Screwnomics
Rickey Gard Diamond
Illustrated by Peaco Todd
My mother wouldn’t like my using what she called the f-word to describe the dirty things I’m about to tell you—but then in her day the economic system may not have been quite as perverted, or as full of filthy tricks. Women’s wider understanding of how and why our present economy works as it does could turn the system around. Right now it disadvantages family life, love, young children, music and art, nature’s beauty and health and the faithful devotion that makes any life worthwhile. But women and the men who love them can make needed change.
When the current economic system talks, it can put you to sleep, or convince you that it’s all just too difficult and boring. Yet while we weren’t looking, EconoMan has made it the central story of our time, one that threatens to blot out any tale but that single one about money, as if money were all that mattered. We may know that isn’t true. But we’re also dimly aware of the economy’s constant slithery murmur at our back; to let yourself doze off is to pretend you are not sleeping with a huge boa constrictor.
What kind of drama can I find for you in rows of numbers? What sort of economic story can I tell to keep your attention? Call this economic porn, because really it’s a filthy tale. A growing number of Americans feel as if they are being royally fucked—but invisibly, mysteriously. We have lots of uncomfortable feelings, and less time to think about them, less money, less savings, less real enjoyment. Still stuck in an economic recovery that seems unrecovered except for the few who get the lion’s share of everything, we are unhappy and unsure that we can trust what had once seemed trustworthy truisms.
Women are at the center of Screwnomics. The woman hurt most is our Mother, Gaia the earth. EconoMan’s assumption that we females are for the taking connects our biology and hers. Every woman has an economic tale of her own to tell, and I hope she will find it easier to share after reading Screwnomics.
Making It Personal
My mom died the same month our economy crashed in 2008. Her little house in Michigan, paid for in full, lost $30,000 in value overnight. She’d have been angry, and others were much worse off, but how exactly could that happen? She wouldn’t like my using what she called the f-word to describe the dirty things I write about in Screwnomics—but after studying this stuff for decades, it’s the only word that fits.
Screwnomics won’t help women manage their personal finances, but it does explain the larger macro-assumptions of a system that makes our managing impossible, and growing inequality inevitable. Its data ignores gender and biology. It makes women and much of their work invisible.
Money and troubles go together, in nations, in families. My mother and I had a rocky relationship, not that unusual for my 60s generation. She was an accountant and disapproved of feminists, though she lived as one herself and set me an example. She worked and earned good money in a time when that was unusual for white middle class women. She worried about my artsy-fartsy choices.
Thirty-five years ago, I began working too as a writer and graphic artist, a newly single mom. When I had to go on welfare to feed my three kids it confirmed her shame and my self-doubt. Neither of us thought to question an economic system that paid me half of what my ex-husband earned for the same hours—and with less education. And not counting the second shift of work at home that Mom and I both always worked. Neither of us thought of welfare as a government subsidy for business.
When I later moved to Vermont and discovered feminist thinkers who noticed women and children were most often the poor, I became a critic of the economic system, while Mom remained a fan, her politics influenced by Fox News. I want Screwnomics to break through divisions like the ones Mom and I suffered while both disadvantaged and made poorer.
In This Together
The economy’s glut of numbers and verbiage can convince you it’s too hard and boring. If more of us understood EconoMan’s circular thinking, his slippery language and preference for crushing women and children, we’d put him outside or in a cage where boa constrictors belong. One woman alone might not, but women together? We could do it. And I don’t think anything can change until more women face this, study it and laugh at our fears together.
I want to make this easier with cartoons and definitions and lots of girl talk, connecting things. That would be radical. It’s been a joy, working with cartoonist Peaco Todd, who illustrates my jokes. We’ve compared our very different lives, discovered common ground, and drawn a trio of girlfriends. Screwnomics doesn’t yet have a publisher, the work still in process, and we’d welcome TRIVIA readers’ stories, thoughts, and questions, too.
Along with definitions, history, cartoons, and insults, Screwnomics includes my family’s dirty laundry, and shameful stories from within the halls of power with women like Elizabeth Warren, Brooksley Born, and Sheila Bair. I include bad girl Helen Brown, the one person jailed for the fraud that led to the crash of 2008; and Wendy Gramm, a real-life Cruella on Enron’s board, who opened the financial chicken coop for the Wall Street snakes at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
All this gossip sheds light on what this macro-stuff means—like what are commodities and futures and trading and interest and derivatives and balance sheets? We have to know before we can change things.
