Pestilence & Gender
Pestilence & Gender
Shattering the Twisted Spire of COVID & Misogyny
To the simple-minded who see the world through false binaries, the beginning and end of pandemics are solely marked by a surge of deaths. We see false binaries in the politics of gender as well, blinding us to the complexities of interpersonal relations. It shouldn't be too controversial to state that gender is a largely cultural instruction; a performative theater based upon fictional constructs of masculinity and femininity. Misogyny has long haunted our culture, and the mistreatment of women in STEM has been a blighted curse upon a storied history of incredible achievement.
What has tragically taken place over the last four years is an explosion of misogyny in nearly every form across every specter of the COVID-19 pandemic - from medicine to academia, this scourge has largely gone unspoken and unconfronted. Unfortunately, disasters such as pandemics tend to exacerbate these sorts of bigotries in our culture, and reward bad actors that should, quite frankly, should be a little more afraid of their respective institutions taking disciplinary action.
This isn't a simple binary, either - women like Sunetra Gupta, a laptop class academic, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, and Brookings Institute hack Leana Wen made a pretty penny sitting at home to encourage mothers to turn a blind eye to children suffering from COVID-19 - even when it leaves them disabled. However, our culture has coded certain traits as masculine (strong, positive, good) and feminine (weak, pathetic, bad) that becomes nonsensical when dealing with a global crisis.
For American men, modern masculine culture has smashed face-first into a nihilistic ditch. Try suffering through billionaire comedian Jerry Seinfeld whining about the long-gone days of "dominant masculinity,"" a totally absurd & fictional concept:
You have boys and young men in America getting confused by mixed signals - if you've grown up in the relative luxury and comfort of the suburbs (or better) and never had to hunt, fish, or farm to feed your family, for example - but your entire media culture is indoctrinating you into subscribing to a culture of masculine dominance over the elements, the Other, and worst of all, WOMEN!!! - it's hard to make sense of how you fit into this vast gap between your daily life, and the mythical idols you're supposed to model yourself after, such as scam artist & professional wrestler Logan Paul, or sex trafficker & scam artist Andrew Tate. All of this is seductively wrapped within an economy centered around tasteless consumerism and instant gratification - fast food delivery to your doorstep, strangers laughing at your bad jokes online, & even the chance of intimate encounters are all just a few taps and swipes away.
So obviously, the solution to this existential crisis is to buy an oversized $100,000+ urban assault vehicle for your daily 45 minute commute to your desk job as an "online marketing manager," the most masculine career path one can achieve, only losing 90 minutes of every day just to be bossed around for 8 hours by someone who couldn't care less if you dropped dead tomorrow, and another thirty in the bathroom ranting on your lunch break about how you should be entitled to run over children for the crime against humanity known as riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. Our culture is, unfortunately, not fostering a culture of men able to think critically or empathetically.
Hundreds of words later, and we can finally begin to talk about the intersection of gender and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The "Women's Work" of a Pandemic
Early in 2020, the United States and Europe was slammed with the still-unfolding SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. If you were here in New York City, it was especially hellacious to witness. If you were a healthcare worker in New York City, it was an experience so horrific that it drove some "frontline heroes" to take their own lives. COVID-19 quickly became an incredibly grim nightmare, of which America was entirely unprepared for - especially with an unqualified blowhard in the White House.
“I think safe to say that any choreographed dance number from people dressed in scrubs has made the average person lose trust in the healthcare establishment.” - Stefan Baral, Great Barrington Declaration advisor. April 09th, 2024 via Twitter
We all handle stress and trauma in different ways. Some healthier than others. A "real man" hiding his trauma at the bottom of a whiskey glass is considered cool and resilient, whilst a nurse struggling to survive a mass death event by dancing on social media is considered "cringe" and pathetic. In fact, TikTok nurses doing dance routines to try and keep each other's morale up nationwide has been used as "evidence" by insufferable male anti-vax cranks to support their claim that there has never been a COVID-19 pandemic. Male fantasy yet again takes precedence over the objective reality that women face, with many nurses being disabled by COVID-19 and left to rot & die. COVID-19 mass infection advocates such as Stefan Baral have not said a word to speak up for his newly disabled nursing colleagues, of course. That might require a man finally admitting that he was wrong.
Not all nurses are women, and not all doctors all men, obviously. Not all teachers are women, and not all professors are men, either. In our larger culture, these professions are typically gendered one way or the other as part of a false binary to silence critical dissent. When we're talking about gender politics in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, we inevitably have to discuss what sort of abuse and mistreatment has become widely acceptable from the imagined (masculine) superior to the (feminine) inferior, such as the "political radical idiots" in public health, from the "evidence based" enlightened pestilence sycophants in male-dominated contrarian academia.
