Good girls never win
August 25, 2007

The idea of discriminating on anything other than performance infuriates me. My saintly twin has written about the virtues of the "no asshole rule." A simple idea: that a nice way to get a team to function at maximum efficiency is to remove all the assholes. That's a tough cookie to swallow because asshole is very difficult to define. It's a hole after all, dependent on the fleshy gluteus maximums for its existence. All one has to do is walk into a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods to see the benefit of the no asshole rule. What odd corporations they are. They remind me of a bizarro world New York stock exchange, selling tangible life sustaining things with a smile, but still somehow mechanically inhuman.

I've never been a team leader but I imagine that having an optimal team is about how the individuals interact with each other relative to the objective. There must be an asshole quotient, therefore if the mean is high, perhaps it would be a detriment to have an outsider on board, an antiass. I'm sure it's dependent on the purpose of the team. Think tanks probably work better with assholes; synchronized swimmers less so. While being an overass may be grounds for dismissal, I don't think it's a good basis for determining wage. I suppose the logic behind the assrule is that having one in the midst of the office could cause the nice folk to seek other employment or hurt the others performance by over activating the mental hate centers. It seems odd to me to even consider "who" a person is as relevant to their job. Cult of personality has it's place, I just think it makes more sense in Hollywood.

I've listened to the arguments against sexual discrimination in the work place. The statistics reveal that males tend to make more money than females doing the same job. I except a naturally existing variance in wage, depending on the job, because males and females generally exhibit much different behavior in youth, which lends to being raised differently, thus excelling in different areas of skill. I would expect that there are jobs that females average higher wages than males, jobs that require keen communications skills for instance, and vice versa. Statistics are a funny beast. Mark Twain said it best, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." I imagine people of resent African decent average more money in basketball. It's not that light skinned people are being unjustly discriminated against, it's just genetically there are more 7 foot dark skinned people. Hopefully humans realize that Mind is not genetic and that legitimate height discrimination for B-ball doesn't get carried over to the office. This is were the complex issue of sexual discrimination comes into play, men and women do have physically different brains. Natural discrepancies in performance are bound to surface.

A feminist activist friend of mine came to the same conclusion as I, wage should be based souly on individual performance. Anything else violates the principle of equality. I know that there are unjust biases in the minds of many and that will be a problem that humankind will probably always struggle with. No one is or ever will be perfect. However the problem is much larger than I had realized. A friend of mine in the corporate world told me of an experience she had with her boss. He hired a male for a secretarial position and started him at a much higher rate than the female that formally held the position. As this is obviously unconstitutional, my friend confronted the sexist bastards prejudice. He said, "Yeah, but he's a man. Men have families to take care of." My asshole opened up and I almost lost my shit. I knew that people discriminate unconsciously but to say it out loud and not be able to recognize it, boggled my mind.

At first I couldn't understand how my friend could keep working for him. Though, she concluded that he is just stupid, not really sexist. When she opened his eyes, he realized that he could get in trouble for what he did and started the trainee at a sexually equal rate. If I were a woman I would have a difficult time looking at him, lest working for his company. I'm the kind of person who has to believe 100% in what I do and who I do it for. I'd rather be poor than be you're hired by Donald Trump. I walk the walk too, I mean I walk so much my shoes wear fast. I began to think of ways women could fight back against this manly family man bullshit. My first thought was that the market could dent it. There are a limited amount of workers for any job, and generally half of them will be women. If women put the anti-ass principle above money, they will hurt the asshole business owners passively by reducing their available talent base. This would increase the success of equal minded business owners. Good girls never win, but they can help fight.