We aren’t encouraged to connect this huge system with our personal stories. Economics isn’t personal, EconoMan would say at the very idea with scorn in his tone. When I was poor, I didn’t think monetary policy mattered to me, and believed my ignorance of the differences between macro and microeconomics meant I wasn’t entitled to trouble my pretty little head over matters too hard. In 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote: “The personal is political,” and everything changed. Girlfriends talking together raised our consciousness. Hanisch was right, but the personal is also economic.
Making It Our Own
During the day, Wall Street’s economic frat boys (and a few she-male chauvinists) put on pressed and pleated suits of coldblooded snake logic. But in their underwear and their attitudes, they maintain a monkey boy relationship with the “female,” competitively mounting whoever is weaker. I call this economic porn. That most tender and personal of subjects, gender, plays a key role in the sorting-out process of the haves and have-nots in this economy, within classes, within races, within work fields.
In that sense, the word female most often means anyone more motivated by love and family commitment than by ambition for power; in the world of money that makes you a “pussy,” whatever your gender or sexual preferences.
Women need to respect their own ideas, ambition, and agency. We’re finished as a species if we only imitate hypermasculine models. I like calling myself an “amateur economist.” My husband worries I’m not “leaning in” to claim my expertise, which is in fact considerable given all my failures. But when I look at its root in the Greek, ama for love, I think it exactly the word I want.
Economic language omits all things tainted soft (translate: female). It rarely expresses subjective experience or human feelings, though it may analyze and reduce them rationally. So to my mind, devotion and even the erotic, or eros, what psychologists call “the sum of all our instincts for self-preservation,” is exactly what economics most needs. To stop killing the planet and each other, it must grow softer, warmer, sexier.
The essential biologic drive that keeps all life functioning—whatever gets you and the elephants and the fish and the ferns out of bed every morning, whether it’s the kids, a new lover, a burning hope for a new nest, a dream of some future greener pasture—whatever gets you juiced and keeps you going—that is exactly the devotion needed to transform an abusive and fear-filled system to one that embraces life and a future we can love.
Poet Audre Lorde, psychologist Rollo May and Charles Darwin all helped me to see the practicalities of the erotic. Money doesn’t make the world go around. Sex does. Its genetic and communal exchanges are as diverse and egalitarian as billionaires are uniformly individualistic and mostly white pricks.
Confronting the ugliness of lopsided exchanges brokered without feeling or care by economic johns leads me closer to humans’ universal longings. Not being screwed is just the beginning. Giving our deepest selves to the best we can dream of together, we can thrive, not barely survive—because always humans want to belong to a tribe, not be alone.
However the economy gets defined today, by whatever school of economic thought, we women (and most men) do not own it. Up to now, the stars of the nation’s preferred economic family movie have been political cowboys like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, or learned professors like Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. But this book is about the bit players, you and me, who only keep the whole show going, making sure everyone eats and has clean socks.
[Adapted from Screwnomics: Making Economics Sexy; What Women Need to Know to Make Change—a work in progress.]
When the current economic system talks, it can put you to sleep, or convince you that it’s all just too difficult and boring. Yet while we weren’t looking, EconoMan has made it the central story of our time, one that threatens to blot out any tale but that single one about money, as if money were all that mattered. We may know that isn’t true. But we’re also dimly aware of the economy’s constant slithery murmur at our back; to let yourself doze off is to pretend you are not sleeping with a huge boa constrictor.
What kind of drama can I find for you in rows of numbers? What sort of economic story can I tell to keep your attention? Call this economic porn, because really it’s a filthy tale. A growing number of Americans feel as if they are being royally fucked—but invisibly, mysteriously. We have lots of uncomfortable feelings, and less time to think about them, less money, less savings, less real enjoyment. Still stuck in an economic recovery that seems unrecovered except for the few who get the lion’s share of everything, we are unhappy and unsure that we can trust what had once seemed trustworthy truisms.