Even if it's not scientific, rooted in serving one's own personal comfort above all else: a man's fantasy inevitably becomes a woman's burden to bear. For decades, feminist theory has talked about the unfair distribution of domestic labor - childcare, washing dishes, etc. - as simply "women's work." Even in politically radical circles, these sorts of gender divides continue to be brought up and hotly debated. Whether its anarchist women left to clean up after an organizing meeting, to right-wing "tradwife" fetish "content creators" realizing just how poorly they'll be treated if their "alpha males" ever get to establish a Fourth Reich.
Early in 2020, educators in New York City were getting COVID-19 in the classroom from their students...and dying. This inevitably led to remote schooling, nationwide, as nobody should be expected to risk death as part of the job, especially when it comes to educating children. However, like nursing, teaching is another one of those inherently feminine professions, with women making up over three-quarters of America's teachers. Sadly, powerful men quickly went to work fighting to drill into the minds of the American public that these lives were disposable, and not worthy of protecting from the brand-new SARS-CoV-2 virus that was killing in rapid fashion.
Conservative propagandists were more than happy to immediately force-march educators to their needless deaths as early as Spring 2020, whilst sitting at home on their couch, expecting women to waltz to their graves with a smile on their face. All in service of a fleeting, unsustainable conquest for "normalcy." In the fall of 2020, the internet went aflame over an academic "Great Barrington" Declaration, by three laptop academics funded by a conservative think-tank (of fellow thoughtless do-nothings) with zero real-world contributions. Their demand was that you were expected to throw your own health away for their delusional fantasy of "herd immunity" from mass infection.
Billionaire men such as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Koch brothers threw their support behind a Brown University "economist” to lobby against public health. Now, here's a question. In the face of a global pandemic, what is the first profession you would ask about how to confront such a disaster? Infectious disease experts? Epidemiologists? Frontline medical doctors? If you polled one hundred people at random, an "economist" would likely not appear at all. This would quickly become Substack’s leading success story: personally pocketing millions from drumming up fraudulent data on Substack, which was used to the lobby for the deaths and disability of countless American children. Even now in 2024, billionaire Jeff Bezos is helping produce fraudulent research papers claiming COVID-19 "lockdowns," not COVID-19 infections, are what have negatively affected pediatric brain development - when the latter is well documented by an ever-growing mountain of evidence.
As COVID-19 vaccines started to become available to adults in early 2021, teachers' unions quickly became a scapegoat in corporate media. A profession predominantly made up of women, their demands for mitigations to protect their own health, as well as the health of your unvaccinated children, quickly became a target for scorn and abuse. While early data on vaccine efficacy against the original variant of SARS-CoV-2 was promising, there was still reasons for concern and precaution - which would quickly be understood before 2021's end with the Delta variant.
In August 2021, America had recorded ~500 pediatric COVID-19 deaths. Before Christmas 2021, that number quickly doubled, even as liberals' favorite COVID-19 expert, Anthony Fauci, insisted these children were being hospitalized for unrelated causes such as broken legs or appendicitis, with zero evidence to support his claim. A growing number of vaccinated Americans began to die of “breakthrough” COVID-19 deaths or develop Long COVID disability - a condition now affecting tens of millions nationwide. Hundreds of thousands of children who were infected with COVID-19 at school would bring home the virus, infecting a loved one, and forced to play a central role in the deaths of a primary caregiver.
None of this became cause for concern in the media or politics, who have simply doubled-down on upholding a fiction of SARS-CoV-2 as a benevolent cartoon bug which only benefits pediatric health & development. Now that children are being reinfected with COVID-19 on a regular basis and constantly ill as a result of well-documented immune disruption, mothers have been trained to turn a blind eye to constant pediatric illness, whether it’s through fraudulent concepts such as "immunity debt," or with dishonest op-eds convincing mothers that children are healthily developing their immune system’s “muscles” via constant illness. All the while pretending that a sick child can properly focus on their education whilst battling constant illness. School administrators, in total ignorance, are struggling with what they ironically enough call a "chronic" absenteeism epidemic, as if we can force children to simply “power through” unyielding pestilence.
"Women's work" has quickly become centered around enabling a male fantasy of “normalcy” by nakedly embracing a virus that has killed & disabled millions, even turning a blind eye to the suffering and disabling of their own children. This has become an incredibly profitable venture, as anti-vaccine grifters and fellow crusaders against public health have formed a symbiotic relationship with COVID-19, profiting from social media revenue & speaking fees to angrily screech and squeal that we must all blindly embrace pestilence with a smile on our faces, living in a shadow of ignorance as celebration of triumphant masculine incuriosity.
