“Tariffs or this?” mused an X user on April 5, the day after President Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs sent the Dow Jones spinning into its biggest drop since the height of the pandemic.
The “this” in question was a TikTok video from last summer in which the all-women executive team of an Australian skin care company playfully sang and danced around their office. Faced with the option of a woman joking about being a “Gen Z boss” and probable economic ruin: “Tariffs,” the X user concluded.
The apparent link between a group of Australian women having fun at their office and the historic economic fallout of Trump’s tariffs in the US may be obscure to a lot of people. But for a vocal contingent of incel-adjacent men on X, the link is self-evident.
“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,” explained Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her in March in the midst of the DOGE shutdowns. “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 this reading, the Australian skin care executives are callously celebrating their oppressive privilege by filming themselves dancing.
In this worldview, the fun, pretend jobs include federally funded government jobs. These men further believe that because DEI initiatives mandate that women get these fun, pretend jobs — usually described as “email jobs” — women have achieved unnatural degrees of self-sufficiency. No longer do they have to rely on marrying a good provider for economic stability. With that impetus gone, women’s standards for romantic partners have skyrocketed, leaving these hapless men unable to get a girlfriend.
Cartoons Hate Her quotes an X user who berated her for arguing that single women can be happy living by themselves. “Your ‘happy life alone’ only exists because the state funnels taxpayer money into your independence LARP,” he wrote. “I call it ‘negative prostitution’ because it takes men’s money away to ensure women don’t have sex with them.”
These men read Trump’s economic policy as a project of redistributing money and jobs away from women and back to men, ultimately for men’s sexual gain. DOGE slashed away the email jobs in the government, they argue, while tariffs will force a recession that will ultimately kill the email jobs of the private sector. Meanwhile, tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs, which are understood to be the rightful domain of men, back to the US. By the time the process ends, they believe, men will be gainfully employed and now-destitute women incentivized to sleep with them, and the world will be restored to its proper order.
To be clear, this worldview is deeply deluded. Even if you agree it’s bad that women have the ability to make their own money and thus don’t need to settle for subpar romantic partners (personally, I take the radical position that this is good), the economics don’t work. While it’s true that women make up the majority of office workers, it’s not true that they only work pretend email jobs. They also make up the majority of workers in the leisure and hospitality industry (selling on the floor of a retail store, waiting tables, etc.) and in education and health services (home health aids, nurses, teachers, etc.).
Finally, perhaps most crucially, even if a tariff-led recession may mean layoffs from office jobs, the tariffs are highly unlikely to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. They are far more likely to raise prices and make everyone’s quality of life worse.
What’s true is that tariffs are likely to make women’s lives disproportionately worse. The tariffs are expected to raise costs for American families by as much as $3,800 per year, and that burden will be carried most heavily by the people who are already poor. As Lauren Leader noted at MSNBC, women still make less money than men, and the pink tax means they also pay more than men do for basic toiletries and other necessities. They’re more likely than men to shoulder the financial burden of childrearing. Perhaps, as a consequence, women make up the majority of America’s poor. (Yet they still won’t sleep with those men on X!)
In the TikTok video that enraged so many of these men, the gimmick is that the executives are participating in a girly TikTok trend within the confines of their office.
The original trend began with a group of hot girls chanting rapid one-liners about their appearance as they headed out for a night at the club, their voices taking on the register of children playing a clapping game: “Boots and a slicked-backed bun! Boots and a slicked-back bun!” In the Australian office version, the women are chanting in their business casual attire around an array of cubicles. Frequently, they play with refrains that juxtapose their girliness with professionalism. “Gen Z boss and a mini!” chants one. “Five-foot-three and an attitude!” says another.
It’s that very juxtaposition that seemed to strike the angry men of X as so unjust, that seemed to prove the video is more than just a bunch of women in another country having fun in a way that didn’t affect American men at all. “‘Girls just being silly’ is okay,” explains one of the men Harris quotes. “‘Girls just being silly on top of the ruins of bastions of masculinity that they just destroyed, sending millions into despair’ is not okay.”
The wreckage of masculinity this man is describing is the idea that being a professional office worker should be a specifically masculine identity: The 1950s ideal of the man in the gray flannel suit, a man who does serious business to provide for his family and, as such, is afforded a certain amount of respect. It is true that this archetype has become a species in decline. It is also true that women are now more likely to work at offices than men are — but that didn’t happen because of any vast conspiracy from women to destroy men. There’s actually a very clear and well-documented pattern that can happen whenever a profession becomes dominated by one gender or the other.
The canonical example here is computer programming, in part because it is so new that it’s easy to see the switches happen. From the 1940s through to the 1960s, programming was considered women’s work. At the time, the physical building of computers — the engineering, the hardware — was considered dangerous and intelligent and masculine. The laborious, sedentary grinding away of computer code was considered glorified secretary work: feminine. Women provided cheap, docile, and uncomplaining behind-the-scenes labor in an expensive industry whose glamour was all in the hardware.
As computing developed, however, it gradually became clear that coding was skilled labor — what publications of the 1950s called a “black art” that called for mathematical flair and a talent for innovation: a job that was no longer considered proper for docile, patient, domesticated women but wild and unruly genius men. Programming’s prestige increased. Its pay scale went up. And its workforce turned overwhelmingly masculine.
We can see the opposite effect when a profession starts masculine and becomes feminine, as we saw with human resources. As a culture, we consider jobs more valuable, prestigious, and worthy of financial remuneration when we associate them with men. If we come to associate them with women, the job in question loses prestige and its salaries stagnate. At the same time, men in large numbers will start to leave the now-feminized profession, thereby increasing the impression that it is properly women’s work.
Another way of saying this is that the angry men of X don’t hate women who work in offices because they took away the jobs of hard-working men. Men stopped working in offices because women had started working in offices, too, and our culture hates women.
Now, office jobs, thoroughly feminized, are held to be worthless, pointless, producing nothing of value. The only thing to do, according to this worldview, is to sweep the jobs away and replace them with good, honest factory work and push the women who held them into marriage or sex work — here considered to be equivalents.
That so many online are celebrating the idea that Trump’s agenda will destroy the financial lives of women speaks to how deeply misogynistic the ideology that unites Trump and his supporters can be. The promise of good manufacturing jobs becomes not the promise of a respectable union-protected job that pays well enough for you to raise a family without requiring a college degree but of a manly job that will, somehow, force women to sleep with you. The whole project is to fulfill the incel’s dream of federally mandated sex.
