The Privilege of Men by Judith Mazzucco starts as an unremarkable novel about the meat industry, but then WHAM! the metaphor in chapter 16— At least I think, I hope, it’s a metaphor and not something that’s actually happening somewhere right now. Though—and I’m not sure whether this is Mazzucco’s point or whether she’s ‘just’ making a point about the meat industry—it would be completely logical for it to BE happening, given what is ALREADY happening, with respect to trafficking women for sexual services (i.e., surrogacy and prostitution). Worth the read if only for that chapter. And that point.
Oct 16 2022
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. A MUST READ.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson should be required reading for everyone. In particular, for those with economic and political power (send a copy to the people of your choice!).
“Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism …” p25 And that’s the problem.
“Looking into plans to redirect fossil fuel companies to do decarbonization projects. Capabilities strangely appropriate. Extraction and injection both use same tech, just reversed.” p54 IS THAT TRUE? Then what the hell are we waiting for? “People, capital, facilities, capacities, all these can be used to ‘collect and inject’ either by way of cooperation or legal coercion. Keeps oil companies in business but doing good things.” p54
“But lawmakers are often lawyers themselves, notoriously bereft of ideas. Can we assume they get their ideas about law from others? … Think tanks. Academics. / Meaning MBA professors. … Economics departments.” p59 Yes. Right there. B students with no humanities knowledge, understanding, with no science knowledge, understanding run/create the world.
“The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent.” p74
“Also, the two billion poorest people on the planet still lack access to basics like toilets, housing, food, health care, education, and so on.” p74
“…we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified …” p75
“GDP … consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities … ” p75
And a wonderful conversation on p98-100 culminating in “There are about a hundred people walking this earth, who if you judge from the angle of the future … are mass murderers. If they started to die … Exile, then. Prisons … What if they woke up one day with no assets?”
“Arctic permafrost [contains] as much stored methane as all the Earth’s cattle would create and emit over six centuries, and this giant burp [the melting of the permafrost, already underway] would almost certainly push Earth over an irreversible tipping point into jungle planet mode …” p147
“The whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals. … Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for.” p166
” … many of the worst climate impacts will be irreversible. Extinctions and ocean warming can’t be fixed no matter how much money future people have, so economics as practised miss a fundamental aspect of reality.” p173
” … the heat wave, which was now said to have killed twenty million. As many people, in other words, as soldiers had died in World War One, a death toll which had taken four years of intensely purposeful killing; and the heat wave had taken only two weeks.” p227 “And yet still they burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the heat wave and would cause the next one.” p228 How is it that so many people are so mentally deficient?
“Meanwhile the fossil fuel companies keep pouring vast sums into buying elections, politicians, media, and public opinion.” p250
“Then all those planes going down in one day [through sabotage]. … It killed the airline industry, more or less. That was ten percent of the carbon burn, gone in a single day.” p254 Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“… those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them.” p288-9 Poorly imagined, indeed.
“Help get us to the next world system. … Invent post-capitalism!” p317
“… a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology … economics were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field …” p343
“So until the climate was actually killing them, people had a tendency to deny it could happen.” p349 And yet, see above re the heat wave. So until it killed them themselves? How special do people think they are such that seeing it kill someone else is … irrelevant?
“In the corporate world I’ve read the average wage ratio is like one to five hundred. Actually that was the median; one to 1500 happens pretty often. The top executives in these companies earn in ten minutes what it takes their starting employees all year to earn … To hide the fact that they don’t actually do a thousand times more than their employees. Hiding like that, they won’t be normal. They’ll be bullshitters.” p383
” … would include American stupidity and hubris, and the assumption of being the world’s sole superpower, as one of their outstanding problems …” p483
“Woman as Other—when would that stop, them being as they were the majority of the species by many millions?” p483-4
“Stan back, get away, keep out; maybe try fishing for plastic rather than fish …” p484
Oct 15 2022
Why more men than women will die of the COVID virus
Oct 10 2022
The hardest part about being a woman…
Oct 09 2022
The End of Men – Christina Sweeney-Baird
Just read The End of Men, Christina Sweeney-Baird – well worth the read, one of several notable bits:
[She pretends to be infected] “I have never felt so powerful. This must be what men used to feel like. My mere physical presence is enough to terrify someone into running. No wonder they used to get drunk on it.” (p130)
Oct 07 2022
A woman in Milgram’s experiment
Oct 06 2022
Meghan Murphy’s “The Unbearable Coolness of Porn”
A simple but stunning observation: “… paying for sex is coercive – we all know that when people want to have sex with one another, they do it for free. No one needs to be paid unless one party is not enthusiastic about the sex.”