Long COVID & Women
Even if a woman conforms with the expectation of embracing repeated COVID-19 infections with a smile, there is no guarantee for her healthy safety: women are disproportionately disabled by COVID-19, and women with chronic illness are disproportionately abandoned by their partners. Nurses, teachers, and other women are losing their health, their well-being, and their careers, with no social supports in place to protect them from abuse, poverty, and homelessness. Doctors are not staying up to date on the latest scientific literature on COVID-19's many harms, often diagnosing women with simply "anxiety" or other unrelated issues - leaving them to suffer in darkness. Long-standing anti-abortion crusader Joe Biden’s CDC has largely refused to lead in the leading medical crisis of our times, affecting millions of Americans. This is all in service of wealthy men who genuinely believe that you are not entitled to your own health.
Many of those disabled by Long COVID are forced to turn to social media to find answers, and are faced with an unyielding torrent of abuse, threats, and encouragement to take their own lives by abusive men: another Substack “success story,” Alex Berenson, was a former medical journalist who gleefully rallies his dedicated and paying anti-vax follower base to join him in abusing these newly disabled women, mocking their Long COVID disability as nonexistent and simply "mental illness," regardless of the mountains of evidence proving otherwise. His internet buddy Vinay Prasad, a University of California San Francisco (UCSF) academic and fellow anti-vax social media crank, also has insisted that Long COVID, a condition affecting millions, is simply “mental illness” - in direct contradiction to the quality research his fellow UCSF colleagues are producing.
This feeds into the torrent of abuse that women face when seeking answers and treatment for Long COVID, and goes unpunished by Substack, Twitter, and medical schools such as UCSF; wholly unacceptable and unprofessional misconduct that should be grounds for the stripping of medical licenses and a call to establish new standards in social media conduct amongst medical and academic professionals. Instead, these institutions are permitting men to contribute to a cycle of misogynistic abuse, in more ways than one that should have died out long ago.
Even during an election cycle when America may finally elect its first woman President, Long COVID goes entirely unmentioned in this "post-pandemic" fantasy - leaving millions of Americans in the dark, forced to tune in and watch yet another woman candidate repeatedly beat her chest and holler about how America's going to have the "most lethal fighting force in the world," which for anyone paying attention during the past quarter century, has done little more than bomb, slaughter, kidnap, and torture millions of innocent Arabs.
Radical Islam is obviously not one of the central issues America is facing; the disability and chronic illness burden that years and years of unmitigated COVID-19 epidemic waves will cause is quite unprecedented - we are looking at a population that is weaker, sicker, and much more organ damaged - with all the consequences that follow. Yet, since caring about chronic illness and disability is considered feminine and weak, we're looking at a female Presidential candidate who wants to wave America’s flaccid dick at China and turn Muslim children into fleshy gruel to prove how "tough" she is.
COVID & Misogyny in Medical Academia
There's a lot of great researchers and academics doing the hard work of understanding SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and their many harms they can take upon the human body. The Pandemic Accountability Index regularly compiles this research multiple times a year. As hard-working experts with real-world responsibilities, many often don't spend a great deal of time promoting their outstanding research across social media. However, the anti-vaccine movement - something largely pushed to the fringe in the decades before 2020 - found new credibility thanks to contrarian laptop class academic men who never treated a COVID-19 patient, or even bothered to consult the literature around the original SARS-CoV-1 virus.
This was the case with former Swedish State Epidemilogist Anders Tegnell - when studying scientific research was literally part of his job description, as paid for by the Swedish taxpayer - instead, he pissed off to confer with right-wing social media crank “Fat Emperor.” As a bold crusader against public health, Tegnell likes to market himself as some sort of masculine hero, talking a manly, "evidence-based" stand against illogical feminine quivering in the face of a virus he clearly still knows nothing about. Now he's trying to profit from the COVID-19 contrarian speaking circuit, even after years of evidence and data have proven him gravely incorrect in making his reckless fantasies into public health policy.
A man's fantasy often takes precedent over scientific reality when it comes to COVID-19. A number of men in scientific academia, lent undue credibility by the credentials of their respective academic institutions, have made quite a pretty penny for themselves peddling unrealistic and unscientific fantasies about the supposed harmlessness of SARS-CoV-2, prioritizing their comfortable delusions over hard data and basic medical ethics. Drunkard Francois Balloux of the University College of London and a UK government COVID-19 advisor, is a prominent example that we've previously profiled. So is Substack anti-vax grifter Vinay Prasad of UCSF, another prominent example previously profiled here. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard, wrote the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a radically unscientific and ahistorical fantasy that believed the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic would be ended in 3-6 months by mass infected hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans in early 2020.
The child currently sick in September 2024 as they battle their sixth round of COVID-19 at the start of the 2024-25 school year would boldly disagree with such an obscene claim, but this hasn’t stopped anti-vax “experts” from looking in the mirror and seeing a forsaken genius, oppressed by misandrist public health tyrants.
