Laboring in the Longhouse

The Work is Female

This is a Carousel guest piece by an anon

The > 80% Female Workplace

I worked for five years at a media agency that was over eighty percent female. For the first few years, I reported to a straightforward young man of German Catholic ancestry, with blond hair and blue eyes. He was known to be devout although he otherwise kept his religion to himself, and thereby got away with it. He was no-nonsense, and I enjoyed serving under someone of high moral character. He in turn reported directly to the CEO, also a man. No women existed in my chain of command.

My boss had a long term girlfriend, and, although he was usually the first one in and last one out of the office, he spent almost no time whatsoever fraternizing with the broader team. That he no longer attended company events, even the sacred holiday party, was frequently mentioned to me by the women. He could get away with this, however, having a familial relationship with a member of the board of directors. 

I had no such security. When we moved to a larger office in the same building, they placed me in the center of an open office floor plan, some distance away from my boss, and told us to communicate via Slack, thrusting me directly into the middle of the longhouse. Twitter anon Lom3z describes the historical longhouse as, “a large communal hall, serving as the social focal point for many cultures and peoples throughout the world that were typically more sedentary and agrarian.” I contend that the open floor plan of the modern office is indeed a very literal form of the longhouse. 

I imagine that the cubicle workspace was, by contrast, a masculine world of private cave dwellings, within each of which was the potential for endless little worlds of varied work. The more sealed your cubicle, the greater the probability of depth of work and thought. This is of course unacceptable today when everything must be seen, spoken about, and commented on. All persons must be on a single page, united by a common narrative. Female safety depends on full visibility.

Above all there is gossip, but also talk of the failures of males they are dating, how crazy brunch was that weekend, and their fifth wild bachelorette mini-vacation this year; the audible backdrop of what is in reality the formation of reputation. Through speech, women craft the invisible boundaries that protect their status, bind them together, and keep away unwanted advances from less desirable (beta) males.  

The Whisper

With everything known and knowable, transparent as the glass walls of every conference room, all knowledge clearly sorted and available for reference in the labyrinths of a pathologically organized Google Drive, women maintain control of the modern workspace. They hold a secret power that self-respecting men do not possess: the whisper. Years have elapsed where I have not whispered, but Woman knows its power. It is the soft pleasant murmur of the four-legged snake to Eve and of Eve back to the four-legged snake.

Of course, the whisper reaches a normal volume and even a high pitch if the target of the gossip is not there, and the only way to defend from gossip is to be present. But smack talk cannot be prevented in the world of Slack direct message. No religious man of moral character can tolerate endless gossiping, particularly the malicious kind, without experiencing a deep degradation of the soul. Every utterance of gossip is a kind of little death, and it is the currency of the contemporary office. Countless times I would receive a DM from one coworker demeaning the character or performance of another employee. To calculate refusal to co-sign their denouncement while simultaneously not offending them and triggering their suspicion, thus becoming their next target of ire, was always a pleasurable lunch break ponder.

When there is no gossip being spoken, there is still near constant banter and chatter in the open floor office. Some of it is quite funny and caustically biting. I made it a goal to interject, albeit sparsely, the wittiest one-liners I could think of at critical moments, but to otherwise remain as silent as possible the rest of the time. This secured my popularity. It was said I was the funniest person in the office.

They hired an intelligent, attractive, and busty girl, who started making quite a few passes at me, which I was sorely tempted to do something about, except for that I was 1) openly of a different religious background, 2) am aware that one should not defecate where they eat, and 3) saw her repeatedly sneaking back to her car in walk-of-shame mode as I arrived for work in the mornings, wearing the same clothes she had the day before, after a presumably good date with many different gentlemen of the town. This standoffishness is likely what made me attractive, but after rejecting several overt hints and drunken passes at work events, she saw that I could not be moved. I soon earned the honorific of “work husband,” a title that I ultimately shared with another man, after we became more distant post-lockdown. If the coming regime will introduce and enforce the polycule, this is the only form of it I can probably tolerate. The sorority type who gets drunk at every gathering is probably a nightmare to date, but is hands down the most enjoyable female coworker the modern office has to offer.

The executive suite was still at least three quarters male, and the women on the C-team were known as window dressing. Most of the women in the company, in fact, were wallpaper, save for a few quiet chubby white girls and rail thin Asian girls who accomplished, in line with Pareto, the vast majority of the actual work. By contrast, the office experienced frequent episodes of beautiful thin young blondes fresh out of college, breaking down in tears at 5:00pm when they failed to deliver on campaign objectives, or if a client spoke to them harshly. The primary function of such an employee is to attract new talent and signal the status of the firm.

A divorced girl in her mid-thirties brought her large dog to work everyday, and for some inexplicable reason relating to seniority, perhaps, they had an entire enclosed office space to themselves, her and the dog, even though all she did was manage and organize the masses of reference spreadsheets and training documents into a single database. A kind of human filing cabinet. She was usually among the last to leave as well, not departing until seven or eight each night. This likely allowed her to afford her one bedroom in the most expensive part of town.

