Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité.
I've always kind of wanted to buy a banjo. I say "kind of" because there is something of a white-trash stigma associated with the banjo; there's a certain je ne sais quoi about it that smells faintly of hay bales and chicken guano. But Steve Martin is an accomplished banjo player and everything he does (with the exception of most of his last several movies) is high class, so it can't be all bad.

But then Steve Martin is rich. The rich can afford to be associated with banjos and not worry about the social implications. That sort of a thing can be chalked up to an affectation, a charming eccentricity not unlike wearing a monocle or adopting Romanian babies so you can then eat them.

While Steve and I don't share ungodly wealth in common, we do share something else: a penis.

OK, that came out wrong. I don't want people going around saying that either a) Steve Martin and I are in some sort of time-share arrangement with a single detachable set of male genitalia that we split custody of or b) Steve Martin and I both have access to a third-party male member attached to somebody else like, say for instance, Christian Slater.

What I was trying to say is that Steve Martin and I are both dudes. Both XYs. We both were born with outie genitalia. I assume. Again, I don't want anyone inferring that I know which direction Steve Martin's junk swings on a first-hand basis. Or even on a second-hand basis. I know where both my hands are at all times and neither of them have ever been anywhere near Steve Martin's package.

Money!

The point I'm trying to make is about money. Steve Martin is a guy and I'm a guy so we have a certain earning potential without being limited by gender. If we were both chicks, our income projections would be retarded by our chromosomal make-up. Plenty of people have been retarded by the presence of an extra chromosome, it's just that we know now (more definitively anyway) that the retardation can also be financial and that the extra chromosome is the second X in the XX gender formulary.

What brings all this talk about banjos and Steve Martin's penis* and retardation is this, the latest in a long line of studies that shows women make less than men for doing the same jobs.

I've talked about this before on this blog a little bit, but I'm going to do it again. Why? Because it's my fucking blog, you pushy bastards. And also because it's sort of important to me as a Very Happily Kept Man. I rely on my Sugar Mama to provide me with everything I need whether it be food, shelter, clothing, children, computer games, electronics, jewelry, perfume or stringed instruments of any kind. In exchange I provide her... you know, I'm not really sure what. It's best not to dwell on it too long. She might be reading this and subsequently start asking herself some hard questions.

Ha! I'm kidding. There's no way she's reading this. I happen to know she's too busy killing herself a thousand hours per week for 76 1/2 cents on the dollar of what the deadbeat 9-to-5 man-brother in the next cubicle over makes as punishment for the fact that she doesn't have to shave her face. She doesn't have the free time to sit around reading blogs. Plus she finds my writing style tedious and long-winded, so if she were reading blogs, she'd probably be over at Tbogg or something.

While I would like to raise my voice in protest with all my sister feminists out there who protest this kind of brazen inequality, I will admit that I find it kind of reassuring to know that if I dropped this stay-at-home nonsense and launched myself back into the workforce, I could immediately start making the same salary as my new female colleagues even though they had been at the job for 5-6 years. I know it sounds petty and grasping, but when you haven't drawn a paycheck in nearly 7 years and you feel too guilty to unilaterally approve $6 for a new paperback book, you learn to seek any respite from emasculation you can find. Which is also why I spend so much time at strip clubs.

I don't go to the strip clubs to ogle the naked girls or to have them grind on me in the Champagne Room or whatever; that's all incidental. I go there because the strip club is the social laboratory for gender equity in pay. I go to strip clubs as a patriot and as a devoted feminist to see, if only briefly, a world inside those walls where men are lined up to hand women money for almost no work; to see a world where a woman can make 10x that of what a man in the same profession can make.

And the boobies. I also go there to see the boobies. But mostly it's for the social... whatever I said. Yeah. Absolutely.

So no banjo for me. I could get one, I suppose, but I'd have to answer the questions from my wife when I ran the idea past her and she'd no doubt point out that I already have a ceramic jug and an old washboard-and-thimble rig and a one-string bass guitar, none of which I ever use. Maybe it's time I stopped watching Hee Haw reruns and let that dream die.

But I will never let the dream of equal pay for equal work die. Never.**




This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.7



Pops


* = Welcome, Googlers!

** = Or until I get a job, in which case ladies, the gravy train is over.
- posted by Pops @ 10:45 AM