“My goal is to see everyone get Covid twice a year in this country but have it be nothing more than a common cold-like illness.” -Michael Osterholm, Jan. 27th, 2023. (Osterholm developed Long COVID disability only weeks later)
None of these men in medical academia who have profited from simping for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, whether it be from social media revenue, speaking fees, book deals, or otherwise, have ever admitted fault or mistake when they were undeniably, objectively incorrect - one of the primary responsibilities of working and teaching in the scientific fields. This level of illiterate incompetence would be grounds for termination in the overwhelming majority of workplaces in America, but for a mediocre anti-vax man, universities and hospitals would rather turn a blind eye to such craven unprofessionalism. These once-respectable medical institutions are legitimizing unscientific anti-vax sentiments and allowing them to fester amongst what will be the next generation of medical professionals, who will undoubtably face future pandemics in our lifetime.
On the flipside, women in public health and medical science related to COVID-19 have faced a relentless torrent of harassment and abuse across social media over the past four years. Whether it's for sharing knowledge, publishing new research findings, or simply stating basic facts: female scientists in COVID-19 related academic fields have faced a completely unwarranted campaign of slander and hate, often egged on by unscientific contrarian academic men who are humiliated at the prospect that a woman might know more than them, and render their alleged "expertise" obsolete.
For scientifically illiterate men who knew nothing about medical science before 2020, the very idea of a woman explaining the need for public health mandates, the effectiveness of PPE, or other complicated technical & scientific topics they possess precisely zero knowledge of is a highly intimidating and terrifying prospect. When men are confronted with the reality of their own inadequacies, enabled by a platform such as Twitter which enables emotional outbursts without a second of introspective self-reflection, scientific experts in the fields of public health and pandemics are forced to shoulder the burden of man’s insecurities.
Meanwhile, academic blowhards like Harvard's Joseph Allen laundered their reputation as an Ivy League academic in order to profit from writing about COVID-19 in ways that they had absolutely zero relevant qualifications to comment on. Throughout 2020-21, Allen lobbied for the mass, repeated infection of children with SARS-CoV-2 in pursuit of an artificial "normalcy," killing and disabling countless American children. Now that it's well documented that COVID-19 can disrupt the immune system, and children are constantly ill as a result of the repeated COVID-19 infections Allen championed as relatively harmless, Joseph has made quite a pretty penny pitching his "Healthy Buildings" initiative. Of course, none of these wealthy and comfortable men in academia will spare a penny to provide for the care and needs of your child if they are disabled by the virus these men advocated for. That would be considered a woman's burden to bear.
COVID-19 has shined a spotlight on endemic corruption and ineptitude in scientific academia, spearheaded by egotistical men who are too greedy and insecure to ever admit fault. The one notable exception to this being Scott Galloway, a grifting NYU Business professor relentlessly obsessed with the sound of his own voice, went on Bill Maher and proclaimed that he was wrong, and we should have been mass infecting unvaccinated children, their teachers, and their families with COVID-19 as early as the Spring of 2020.
This would have been tantamount to societal suicide, but self-centered men have never let the facts get ahead of their feelings, even when it's their goddamned job.
Smashing the Chains
All of these problems have existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to haunt us in the foreseeable future until we accept COVID-19 as a call to renew our personal and professional commitments to smash the chains of gender bias and inequality. Radical ideas, such as the possibility that arrogant men on social media could be wrong, and hardworking women in STEM could be right - especially when it comes to a global pandemic, has become too terrifying of a reality to accept for many allegedly “rational” and “evidence based” men. The notion of forcing women - especially teachers, nurses, and mothers - to shoulder the burden of unyielding epidemic waves of COVID-19 with a smile on their face, all so chronically incorrect men can role-play their fantasies of being enlightened purveyors of truth, is a wholly unacceptable "normal" that we must all work together to cast into oblivion.
Caring about public health shouldn't be seen as inherently feminine and "weak" - fighting disease should be considered a sign of strength, regardless of gender or expertise - but social media platforms such as Twitter and Substack choose to reward this sort of boorish, uncaring masculine ignorance whilst abandoning moderation standards to permit unyielding abuse of professional women in STEM. What we are seeing now is real-world science, in the fields related to the COVID-19 pandemic, be cast to the wayside in order to embrace unsustainable, intangible fantasies of male arrogance. If individual men won't accept the personal responsibility to admit to their own unscientific failures in light of an ever-growing mountain of evidence, then professional institutions need to start giving the chronically incorrect the pink-slip for refusing to accept the professional responsibilities of their employment.
We simply can’t move forward as society by letting the worst parts of us profit from exploiting global calamity, forcing hard-working folk to shoulder the burden.