Things continued in this way, days of endless chatter punctuated by organized periods of snacking and eating. Days were structured around munching. I watched with a coffee, intermittently fasting, as they had their daily “Harvest Snaps break.” They gathered in a room designated for office supplies, each removing a single serving bag of vegetable crisps. Later the same day it might be “puffy chips'' time, or “seaweed snack” time, or whichever treat happened to be in stock and in vogue. A cattle call formed every day when lunch arrived, and people avoided a good half hour of work standing and chatting with paper plate and utensils in hand for the catered lunch. If they just staggered their self-service, they could have avoided the wait, but that would mean more pretend work. After lunch there were daily group walks, pairing off to nearby coffee shops to buy milky sugary dessert drinks.

Checking In

When I switched to an account management role, I entered a line of command consisting of about fifteen layers, instead of only two between myself and the CEO. The ladder now was entirely female, all the way up. My trainer in the transition period was a nice young blonde girl, much less senior than myself, but very good at her job. She introduced me to the SaaS platform, demonstrated which boxes I needed to check off as I completed my tasks, explained how to log my time and hours to those individual tasks and projects, and how to input all of the data that would show someone else I had done my job, as each of a myriad of campaign microtasks were completed. It was for my own good, it was explained, so that they didn’t give me too much work. 

Thus began the tyranny of the checkboxes. As the company grew and hired more management and administrative staff, each group brought its own expansions to Salesforce, new procedures for a myriad of SaaS platforms, additional layers of checkboxes that needed to be clicked to signal that we had done the work, because how could one know through performance alone.

It’s really not so far from data entry to needlework, weaving, and basketry. Labor that is extremely regimented and repetitive, without any ambiguity. “Women are chaos,” says Jordan B. Peterson. Because women are chaos, they crave security and regimented institutions. The need to check in, an all encompassing force requiring immediate response to every internal and external email, to every instant message, to report the completion of every minor task, to spend the entire day speaking with the team on video calls, this is how women are able to feel secure and be certain that everything is OK with them and the company. Unfortunately, this method of alleviating anxiety is also completely antithetical to the deep work mindset that leads to quality performance and has probably led to men inventing basically everything.

While focused and concentrated work is hamstrung, the kind of freewheeling and free flying creativity to do the job your way, something not only for loose-cannon cops, but potentially beneficial in any role, is also regarded with bare hostility. Everyone must follow the same proscriptive tasks and processes. As the company expanded and became increasingly regimented, I saw that the only exception to this were the top performing salespeople. They were allowed to get away with a devil-may-care attitude, so assistants (invariably female) would begrudgingly be provided to do the labor for them. Each fought for this right, holding their client relationships over the company’s head and threatening to walk. The female salespeople, being more passive or else not minding the cathartic process of tracking literally everything in data cells, tended to not get assistants.

Indirect Communication Supremacy

It did not take me long to realize that women are simply better at external communications than I could ever be. I was superior at being tough when necessary, but women outclassed me in every other area of the profession. Not only because of their intuitive ability to handle the monotony of checkboxes, so much like the work they naturally excelled in throughout their schooling, while most of the boys struggled to hold themselves still in one place. Work itself has been feminized. 

The doing of business is now a game of indirect communication, primarily through email and messaging apps, and the job of account management became a task of perpetually disappointing people with every message, while still maintaining an air of calm and avoiding of any note of conflict. This is how projects get done: the side that requests the work increases in passive aggressive tone as the side that is doing the work obfuscates and redirects with business speak. As deadlines slip and an oversold product fails to meet expectations, goal posts are pushed via language that admits no guilt, culpability, or responsibility. 

If you were to be too direct, you would often make someone cry, and subsequently be reported and reprimanded. I experienced this while managing a full team of women in retail after college, and thankfully learned my lesson there, to always speak to women softly and indirectly. But I could not do it as well as the women, nor can any average man. The other men in the accounts department, all of whom were all gay, couldn’t compete either, and rapidly filtered out in exasperation. Now that straightforwardness is impossible, Woman has made herself a necessity.

Dread Women

Male directness is still useful in management roles, particularly the high level ones, but even better is a woman who can be indirect when it’s useful, and then apply a masculine tone and attitude when necessary to create dread. They speak sweetly and smile like a Stepford Wife to you all year, but when they feel you’ve dropped the ball or are told by their superiors to reprimand you, they twist the knife of guilt and shame without remorse. Forgot to fill out your timesheet? You bad, irresponsible little man. It’s like you forgot to feed the baby, and it almost died. How could you?

These masculine “dread women” are the greatest enforcers of the new work regime, and quickly fill the bulk of mid-management roles because of their callousness. They are universally mid-thirties. If their masculinity seeps into their physical form, they are single. If they are still physically thin and feminine they will be engaged to an effeminate type of man for a long period of time and then probably unhappily marry him. If he is wealthy enough, she will generally have a baby and quit as soon as she can. If not, she will grow in her masculine frame and solidify her territory in the company. This type of dread woman makes the company her family.

And so the modern feminized work world has fundamentally become a place bereft of joy. Unless you find joy in snacking on chips, ordering what are fundamentally adult ice creams from coffee shops, attending the most asexually platonic of parties, and gossip. Until that day when a man can muster the courage to go out on his own, he grits and bears all of this, collecting the paycheck that barely sustains him and debases his soul. What can the man of action and power do but instead go out and form his own company and band together whatever wily males he can, and attempt to recreate what once was good?