Did You Pack The Jar Of Testicles?
Would a future women-only space colony have to live with that same fear? Would the very idea of a self-sufficient community of women so infuriate and threaten men that they would take it as a challenge to seek out and invade any feminist planet? And what about the frozen sperm?
I’m sorry. I’m reading the Guardian. Perhaps things will settle down.
If our future colony is reliant on what it can transport from Earth, stocks will eventually run out unless they can be replenished, which means giving birth to at least a few male children. Whether, in a matriarchal society without examples of male aggression, those boys would grow up to be the kind of man who grabs a peaceful protester by the back of her neck remains one of the great unknowns.
Or not. Never mind.
Readers may be tickled by the conceit that men would be infuriated and threatened by the departure from Earth of the planet’s feminists. And not, say, delighted. In fact, given recent trends, it seems more likely that feminists would be the ones determined to sabotage and eliminate any all-male spaces, while exempting themselves from comparable restrictions.
The rest is fairly predictable, the standard template, with jabs at “jowly white men in positions of power,” and inspirational rumblings in which women “just take the sperm and leave the men behind.” This bold vision of tomorrow is then traded for a more modest scenario, a compromise of sorts, in which, rather than being “redundant” and eliminated entirely, men are merely “educated… out of bullying and aggressive attitudes towards women” – an education that entails “putting women in positions of power on this planet before we think about how to populate others.”
We await the Guardian article in which a male columnist, perhaps white and somewhat jowly, ponders the appalling nature of women and how they require correction lest they contaminate the heavens with their inherent awfulness.
Via Guardian Science.
the inflammatory question of who would be eligible for such a mission
I object in the strongest possible terms to the use of the word “inflammatory” as though it had negative connotations. The Differently Immune Systemed Community will endure this lexical genocide no longer. On their behalf, I demand The Guardian fire the author of that article and every editor who let the sentence pass, and further that their pensions and unused vacation time payout be donated to a bank account in the Caymans that will be used for, I dunno, Raising Awareness or something.
Via Guardian Science.
*Snort*
Writers at the Grauniad seem to have gone from reading about tests on sperm in outer space and possible human colonies on Mars to heady fantasies of Femtopias in the stars alarmingly quickly.
If you have ever kept chickens you will have noticed that if there is no Rooster one of the females grows larger and starts to grow a Coxcomb. So …..
I’ve read they may also start trying to breed the other females.
Tony, please tell us a bit about Tasmania.
I’m guessing the first generation would be pretty uniformly oriented toward their own sex. Unless you believe that sexual orientation is rigorously genetically determined, though, a problem — heterosexuality — would begin to rear its (ahem) head in the second generation, and would need to be stamped out by social disapproval, psychiatric ‘reeducation,’ legal punishment, hormone ‘therapy,’ electroshock, etc. Whatever is required.
Only forty or so years into the colony’s history and we’re already settling into a dystopia that would make Orwell, Huxley AND Zamyatin blanch.
If you have ever kept chickens you will have noticed that if there is no Rooster one of the females grows larger and starts to grow a Coxcomb.
This is true, our chooks fall into this pattern.
After a number of years one of our chooks started adopting rooster-like habits, occasionally mating with the other chooks. The older ones occasionally try to crow, too. Though one thing roosters do is find food for the other chickens and keep all the flock in order; our self-appointed roosters felt no need to bother with that!
Mind you, our chooks never once cared if we misgendered them and didn’t give a shit about what pronouns we used for them…
aelfheld: TDK, ‘ware dirty telephones.
One person got the reference! Thank you.
I doubt the women who write this garbage do their own cleaning.
Twelve million pageviews. Bloody hell.
Excuse me while I lick my own eyebrows.
Twelve million pageviews.
I knew you when you were a nobody. 🙂
I knew you when you were a nobody. 🙂
No change there. I realise it’s terribly vulgar to trumpet such things, but I’m surprised. A dozen years ago, this didn’t seem at all likely.
[ Dashes backstage, emerges in tuxedo, gestures for spotlight. ]
“I’d like to thank my agent, my hairstylist, and all of the little people who made me the towering glory that I am today…”
From glowering Tory to towering glory?
(No pickled eggs for me tonight).
“…if there is no Rooster one of the females grows larger and starts to grow a Coxcomb.”
Does it also start wearing jeans and motorcycle boots?
I’ll just let myself out.
Excuse me while I lick my own eyebrows.
Ah, but can you catch bugs in mid-flight?
I can on the rare occasions I see a lightning bug. They’ve become scarce around here the last few years. And I haven’t seen a June bug in at least 30 years. In these parts. at least, I think they may be extinct.
Crack some beers, boys. Party at my house! They’re gone!