Satire: Who's 'Ruining' the Workplace? A Comic Takedown of Scapegoating Women

"Women are ruining the workplace."

Before women arrived, the workplace, the narrator insists, was flawless: full of trees, no need to labor, no pants or clothing required. Animals were everywhere; you could sit all day and call, "Quiet. Quiet, piggy!" and nobody would object—except perhaps the pigs. Your job, apparently, was to name them. Fruits were free and mostly edible. It was Good. And crucially, there were no women to spoil things, steal ribs, or tempt anyone with forbidden snacks that would expel them from home and force them to learn a trade.

Oh—wait. That was the Garden of Eden. Different myth. Let’s try again.

"Women are ruining the workplace," the piece repeats, as if opening jars and releasing every conceivable evil into the world: plague, death, sickness, and every ill except hope. That, of course, is Pandora’s story. Wrong myth.

"Women are ruining the workplace," continues the refrain—arriving with terrible rhymes, stirring potions with thumbs and eyes and bat wings, muttering over midnight cauldrons and prophesying that you will be king of Scotland. Those are the witches from Macbeth. Wrong story again.

"Women are ruining the workplace," the voice goes on—towering 305 feet in New York Harbor and insisting people come to your country, blindfolded and holding scales outside courthouses, refusing to smile on command, and carved from stone. That, needless to say, describes statues—especially the Statue of Liberty and depictions of Justice—not an organized conspiracy.

"Women are ruining the workplace," the narrator says, this time blaming collisions with icebergs and foundering on rocks. That’s a ship. Pronouns can be confusing.

"Women are ruining the workplace," the claim persists—biting your arm and sipping your blood. No—those are mosquitoes. Female, yes, but hardly responsible for society’s ills on purpose.

"Underaged women are rui—" No. Those are children. They aren't culpable.

The narrator vows to find the women responsible. He checks the Pentagon—if anything, there are fewer women there now. He looks at the White House—the women there mostly stand at podiums, explaining or defending the men. He scans Congress—yes, there are women, but the institution’s problems run deeper than any single group. He wonders about tradwives, who by definition aren’t even in paid workplaces.

Someone, he decides, is dismantling government, shredding families, fouling the air with coal-plant exhaust, wrecking the economy, eroding rights, diverting money to strange places, groveling before dictators, endangering the food supply. Someone has been making everything a little worse with cavalier disregard for law and human life. Someone is surely ruining the workplace. And not just the workplace.

Of course, the essay is a satire of scapegoating: it cycles through myths, symbols, and misidentified culprits to expose how absurd it is to blame an entire gender for complicated, systemic problems. The narrator’s hunt for a single villain becomes a comic portrait of denial and projection.

In time, the narrator reasons, he will discover who that someone is.