Anyone want to talk real life feminist dystopias with me?

It's only ever a tool, though. On it's own, it is not enough to liberate.

It's a tool that can be rationed, controlled and taken away.

Is it because it gave control to the women whereas condoms do not and a bunch of men refused to wear condoms

This - but what you say about the side effects is also relevant.

Most forms of contraception have some form of side effect, but we are only free to choose the one that suits us to the extent that we live in a country where different forms of contraception are freely available. This isn't something we can take for granted.

However people who believe that artificial wombs are just over the horizon seem to have no idea that many (most?) people in the world have limited access to medical care. IVF has been around for almost 50 years, but for anyone without unlimited wealth access is strictly rationed.

I don't really buy into this genetic engineering/designing our own evolution thing. We still understand such a relatively small amount about the complicated interconnected nature of our physical existence, and I suspect any smart arse intervention, however well meant, would just send unexpected ripples and create problems we can't even conceive right now.

I think human ambition is always at risk of the penalties for hubris.

The other purpose for bringing women into the world still would be for sex if men still fancy real women more than robot women. Also, because the abusive men probably prefer real live women to dominate and bully and a robot won't cut it. Sorry to be so cynical.

I think it’s significant that the big tech companies in the US will pay for their female employees to freeze and store eggs but provide NO childcare benefit of any kind.

There was a time in the 1980s when major US corporations were providing on-site childcare facilities. Those are long gone — a tentative 2nd wave victory washed away by the 3rd wave turn away from fighting for concrete, material benefits for women.

Harriet, I believe it was because women could take it without anyone knowing. Certainly when marital rape was more common and within the law this was important.

It messed up my mental health and brought my thyroid issues to the fore. I won't go on it.

This Twitter thread is an excellent summary of the current dystopia:

Until 1900, married women couldn't own property in all states.
Until 1920, women couldn't vote.
Until 1971, states could bar women from practicing law.
Until 1974, women needed a man to get a credit card.

Now politicians pretend sex isn't even real.

twitter.com/Bleedinheart2MD/status/1192947525180899328 [Thread continues with comparable dates from countries including UK and Italy.]

Well I guess I feel this is relevant because I actually think the pill is talked about like a great thing for women (because of our biology) when really it worked out better for men. But maybe I don't know enough of the history to understand. I can see how it's great for some women who don't get the bad side effects from it.

Sorry this might be a stupid question and is off topic, but why is the contraceptive pill always held up as this great revolutionary thing? Is it because it gave control to the women whereas condoms do not and a bunch of men refused to wear condoms (isn't that rapey?) Or is it just because people prefer the feeling of no condom (in which case I think a better breakthrough would be some sort of super condom that felt the same as without).

I just think condoms are better than hormonal birth control in general. I had really bad side effects from the pill and I know I'm not alone in this. My mental health was very, very bad. And the pill doesn't protect against STDs.

I suppose it is similar to an appendix. If some people started being born without an appendix, the need for people with one would cease to exist. And if we then engineered out all people with an appendix before conception, that would be a moral good as we would have ‘fixed’ appendicitis.

The same with women. If you view pregnancy and breastfeeding as problems to be eradicated by technology, why bother creating more people with female biology? Female biology would be just like having an appendix.

‘Eliminating that requirement of biology through technology doesn’t therefore eliminate our reason for being.’

What other reason is there for being? What would be the other purpose of deliberately bringing women into existence?

If women’s biology is a problem that could be fixed through technology, what would be the point in women existing?

Hmmm. Yes some aspects of our biology could be improved on through technology, but that would not erase our existence as women.
Take the example of artificial wombs and no longer having to be pregnant and go through childbirth. A woman is more than a breeder, a vessel for the next generation. Eliminating that requirement of biology through technology doesn’t therefore eliminate our reason for being.

I don’t know why humans are here and self aware, but I refuse to think a woman only exists to be a slave to her biology.

I’m optimistic except for revolutions! Lol. ;)
I genuinely appreciate your points as well. Life isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. I agree especially where you said that humans don’t progress in a linear upwardly fashion- we take two steps forward and one step back as often as we take dark side tracks.

Plan, I genuinely have appreciated your optimism on this thread. And yes, the revolution comment was in jest, largely because I'm well aware that women tend to get short changed there too.

If women’s biology is a problem that could be fixed through technology, what would be the point in women existing?

Wouldn’t we just eradicate the problem by only creating male foetuses?

I hope you're right, Plan and that the women now doing STEM are creative and entrepreneurial, and don't stick to working on projects imagined by males. Sadly I do agree that technology doesn't always lead entirely or directly to improvements for women.

Revolution is attractive but history tells us that women usually end up worse off both during and after a revolution.

