucker born every minute. Feminism supplied a never-ending stream of them. No conspiracy was required. Feminism supplied the moral language of autonomy. Paid employment was “emancipation” from those nasty children, that overbearing husband, and household drudgery. The moment women announced that they were emancipated, six fat guys with cigars violently agreed and offered them the “lifeline” of 12-hour days, stress, shorter lives, office politics, and two lousy weeks off a year. For roughly the first 40 years, corporations capitalized on this by paying women lower salaries, much as they had exploited women and children in the good old days of the 19th-century sweatshop. No more dependence on the husband. Now women were free to be downsized, work weekends, be fired for mysterious reasons when they made too much money, and have no social life. When they returned home from work and were too tired to cook, they ate microwaved food from a box. Alone. The feminists cheered and called it freedom, while the other side booked its highest revenue figures in half a century, boosted the overall GDP, and gave Rocco another Mercedes for his four-car garage in Jersey.
Employers were not entirely unreasonable. Well, actually, they were. It usually took government intervention to require employers to grant leave after childbirth, much of it unpaid. And we don’t want to be away too long now, do we? Too much bonding with a child might induce a good worker to lose her mind and step away to spend time with her family. This was discouraged. Good little corporate feminists everywhere used shaming strategies to prevent this kind of thing. Then corporations went all in with the bullshit, celebrating things like International Women’s Day and trumpeting this newfound liberation at every opportunity. They even set up women’s groups inside corporations and sold such brazen bullshit as “The Most Powerful Women in Business.” Now, if a man walked into a bar and waved around his moniker as one of the “most powerful men in business,” it wouldn’t be long before someone punched him in the face. Half the reason there is so much animosity toward Donald Trump—from men—is that he is such a braggart. But somehow, a childless woman eating microwaved soup from a box could take solace in being a good little corporate soldier—and “powerful.”
Capitalism did not invent women’s work. Women always worked. The Marxist-feminist story of centuries-long female subjugation displays an amazing degree of historical illiteracy about a time that was not even that long ago. Women worked on farms and were essential to the family’s survival. They cured meat, canned fruits and vegetables, made bread, educated the children, and, in earlier centuries of high childhood mortality, often watched far too many of those children die. They were healers, nurses, teachers, agriculturalists, artisans, and inventors. They also worked in trades and garment making and then joined the incredibly harsh, demeaning labor of the Industrial Age, working in factories and sometimes packinghouses alongside men and children. Children, in fact, were considered a great bonus. They were cheaper, more submissive, less inclined to organize, and really easy to intimidate. The factory did not employ women and children because the owners believed work would provide them dignity. It employed them because they were cheap.
The new factory is much nicer. It has exposed brick and cold brew coffee—or it offers around-the-clock remote work. The employer purchases the best part of the worker’s day, the most usable fragment, and leaves the worker to absorb the rest: illness, downtime, insurance, the terror of downsizing, and all the basic humiliations of the workplace. When my father was alive and I complained about work, he would say, “That’s why they call it work.” My older brother would say, “Get in line.”
These glorious corporations, law offices, and other businesses exploit “unpaid internships” in a manner that would have made P. T. Barnum proud. The intern works, learns the business, and has the honor of working next to an actual paid employee—in the hope that one day she, too, will be paid. Federal law has even intervened, applying a “primary beneficiary” test to prevent a for-profit employer from simply relabeling an employee as an intern and refusing to pay. The fact that an employer may need to demonstrate, through a seven-factor test, why a worker should not be paid simply suggests that the bullshit has become highly sophisticated.
In America and overseas, employers do it through part-time and contingent workers who receive less money and fewer benefits and often have to rely on public assistance for health care. In 2025, 87 percent of full-time private-industry workers had access to employer-sponsored medical benefits, while only 27 percent of part-time workers did. In the wisdom of our politicians and corporate blowhards, a person who works 29 hours a week never gets sick or ages.
But in terms of workarounds, I have saved the best for last. The greatest trick in the corporate grab bag was the two-income household. With millions of new workers in the workforce, corporations realized that they could pay people less. Much less. Much, much less. We boomers grew up in families where Mom stayed home, Dad made $20,000 a year, and we had a home, walked to school, and had four or five kids. Only one person had to earn a salary. I do not believe there would be any shortage of men raising their hands to stay home, hang out with the kids, work on a novel, or practice becoming a flamenco guitarist while the children were at school. Plenty of guys who get their asses handed to them at work every day would sign up for that. I’ve offered my wife the opportunity to go out, become a financial-services lawyer on Wall Street, and work 70-hour weeks trying to prevent Wall Street thugs from stealing with both hands. She hasn’t jumped at the opportunity.