Women are at the center of Screwnomics. The woman hurt most is our Mother, Gaia the earth. EconoMan’s assumption that we females are for the taking connects our biology and hers. Every woman has an economic tale of her own to tell, and I hope she will find it easier to share after reading Screwnomics.
Making It Personal
My mom died the same month our economy crashed in 2008. Her little house in Michigan, paid for in full, lost $30,000 in value overnight. She’d have been angry, and others were much worse off, but how exactly could that happen? She wouldn’t like my using what she called the f-word to describe the dirty things I write about in Screwnomics—but after studying this stuff for decades, it’s the only word that fits.
Screwnomics won’t help women manage their personal finances, but it does explain the larger macro-assumptions of a system that makes our managing impossible, and growing inequality inevitable. Its data ignores gender and biology. It makes women and much of their work invisible.
Money and troubles go together, in nations, in families. My mother and I had a rocky relationship, not that unusual for my 60s generation. She was an accountant and disapproved of feminists, though she lived as one herself and set me an example. She worked and earned good money in a time when that was unusual for white middle class women. She worried about my artsy-fartsy choices.
Thirty-five years ago, I began working too as a writer and graphic artist, a newly single mom. When I had to go on welfare to feed my three kids it confirmed her shame and my self-doubt. Neither of us thought to question an economic system that paid me half of what my ex-husband earned for the same hours—and with less education. And not counting the second shift of work at home that Mom and I both always worked. Neither of us thought of welfare as a government subsidy for business.
When I later moved to Vermont and discovered feminist thinkers who noticed women and children were most often the poor, I became a critic of the economic system, while Mom remained a fan, her politics influenced by Fox News. I want Screwnomics to break through divisions like the ones Mom and I suffered while both disadvantaged and made poorer.
In This Together
The economy’s glut of numbers and verbiage can convince you it’s too hard and boring. If more of us understood EconoMan’s circular thinking, his slippery language and preference for crushing women and children, we’d put him outside or in a cage where boa constrictors belong. One woman alone might not, but women together? We could do it. And I don’t think anything can change until more women face this, study it and laugh at our fears together.
I want to make this easier with cartoons and definitions and lots of girl talk, connecting things. That would be radical. It’s been a joy, working with cartoonist Peaco Todd, who illustrates my jokes. We’ve compared our very different lives, discovered common ground, and drawn a trio of girlfriends. Screwnomics doesn’t yet have a publisher, the work still in process, and we’d welcome TRIVIA readers’ stories, thoughts, and questions, too.
Along with definitions, history, cartoons, and insults, Screwnomics includes my family’s dirty laundry, and shameful stories from within the halls of power with women like Elizabeth Warren, Brooksley Born, and Sheila Bair. I include bad girl Helen Brown, the one person jailed for the fraud that led to the crash of 2008; and Wendy Gramm, a real-life Cruella on Enron’s board, who opened the financial chicken coop for the Wall Street snakes at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
All this gossip sheds light on what this macro-stuff means—like what are commodities and futures and trading and interest and derivatives and balance sheets? We have to know before we can change things.
We aren’t encouraged to connect this huge system with our personal stories. Economics isn’t personal, EconoMan would say at the very idea with scorn in his tone. When I was poor, I didn’t think monetary policy mattered to me, and believed my ignorance of the differences between macro and microeconomics meant I wasn’t entitled to trouble my pretty little head over matters too hard. In 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote: “The personal is political,” and everything changed. Girlfriends talking together raised our consciousness. Hanisch was right, but the personal is also economic.
Making It Our Own
During the day, Wall Street’s economic frat boys (and a few she-male chauvinists) put on pressed and pleated suits of coldblooded snake logic. But in their underwear and their attitudes, they maintain a monkey boy relationship with the “female,” competitively mounting whoever is weaker. I call this economic porn. That most tender and personal of subjects, gender, plays a key role in the sorting-out process of the haves and have-nots in this economy, within classes, within races, within work fields.
In that sense, the word female most often means anyone more motivated by love and family commitment than by ambition for power; in the world of money that makes you a “pussy,” whatever your gender or sexual preferences.
