My last real job was a particularly dreary one, working on compliance for the mortgage department of a large multinational bank. The building was run down, the equipment was outdated, and every desk and monitor in the endless sea of cubicles was covered in dust. Nobody was happy to be there.
I worked with three women. The first was a moderately attractive brunette in her early thirties with young children at home. Her only career goal (according to her own admission) was to be promoted to one level higher than her current position so that she would get an extra week of vacation time. The second was a sweet blonde lady in her fifties with a slight Southern accent and adult children. Her greatest joy in life was drinking beer and watching auto racing with her family.
The other woman was my boss’s boss. She was morbidly obese, had been working at the company for over twenty years, and was disliked by everyone. She mostly kept to herself in her corner office lair, the entrance guarded by most pathetic tiny, balding, forty-something gay (I think) male secretary lackey I’ve ever seen in my life.
I was reminded of this particular office dynamic a couple days ago when reading a Heartiste piece pondering the utility of status jockeying among women. Since, as Heartiste, the study he cites, and a basic understanding of human nature concur, social status is irrelevant to a woman’s mate value, why then do women compete with each other for status? Heartiste proposes a few theories.
For me, the topic brought up a in my ever-insatiable mind a related question that I have considered only briefly before. That is, why do some women spend decades of their lives toiling endlessly in miserable, meaningless, soul-destroying desk jobs to attain wealth and career positions that seem to afford them no real benefit? Is a closet full of Coach bags and Louboutin shoes really worth it?
Of course, most women aren’t this way at all. Most women are like the first two women in my old office. They work when they feel they have to, but find it far more meaningful to spend time taking care of and relaxing with their families. Post-feminist society does everything in its power to beat into young girls’ heads that they ought to spend their prime-fertility years laboring away at a meaningless desk job for some corporate behemoth to pursue the same career ambitions as men, but the corporate propaganda is proves to be no match for biomechanical reality most of the time.
This is the real reason for the gender wage gap, by the way. It isn’t that women are oppressed by the evil patriarchy. It isn’t that women are taught not to assert themselves (these days you can hardly take a step without bumping into a fat spinster cat lady or scheming male feminist loudly demanding girls do precisely the opposite). It is quite simply that career/financial success directly influences male mate value, so men want it more. It has no influence whatsoever to female mate value. The sweet, pretty receptionist will come out ahead of the ambitious female Senior Director every time.
But why then does there persist this minority of women who work their lives away for money and titles and obvious status signals such as luxury cars and designer clothes? my theory is that they are confusing indicators of mate value for mate value itself–or they’re hoping you will.
For a man, accumulating wealth raises his mate value in and of itself. Typically, a wealthy man is a man with high mate value. Such a man, by virtue of his high mate value, will pair with a high value woman, and generally share his wealth with her. So, traditionally, a woman displaying signals of wealth would be assumed to have acquired that wealth through her high mate value.
Most women compete for the actual prize: a high quality man and high quality offspring. But a few women–probably those who feel they can’t compete very well in the traditional domains of feminine charm–will opt instead to compete with men for mere signals of status, hoping to dupe others (and perhaps themselves) to mistake their outward display of success for the real thing.
But it’s a pretty transparent façade. Normal people view the ambitious career spinster with her fancy shoes and fancy purse like they do a beat-up old Chrysler in a Wal-Mart parking lot with a BMW logo super-glued to the hood.