I was thinking of the humble flushing toilet this morning and thanking my stars I was not born a woman 150yrs ago where there would be no indoor plumbing. Guess who would be hauling water in from a well and emptying/scrubbing shit filled chamber pots every damn day? Moi. Because that WAS woman’s work.

Did you know that 75% of university STEM students are women? I believe we are about to enter an era of technology designed by women and for the further liberation of women.

It's only ever a tool, though. On it's own, it is not enough to liberate. I don't deny that it's changed many women's lives. But the idea of human progress as a linear bad-to-good situation is folly, I think. What is granted may be taken away, and there are as many backward steps as forward ones.

Much more is needed than freely available technology for women to be liberated. Personally, I'm always leaning towards revolution

Any technology that has the potential to 'liberate' women from their biological functions of gestation and breastfeeding (and right here, I'm questioning the notion that this is a liberation) is likely to be expensive, and accessible to only an elite segment of society.

Contraception proves you wrong as it has done the most to liberate women of any technology.
Technology doesn’t have to be expensive and limited to the elite. They said the exact same thing about computers back in the 1980s. But my phone now has more computing power than the biggest multi-million pound super computer that existed then.

Floral,
I don’t mind a dose of caution either. They’re pitfalls to avoid with technology. But technology has aided women immensely. So much of society was closed to us because someone had to spend all day cleaning, washing, cooking and rearing the dozen children produced by contraceptionless sex.

The labour saving devices mean too that women have opportunity to pursue intellectual lives as scientists writers journalists artists. Yes it’s still women pushing buttons on machines, but the hours and hours of free time has opened up entire careers now that we don’t need a servant class constantly cleaning and washing up after a dozen children. Contraception is technology too.
Yes, we still have to work (as do men) but I for one am glad technology has given me the opportunity to use my mind instead of being doomed to mindless physical work.

Interesting paper on gender, accelerationism and transhumanism that you might be interested in. I kindof like it, but I suspect I may be in the minority...enjoy.

^"Gender is a hyperstition overlayed on sex by the male. Its function is to objectify the female and impose on her a social function as a machine whose duty is to reproduce the human, always in the service of the male, who alone has no future and must have sons to pass his legacy onto. "
...
"The central figure of G/ACC is the trans woman. She is the demon-spawn of the primordial feminine that has manipulated males into serving as a heat sink for evolution and that is now discarding them towards an alien and inhuman machinic future... she becomes the Body without Sex Organs: The body in a virtual state, ready to plug its desire into technocapital, becoming fused with technocapital as a molecular cyborg who is made flesh by the pharmaceutical-medical industry. She enters into the world as a hyper-sexist backlash at the logic of the gender binary. She takes gender and accelerates it, transforming into a camouflaged guerrilla. The trans woman is an insurgent against patriarchy who is continually flanking it, introducing an affirmative zero into the gender binary, the affirmative zero which reaches ever more configurations in the downward cascade of gender fragmentation away from the binary and ultimately away from the human itself. It is a process of gender shredding where the feminine wins out in a cybernetic warfare against the crumbling tower of the masculine, and where therefore human reproduction becomes impossible."
...
"As humanity on nearly every front definitively proves that it is not fit for the future, and that women will find their own exit while the masculine languishes in resentment, the Thalassal upswelling of gender acceleration births from its slimy womb the only daughters that trans women will ever bear: AI."^

vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/

Liberation involves a restructuring of society, not making women into pseudo-patriarchs with the help of technology.

Any technology that has the potential to 'liberate' women from their biological functions of gestation and breastfeeding (and right here, I'm questioning the notion that this is a liberation) is likely to be expensive, and accessible to only an elite segment of society.

So right away, we would end up with two classes of women - the minority who can afford to 'opt out', with all the benefits that brings, and the majority, who are stuck doing the same old, even more devalued than before, because biologically mothering becomes something associated with the lower classes.

That's no utopia for women, even if it does free some individual women from biological 'chains'.

Tech down is entirely the right way to go about deepening the dystopia for women as a class, imo.

PlanDe, I always appreciate optimism, truly. But I have no faith, whatsoever, that technology which could bring about the emancipation of women, all things being equal, will have that actual conclusion.

What in history would lead any to conclude that technological advances will both benefit and liberate women? To take a slightly less sinister tech that reproduction related means, the washing machine has been an astounding tool in the freeing of women from hours of back breaking chores.
But who in the bulk of society remains the primary user of the device, and has therefore swapped one set of chores for another?

Has technology improved a woman's lot here? Technically, perhaps. But the burden remains hers due to social conditioning, and in fact the time freed up from those longer chores is consumed by other chores, and in fact the very existence of the machine is used as proof that she has more opportunities and therefore discounts any further claim to need liberation.

Tech is certainly a two edged sword, and I think history amply shows that women do not fare well on either edge.