Women need to respect their own ideas, ambition, and agency. We’re finished as a species if we only imitate hypermasculine models. I like calling myself an “amateur economist.” My husband worries I’m not “leaning in” to claim my expertise, which is in fact considerable given all my failures. But when I look at its root in the Greek, ama for love, I think it exactly the word I want.
Economic language omits all things tainted soft (translate: female). It rarely expresses subjective experience or human feelings, though it may analyze and reduce them rationally. So to my mind, devotion and even the erotic, or eros, what psychologists call “the sum of all our instincts for self-preservation,” is exactly what economics most needs. To stop killing the planet and each other, it must grow softer, warmer, sexier.
The essential biologic drive that keeps all life functioning—whatever gets you and the elephants and the fish and the ferns out of bed every morning, whether it’s the kids, a new lover, a burning hope for a new nest, a dream of some future greener pasture—whatever gets you juiced and keeps you going—that is exactly the devotion needed to transform an abusive and fear-filled system to one that embraces life and a future we can love.
Poet Audre Lorde, psychologist Rollo May and Charles Darwin all helped me to see the practicalities of the erotic. Money doesn’t make the world go around. Sex does. Its genetic and communal exchanges are as diverse and egalitarian as billionaires are uniformly individualistic and mostly white pricks.
Confronting the ugliness of lopsided exchanges brokered without feeling or care by economic johns leads me closer to humans’ universal longings. Not being screwed is just the beginning. Giving our deepest selves to the best we can dream of together, we can thrive, not barely survive—because always humans want to belong to a tribe, not be alone.
However the economy gets defined today, by whatever school of economic thought, we women (and most men) do not own it. Up to now, the stars of the nation’s preferred economic family movie have been political cowboys like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, or learned professors like Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. But this book is about the bit players, you and me, who only keep the whole show going, making sure everyone eats and has clean socks.
[Adapted from Screwnomics: Making Economics Sexy; What Women Need to Know to Make Change—a work in progress.]
Working notes
I’m writing this book for unwonky women, who have wisely avoided a dismal subject. Women want to know about economics today, but something intuitive has warned them off, like a frat house late at night: Hazing, secret clubs with creepy names, hoarding privileges and taking advantage, scoring girls. It’s all true.
Screwnomics looks at that for starters. But better, it introduces the many brilliant women who have new solutions that most don’t know about. We girlfriends seldom talk about the economy among ourselves. We don’t think of it as ours. Economics is not just male-dominated. It is male-identified.
Women’s numbers on Wall Street have actually declined the past 10 years. Only 12 percent of professors in the field are women. In economics women must impersonate men, talk ultra rational man-talk, and then get ignored, since man-talk jockeys for top position, winner take all. Linguist Deborah Tannen has shown us this talk’s purpose is not connection; it’s competition.
We have never needed connection and cooperation more than now. Another kind of creative economics is possible, but I doubt things can change so long as the majority of women believe economics has little to do with them. Screwnomics confronts EconoMan of modern times, drawing on Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” to introduce EconoMansplaining and different schools of economic thought.
Right now “neoliberalism” and its free market leads the EconoMan pack—and it sounds good. New and liberal and free are good for women, right? But liberal in economics means the opposite of liberal in politics; neoliberalism is a throwback to colonial times, when rich men were royalty, women were property, and sexism wasn’t yet a word, but just normal.
How does EconoMan get away with such lies? He’s not above confusing you. It’s his usual method, so thorough he sometimes confuses himself. If that doesn’t work, violence is ultimate mansplaining, and EconoMan’s violence has become the new norm.
Over my lifetime I’ve had a front row seat to huge transformations in our economic ideas, from male-identified Keynesian ones to today’s hyper masculine phallic priapism. As a young woman, I cast my first vote for Michigan Republican David Stockman, who later became Ronald Reagan’s accomplice for “slaying the beast,” our government, though this isn’t how Stockman ran. Anti-government ideas have grown more popular, cutting our government budgets believed “good” for the economy, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I’ve witnessed neoliberalism’s results in Michigan’s economic unraveling. My son-in-law’s dad edits a small local newspaper and says the nation’s eight-year recession has been 30 years long in Michigan. My hometown of Benton Harbor would set the precedent for replacing elected officials with a king-like economic manager, a test case for doing the same in Detroit and Flint, money trumping democracy and human decency.