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The two-earner trap was a masterstroke. Not only were both workers paid comparatively less, but the cost of housing, education, health care, and child care adjusted to the purchasing power of two earners. The family earned more gross income and got less for it. Way, way less. They spent more time commuting, paid more payroll taxes, paid for outside care, and enjoyed the astounding privilege of paying $19 for a salad in a plastic bowl to eat at a desk. No more Mom or Dad making lunch for the grammar-school kids at midday. No more family meals. No more marriage, really. Just a bunch of dissociated, drifting workers spending their off-hours arguing with strangers on Facebook while Mark Zuckerberg sold their personal data to a retailer trying to sell them a $120 pillow.
Productivity soared, but typical compensation did not. It stagnated by comparison. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that from 1979 to 2019, net productivity grew 59.7 percent, while the typical worker’s compensation grew only 15.8 percent. Executives discovered the word “synergy” to use in meetings, while the top 1 percent grew richer at an astounding rate, the middle class withered, and Rocco bought a new 15,000-square-foot house in Franklin Lakes. As women grew from roughly 38 percent of the American workforce to 47 percent by 2019, employers received more talent, governments received more taxable income—which they obviously pissed away—and families broke apart and suffered nervous breakdowns. Women’s liberation became the most successful capitalist scam of all time: a woman’s right to work was transformed into a family’s obligation to provide two workers to companies that could not give two shits about their children, their health, or their well-being, and saw them as entirely expendable.
It is little wonder that the number of abortions soared during this period to almost unbelievable levels. Worldwide, an estimated 29 percent of pregnancies end in abortion. That number is astounding. At the present global rate, another billion abortions would occur in less than 14 years. And we wonder why population numbers in so many countries are below replacement level.
We can and should dispense with the motherhood myth that women are invariably more maternal, compassionate, and protective than men. Someone needs to drive a stake through that lie. Human beings of both sexes are capable of selfishness, tenderness, and cruelty. So this is not a matter of insisting that women stay home. Plenty of men would cheer and say, “Have at it.” But children still require the sustained presence of at least one parent who cherishes them unconditionally and regards them as the most important thing in life.
Which leads us to the other con of global corporatism. Every corporation—indeed, its continued existence—relies on work it does not pay for. Someone fed, raised, and educated each employee. And while that person is at work, someone may be back home managing the house, remembering the appointments, and repairing the human being whom the workplace has turned into a dishrag by the time he or she gets home. The corporation receives a relatively well-rested and content employee back at work on Monday morning because of this invisible, unpaid labor.
The International Labour Organization reports that unpaid care responsibilities keep an estimated 708 million women outside the global labor force. Fifty to 75 years ago, there was at least some acknowledgment of this work in the fact that one salary could sustain a household. But now employers talking about “green-energy drives” and “recycling” are busy screwing over families: taking labor for zero dollars, refusing to pay workers a fair wage, collecting corporate welfare whenever the economy collapses, offering two-week vacations and unpaid parental leave, and making life so expensive and unsustainable that having children and a family is nearly impossible for millennials, Generation Z, or anyone coming behind them. It’s not as though life was a picnic for boomers, but at least we saw how things should work during our childhood years. And I don’t think children give a damn whether it is Mom or Dad who is home when they walk in, so long as one of them is there to help with homework, make dinner, and yell at them to clean their room.
Capitalism reworked feminism into a way to increase GDP, diminish salaries, and push the workforce to the point of exhaustion, depression, and even suicide—without workers noticing what had happened. Feckless, dogmatic feminists cheered this development on, led by their unlimited vanity. This neo-Marxist paganism was the perfect opportunity for capitalist exploitation. Let’s admit it. Feminism was pushed by naive suckers who persuaded women that interdependence and love within a family—a shield against the corporate world—were degrading, but working for Bob the Asshole was freedom. Bob saw them coming a mile away. Husbands and children were oppressive. A regional vice president with a toupee and a penile implant giving you a performance review was emancipation. Good choice, ladies.
Let’s stop being suckers, shall we? Men don’t care if women work. This isn’t Iran. Let either parent build a career, and the other stay home, work from home, or write a new bestseller—but, more importantly, be there for your children. Latchkey kids used to be regarded as a social failure; now everyone is one. Demand that employers pay a fair wage and get control of this part-time-worker workaround bullshit. Tell your congressman to stop harassing his intern long enough to get something done. Stop voting for the status quo. Make sure interns are paid, and regulate evasive contracting. Recognize real work even when no corporation does, and demand fair compensation for it.
Global corporatism doesn’t hate you. It’s worse than that. It doesn’t care about you. It will not sit beside your hospital bed, teach a child right from wrong or how to read, listen to a frightened child in the middle of the night, mourn the passing of your friends or family members, or extend love. It swallows up everything it can and feasts on the unknowing and unsuspecting. They are not called sharks for no reason. Admit to yourselves that you have not been empowered but snookered. And fight back.
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This content originally appeared on AbstractTruth Substack.
