A Message To The TikTok Girls Pretending To Be Underwater Welders: Start Appreciating Men
“You heard of ExxonMobil?” Hannah Pawelski asked her dad during a phone call posted on TikTok. “It’s like an oil company,” she added. When her father replied yes, Pawelski, holding back laughter, told him she “saw like a job posting, and I applied and it’s like an apprenticeship … in an offshore oil rig,” and that it “pays so much money.”
Pawelski, like many other girls participating in this latest TikTok prank, isn’t serious about working on an offshore rig, but her dad doesn’t know that. Her father understandably responded to his twentysomething daughter’s call by trying to make her understand that offshore oil rigging is not for her. “You’re in the middle of the ocean, the wind is blowing. It’s probably one of the most dangerous jobs in the world,” he told her.
“But they offered me it, and they said you’d get trained … and you get paid like $150,000,” Pawelski jokingly countered. “Yeah, because you may die,” her dad responded.
Countless other young women in their twenties have hopped on the trend over the past couple of weeks to prank their fathers and brothers into believing they are seriously considering becoming offshore oil rig workers.
“Those are the most rugged motherf-ckers you’ve ever seen in your life,” one father told his daughter over the phone, stating plainly that she “couldn’t make it” and “couldn’t do the work.”
“A lot of those guys die,” a brother informed his sister after she told him she accepted a job as an underwater welder. “There’s a Mark Wahlberg movie about them dying,” the brother insisted.
Indeed, Wallberg’s 2016 film “Deepwater Horizon” is based on the real-life 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, which killed 11 workers and injured 17. While it’s funny to imagine these nail-polished girls leaving their white-collar jobs to try their hands at underwater welding, the danger entailed in offshore oil rigging is no laughing matter.
Oil rigging is one of the most high-risk occupations in the world, and there are reasons to believe the fatality rate is even greater than is officially reported. Underwater welding, which is what most of the young women are joking about doing, is widely considered the deadliest job you can have, with a nearly 15 percent fatality rate.
The reason the trend is funny and has amassed millions of views is that no one believes these women would last one day working on an offshore oil rig, including the girls themselves.
As of 2020, women made up 3 percent of offshore oil rig workers. The percentage is presumably even lower for underwater welders. Young women are beginning to realize how grueling these jobs are, with the TikTok trend sparking viral videos of women reacting in awe at the work men do on oil rigs.
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Oil rigging is crucial to modern society. Oil and gas extraction is what provides the rest of us with energy to build cities, heat our homes, power our vehicles, and facilitate global trade.
Other essential and extremely dangerous industries, such as logging, fishing, roofing, trucking, construction, and iron and steelwork are also dominated by men.
The oil rig TikTok trend is an important reminder that the professions that quite literally build and sustain our civilization aren’t gate-kept from women due to structural sexism. Women physically can’t or, more often, simply won’t do those jobs.
Yet this same demographic of women — who know they could never and would never underwater weld or steelwork — routinely takes the opposite sex for granted. Just watch this viral video, where women are asked the question, “Do we need men?”
The resounding response was a disgusted “No.” Clearly, however, we do need men.
Modern feminism has convinced generations of women that they are victims of a patriarchal society and that male leadership and attributes are inherently unjust and “toxic.” The result has been women who are bitter, self-pitying, and ungrateful. Men, meanwhile, have become dangerously discouraged. “[F]or every one woman who drops out of college, seven men drop out,” writes Federalist Contributor Owen Strachan. “Men have left the workforce in almost unprecedented numbers; the current employment rate of men in prime working years mirrors that of the Great Depression.”
Strachan adds that men are increasingly abandoning their families and fueling a cycle of fatherless homes. Lastly, “In the bleakest category there is,” writes Strachan, men are killing themselves at far greater rates than women, making up a disturbing 80 percent of suicides.
Demoralizing men is not good for men, nor is it good for women. Frustratingly for many women, nearly 50 percent of young men between 18 and 25 have never approached a woman in person to ask her on a date. No date means no marriage, no children, and a population hovering dangerously below replacement rates.
When men’s masculine qualities, such as competitiveness, stoicism, and aggression, are demonized instead of channeled for good, horrible things happen. Women forget how much men rely on us to build them up. They desire our approval and respect. When we vilify their very nature, society begins to fall apart. Anyone who looks around can see it happening now in real-time.
March is Women’s History Month, when man-hating becomes even more socially acceptable than the other 11 months of the year. This March, if women really cared about the betterment of their sex, they’d start appreciating men. If we have any chance of avoiding civilizational collapse, women need to reject the feminist cult and begin understanding that both sexes play necessary and complementary roles in society.
Perhaps the oil rig TikTok trend is a starting point. If women can at least appreciate the ways men’s physical strength and stamina contribute to society, maybe we can begin to heal decades of hurt and turmoil between the sexes spurred by toxic feminism.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a contributor to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @evitaduffy_1.
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