Read the whole thing here: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2022/09/12/the-unbearable-coolness-of-porn/
Sep 22 2022
“Men need Sex” — a story about a story
So I wrote a story, “Men Need Sex.” I started with the mistaken, but wide-spread, belief that men need sex (PIV). Mistaken because, unlike food, water, and oxygen, without sex, you don’t die. Then, ‘inspired’ by Roger Elliott, I thought, ‘What if?’ What if men really did die if they didn’t get sex. I postulated contagion, perhaps social. Then I postulated a shortening incubation period (between belief, not getting sex, and suicide). And I added the belief that men are entitled to get what they need, which ramped up rape and, consequently, women’s self-quarantine (after begging, to no avail, for stricter gun laws and a curfew for men). I ended the story with something like ‘And then the women just … waited.’
The SciPhi Journal rejected it. Which was disappointing, because I thought the story was clearly sf with a philosophical element (“As its primary mission, SPJ wishes to provide a platform for idea-driven fiction, as opposed to the character-driven mode that has come to predominate speculative fiction”). Future Fire also rejected it, which was also disappointing, because they focus on feminist sf. But what I want to focus on is the first rejection because it came with the explanation that my story “reads as a fully seriously intended apology of gendercide.”
How was what I described gendercide? The women didn’t kill the men; they just waited for them to kill themselves. Yes, they withheld sex, but if you’ll die without food and I refuse to give you food, am I killing you? Perhaps. The philosophical community has not yet come to a consensus on that; it’s called the passive euthanasia vs. active euthanasia debate (and the SciPhi editor should have been well aware of that debate).
Framed another way, if you’ll die without being able to hurt someone, and no one steps forward to be hurt, are we all killing you? Not at all clear. That’s called the Good Samaritan debate (and again, the SciPhi editor should have been well aware of it), often illustrated by the scenario of a drowning child: if the passerby is a competent swimmer, then yes, she has a duty to rescue, but if the passerby cannot swim, and the rescue puts her own life at risk, then no, she has no duty to rescue. The essential question is ‘On what grounds would one have a duty to sacrifice oneself for another?’
Does intercourse put a woman’s life at risk? If she has no contraception and no abortion, that is, if she’s forced to become pregnant and then doesn’t miscarry, well, maybe. It is not uncommon for a woman to die giving birth. At a minimum, there is a clear risk to her health: high blood pressure, diabetes, anemia, stroke, cardiac arrest. Perhaps the SciPhi editor is unaware of the health risks of pregnancy and childbirth…
But even with contraception and abortion … why is she obligated to allow herself to be hurt (yes, men, sexual intercourse against our will, absent our desire, hurts) (maybe that’s what the SciPhi guy didn’t get?) so that the man will live? If it’s a one-time thing, and the man in question is a good man (yes, that would figure into my deliberation), okay, maybe many of us would, and should, say yes. Ten minutes, in and out, go on, live.
But if it’s an ongoing thing, like the provision of food (which is what my story suggests), then the scenario would be very much like one sex, male, enslaving another, female; men imprisoning women to ensure continued sexual access and, therefore, their continued existence.
All that aside, the editor said “Art is free, and I won’t criticise any apology of anything.” Okay, then, an apology for gendercide, should that have been what my story was about, would have been okay. “However,” he continued, “all pieces of writing for SPJ must have at least a grain of plausibility.” When I pointed out that I’d referenced Elliot Rodger and Alex Minassian, he said he hadn’t heard of either one. What? What? (I keep forgetting that since words like sexism and misogyny aren’t used on primetime tv or in mainstream news, most people [in the U.S. and Canada, at least, because their entire worldview is formed by those two media] `aren’t familiar with the concepts. And it keeps shocking me when I remember that. But wait, weren’t both Rodger and Minassian reported in mainstream news?) My guess is the editor just didn’t read my story very carefully. (Both Rodger and Minassian were referenced in footnotes.) And why might that be? Because … oh, right. It was written by a woman.
He went on to say “As a 100% gay male, I can assure you that your statements about ALL men are quite off the mark …” Quite apart from the fact that any statements I made about ALL men were in the context of the story, a fiction, I never made any statements about ALL men; in fact, I quite deliberately say “Of course not all men” at one point.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “the funny notion implied in your story that women don’t need sex is also wrong”— oh do tell, please, go ahead and mansplain women’s sexuality to me.
“Myself and quite a few of my gay male friends have had experiences of being sexually harassed by women. Therefore, women seem to need sex as well.” Therefore? Okay, at this point, I’m thinking the editor of a philosophical science fiction journal doesn’t have a philosophy degree.
In a subsequent email (because yes, I responded to his rejection letter, refuting his points; I’m tired of just letting these things happen without challenge), he said “At any case, there is too much hate shown by the narrator to be humanely appealing.” Need I point out all the sf in which male narrators show too much hate of women to be humanely appealing? (Yes, men, any time you write a story or novel in which the males subordinate or sexualize the females, you’re expressing hatred of women.)
And, in yet another email, he said “There is no lack of publishing venues that would gladly accept any kind of male-bashing. SPJ is not one of them.”
To which I replied, “It’s just … disappointing that you didn’t see that the story is actually an argument against male entitlement and an exposé of, and a cautionary tale about, toxic masculinity.”
[The story appears in Fighting Words: notes for a future we won’t have.}