Corruption grows bolder in our politics. There’s an urgency we all feel. Yet around the world, women and their children remain the poorest, the most vulnerable, and the least noteworthy to most economists. For example, Thomas Piketty’s recent and much celebrated 700+page work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which so expertly describes growing inequality, has exactly seven references in its index to women or females.
Screwnomics looks at that for starters. But better, it introduces the many brilliant women who have new solutions that most don’t know about. We girlfriends seldom talk about the economy among ourselves. We don’t think of it as ours. Economics is not just male-dominated. It is male-identified.
Women’s numbers on Wall Street have actually declined the past 10 years. Only 12 percent of professors in the field are women. In economics women must impersonate men, talk ultra rational man-talk, and then get ignored, since man-talk jockeys for top position, winner take all. Linguist Deborah Tannen has shown us this talk’s purpose is not connection; it’s competition.
We have never needed connection and cooperation more than now. Another kind of creative economics is possible, but I doubt things can change so long as the majority of women believe economics has little to do with them. Screwnomics confronts EconoMan of modern times, drawing on Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” to introduce EconoMansplaining and different schools of economic thought.
Right now “neoliberalism” and its free market leads the EconoMan pack—and it sounds good. New and liberal and free are good for women, right? But liberal in economics means the opposite of liberal in politics; neoliberalism is a throwback to colonial times, when rich men were royalty, women were property, and sexism wasn’t yet a word, but just normal.
How does EconoMan get away with such lies? He’s not above confusing you. It’s his usual method, so thorough he sometimes confuses himself. If that doesn’t work, violence is ultimate mansplaining, and EconoMan’s violence has become the new norm.
Over my lifetime I’ve had a front row seat to huge transformations in our economic ideas, from male-identified Keynesian ones to today’s hyper masculine phallic priapism. As a young woman, I cast my first vote for Michigan Republican David Stockman, who later became Ronald Reagan’s accomplice for “slaying the beast,” our government, though this isn’t how Stockman ran. Anti-government ideas have grown more popular, cutting our government budgets believed “good” for the economy, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
I’ve witnessed neoliberalism’s results in Michigan’s economic unraveling. My son-in-law’s dad edits a small local newspaper and says the nation’s eight-year recession has been 30 years long in Michigan. My hometown of Benton Harbor would set the precedent for replacing elected officials with a king-like economic manager, a test case for doing the same in Detroit and Flint, money trumping democracy and human decency.
Corruption grows bolder in our politics. There’s an urgency we all feel. Yet around the world, women and their children remain the poorest, the most vulnerable, and the least noteworthy to most economists. For example, Thomas Piketty’s recent and much celebrated 700+page work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which so expertly describes growing inequality, has exactly seven references in its index to women or females.
About the author
Rickey Gard Diamond is both a journalist and a fiction writer, but her work in both realms most often concerns women and economic issues. She earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College, where she was a professor of liberal studies in the undergraduate program for 18 years. Her fiction has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Louisville Review, Other Voices, Kalliope, Plainswoman, and other journals. She has also written a novel, Second Sight. Diamond is the founding editor of Vermont Woman, where she has widely published articles and book reviews. She is among the recognized writers in Vermont Odysseys: Essays on the New Vermont. Recently, she won an investigative journalism award from the National Newspaper Association for her Vermont Woman series: An Economy of Our Own.
About the cartoonist
I’m a syndicated cartoonist, an author, and professor. I’ve authored, co-authored and illustrated books and articles on subjects ranging from transforming anger to understanding football. I find that creating characters and illustrating storylines can help humanize otherwise theoretical matters and add the invaluable element of humor.
When I started working with Rickey on the Screwnomics cartoons, I was pretty much as clueless as Suki (one of our three main characters). Working on this project has opened my eyes and taught me how important it is for women to believe in the possibility of true economic equity and learn the ways and means of making that change a reality. We hope this book and our cartoons will support and encourage that aspiration.
When I started working with Rickey on the Screwnomics cartoons, I was pretty much as clueless as Suki (one of our three main characters). Working on this project has opened my eyes and taught me how important it is for women to believe in the possibility of true economic equity and learn the ways and means of making that change a reality. We hope this book and our cartoons will support and encourage that aspiration.