“Tariffs or this?” mused an X user on April 5, the day after Trump’s newly announced tariffs sent the Dow Jones spinning into its biggest drop since the height of the pandemic.

The “this” in question was a TikTok video from last summer in which the all-women executive team of an Australian skin-care company playfully sang and danced around their office. Faced with the option of a woman joking about being a “Gen Z boss” and probable economic ruin: “Tariffs,” the X user concluded.

The apparent link between a group of Australian women having fun at their office and the historic economic fallout of Trump’s tariffs in the US may be obscure to a lot of people. But for a vocal contingent of incel-adjacent men on X, the link is self-evident.

“A lot of men (specifically, single and frustrated ones on the right who have a negative view of women) have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace,” explained Substack writer Cartoons Hate Her in March in the midst of the DOGE shutdowns. “They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who has for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs.” In this reading, the Australian skin-care executives are callously celebrating their oppressive privilege by filming themselves dancing.

In this worldview, the fun, pretend jobs include federally funded government jobs. These men further believe that because DEI initiatives mandate that women get these fun, pretend jobs — usually described as “email jobs” — women have achieved unnatural degrees of self-sufficiency. No longer do they have to rely on marrying a good provider for economic stability. With that impetus gone, women’s standards for romantic partners have skyrocketed, leaving these hapless men unable to get a girlfriend.

Cartoons Hate Her quotes an X user who berated her for arguing that single women can be happy living by themselves. “Your ‘happy life alone’ only exists because the state funnels taxpayer money into your independence LARP,” he wrote. “I call it ‘negative prostitution’ because it takes men’s money away to ensure women don’t have sex with them.”

These men read Trump’s economic........

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