I came across an article on the Washington Post website with the headline “How America fell in love with crazy amounts of air conditioning.” I fully expected it to center on how we selfish Americans who want to stay cool in the summer months are essentially throwing ourselves into the global oven by running our energy-consuming ACs.
Though the article mentioned that America uses a lot of energy for air conditioning–the WaPo writer points to a link that says Americans use more energy on air conditioning than the continent of Africa uses to power everything–anthropoidal-caused climatologicomal upheavaling was not the focus of the article.
Instead, we read that some other sinister factor is at play, one that plagues half of our country on a continual basis:
America, it turns out, is addicted to A/C for reasons of fashion, physiology, gender norms, architecture and history.
And there you go. Slipped into the middle of that sentence was the point of this article. Males are using their privilege to oppress women further by making them work in the cold. It’s a passive aggression, perhaps so inherent in men that they’ve never realized that it’s their fault that women are freezing in the office, including offices where journalists of major news corporations work. (Yes, the author of the article was a woman.)
Air conditioning is always set too cold for women. It’s a commonly-known fact that women can’t tolerate the cold like men can. Men wear cozy business suits to the office. Women wear dresses and open-toed shoes and the like–just as their male oppressors expect them to wear in the office. This injustice also occurs in consumer establishments such as movie theaters, restaurants, and other locales where men and women gather to socialize. Men get to dress comfortably, while women have to lug around a damn sweater everywhere. It’s just not fair!
The article doesn’t come out and say it in those words, but the message is clear. All across America, the War on Women is waged daily in the form of subtle battles taking place in freezing-cold skyscrapers and business establishments.
“Women do register temperature a little more sensitively than men,” says Susan Mazur-Stommen of Indicia Consulting, a company that studies human behavior and sustainability. “However, what you also see is gendered clothing differences, particularly seasonal. We have norms that say it’s more acceptable for women to show more skin.”
So why do temperature settings typically suit the men but not the women? It’s hard to know for sure, but women haven’t been a major part of the workforce for long and typically men have designed office buildings, installed air conditioning systems and set the thermostats.
Ah, those devious male building engineers and heating/cooling technicians making women cold, reducing their productivity, causing certain parts of their bodies to project outwardly for their evil, overpaid corporate bosses to leer at, perpetuating the objectivity toward women.
Let’s try to overlook that there are companies out there that can exist with a focus on things like “human behavior and sustainability.”
The writer of the article went on to mention other effects of air conditioning, like how retiring Republicans have moved to the South, which used to be dominated by Democrats. So the political party angle got covered.
The piece ends with another quote from that “human behavior and sustainability” expert:
“We’re cooling these buildings because men will not stop wearing business suits. It really comes down to social norming,” Stommen says. “We are spending a lot of energy keeping men both thermally comfortable, and also socially comfortable.”
Because our excessive use of energy is why our planet is melting, one could surmise that the true point of this article was to show that sexism is another thing that will bring about the end of the world.
Upon reading the article, I wondered why someone decided that this topic needed to be tackled. The author reminded me of a cheesy piece the same Washington Post ran about a week and a half ago concerning women working in cold air-conditioned offices.
Then shortly after finding this morning’s WaPo article, I noticed this one by the New York Times titled “Chilly at Work? A Decades-Old Formula May Be to Blame.” Through my acute powers of perception, I was successful in predicting what the point of the article was.
It happens every summer: Offices turn on the air-conditioning, and women freeze into Popsicles.
Finally, scientists (two men, for the record) are urging an end to the Great Arctic Office Conspiracy. Their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that most office buildings set temperatures based on a decades-old formula that uses the metabolic rates of men. The study concludes that buildings should “reduce gender-discriminating bias in thermal comfort” because setting temperatures at slightly warmer levels can help combat global warming.
This is the article that dives headlong into the “subconscious sexism contributes to climate change” topic. The writer of the article, another chick, quotes a dude who explains,
“In a lot of buildings, you see energy consumption is a lot higher because the standard is calibrated for men’s body heat production,” said Boris Kingma, a co-author of the study and a biophysicist at Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “If you have a more accurate view of the thermal demand of the people inside, then you can design the building so that you are wasting a lot less energy, and that means the carbon dioxide emission is less.”
Good! Less competition for my namesake line of work.
“Many men, they wear suits and ties, and women tend to dress sometimes with cleavage,” said [building physicist Dr. Joost van Hoof], who wrote a commentary about the study. “The cleavage is closer to the core of the body, so the temperature difference between the air temperature and the body temperature there is higher when it’s cold. I wouldn’t overestimate the effect of cleavage, but it’s there.”
So for the planet’s sake, men should “stop complaining,” Dr. Kingma said. “If it is too warm, the behavior thing you can do is take off a piece of clothing, but you can only do that so much. You could also say let’s keep it a very cold building and women should just wear more clothes.”
Sure thing, smart aleck. Let’s raise the temperature in offices and other places of business so that men have to work and go out for dinner in warmer conditions. That’ll go over great during those important business meetings, dripping sweat all over clients they have to impress. Women love dating men who have pit stains darkening their shirts. Should these places of business be too cold for women, or too warm for men? If one were to agree with the premise of these articles, it would seem that there is no perfect in-between where both men and women will be ideally comfortable.
So now we have a new progressive outrage brewing, and it does double duty by combining sexism with global warming. Does this mean that we’ll soon be seeing women around the country publicly demanding recognition of their thermal rights and environuts clamoring for lawmakers to enact more thermostat regulations? It seems inevitable, if these articles are any indication.
