An NPR report from earlier this week uncovers a conspicuous fringe benefit of Amazon’s newest HQ2 landing in the Washington, D.C.-metro area: More men to date for the sex- and romance-starved straight single women overrunning the nation’s capital, per the sources NPR found to prop up this piece. Just think of the reproductive potential! Hard to imagine a better place to situate a headquarters for your overwhelmingly male company than in a town that makes it optimally easy for your employees to breed. In this tragically regressive framing, literally everyone wins: the desperate harpies of D.C., AND the company that laid waste to dating scenes in other regions of America by attracting men like rats to dry land.The company’s choice of breeding ground couldn’t appear more deliberate, per WAMU, a local NPR affiliate: “Assuming the company continues to employ mostly men and imports most of its workers rather than hiring locally, Amazon could bring thousands of new men into this region by 2030,” the outlet reports. “It's gotten to the point where I've run into all my exes and all my friends' exes,” according to one woman WAMU spoke to. “Women get the short end of the stick in D.C…. [I see a lot of] women who are overqualified for the men that they date, and men seem to have the pick of many, many different fascinating women,” said another.If we were to be incredibly generous to Amazon we might say, Hm, maybe it’s settling in a woman-skewed city to finally use its absolutely disgusting largesse to actually hire more women. But leveraging a city for its reproductive potential is the kind of "vertically integrated," "dominate the market" dystopian capitalist wet dream that Amazon lives for; how is it that NPR is the one who has to do everything, here? Maybe Amazon is being coy, so the dating-haggard women of the D.C. metro area don't catch on: In the same NPR report, a woman in the Seattle-Tacoma area where Amazon’s main HQ is located described her experience dating male Amazon employees as, “absolutely [expletive] atrocious.” But if women in the D.C. area can simply get over and/or ignore that, we have a really compelling company-town concept on our hands: Workers born and raised within the company are less likely to organize, probably. They’re literally already a family.Our sympathies go out to the single men of Amazon who currently work in Seattle and won't be chosen to be airdropped into D.C… And to the women of D.C., who are apparently so beaten down by the current, local fare, they’re looking to the employees of a thoroughly evil company where employees routinely cry at their desks as their best possible option.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow Hannah Smothers on Twitter.
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