Anyone want to talk real life feminist dystopias with me?

I've just started looking at it and it did at least ask for sex.

It's notable that apple didn't include any menstrual tracking apps in their health data till the latest update last week:

Women are still an afterthought in design and technology.

Huxley is instructive. But like Orwell, not an instruction manual.

Flora wins the Internet today 🌟

Yes Floral. Technology can be used to be oppress or free. Your oppression scenario is just as possible as my freeing one.
(The drudge class includes both women and men. It’s called the working class. I think we will have a drudge class until we have robots to become the drudges and then all humans will be free)

So, the lesson is not to be afraid of AI or technology, but what society will do with it. The cyborg example for instance. Fantastic to help the disabled live normal lives. Give a quadriplegic arms and legs, the blind bionic eyes, etc. OR horrible nightmare to create super soldiers to kill other humans en masse.

@AriadneAufNaxo, I believe that recognising the biological experience of being a woman is an essential part of the women's emancipation movement. We aren't simply men who give birth. Outside of reproductive biology, I don't believe there are important differences (no pink/blue brain). But our experiences related to reproductive biology do impact on us, on our brains and on our behaviour. Appreciating that in a 'spiritual' way is just a way of saying 'feeling connected'. I'm sorry if that makes you think of woo and you don't like it. Thanks to the trans movement (!), this side of 'being a woman' has entered the feminist conversation, and about time too imo.

Breastfeeding and vagina birth do far more than we currently understand. Look at the changes in CSection delivered babies immune systems that are altered by wiping babies with a swab from their mothers vagina. We can provide other options, improve options but we don’t currently or perhaps ever understand all the factors involved in biological processes.

The contraceptive pill - men thought yes sex no consequences no condoms. Men didn’t think that it would change women’s sexual behaviour in a way which meant women were not bound and beholden to them. Coercive reproduction became more difficult to achieve. DNA testing took away men’s ability to deny paternity. Caveat for the next bits being first world women. IVF means women can have children without having sex with a man. Women no longer lose their children to their ex husband if divorce. Women are not reliant on men deciding to provide food and shelter. Women have legal recourse for marital rape.

With all that is it really a surprise that abusive men want to find new waysto abuse women? If they can wrap it up as being progressive it’s a bonus.

The problem is that female biology is mostly seen as something to be fixed

Is it? By whom? My really heavy periods needed to be fixed but so did my husband's osteoporosis. There's nothing judgemental in fixing either.

So I think, in order to balance it, we need a bit of elevation

Each to their own but I really dislike the woo /Gaia/ earth mother/ sisterhood elevation of what is nothing more than a biological function shared with all female mammals.

Technology can free as much as oppress.

And technology can be taken away.

Without some kind of evolutionary jump, women will always be excluded in societies where contraception isn't freely available. The concept of 'trans humanism' freeing humanity depends on the idea that everyone can have equal access to resources.

Seems to me that transhumanism and all these attendant AI technologies are some of those gleaming white whooshy door SciFi ideas that sound rather intriguing for the possibility of freeing women from certain kinds of naturally occuring labour, but in the hands of neo-liberal capitalists become a new way to commodify female existence.

Gestate children in plastic bags with manipulated DNA and feed them artificial nutrition as good as breastmilk? Excellent. Frees up the drudge class from all that pregnancy and breastfeeding encumberance and means much less time off or consideration needed for the physical effects on the drudge class. They can be better workers, engineered to be infertile and therefore useful consequence-free sex providers. No periods to slow their work rate, either.

I mean, anything I can think of that would alter our biology at source, rather than changing society to accommodate the currently occuring biology of humans, seems as ripe for dystopian exploitation as can be.

Huxley is instructive. But like Orwell, not an instruction manual.

Women's bodies are only useful in a subservient role. If we take away the subservience with enforced equality, then we have to alter the body or remove it from the equation.

Nothing must be permitted to interfere with the march of progress, least of all women's nasty leaky bodies. Its become impossible to imagine we could arrange society in any other way.

The problem is that female biology is mostly seen as something to be fixed. So I think, in order to balance it, we need a bit of elevation.

In the long term, I want it to be neither elevated nor denigrated. Just to be. To bring things back to the OP, I think the language changes are adding to the denigration and putting us further from the balance.

I dislike feeling my biology is an inconvenience that needs a solution to fix it
I agree - it is what it is- bits of it might need a bit of fixing to work as nature intended.

Bfeeding for me was all about bonding not nutrition. Pg and childbirth were highly significant emotional times for me - not a fun experience like going to the pub, but a deeply transformational experience - almost spiritually bonding with all the generations of women before me who gave birth, and those giving birth today

For me that's as unengaging, unappealing, unrealistic and woo hoo as "female biology- ugh get it sorted"

Yes I'm with you Isay.

Miranda Yardley has a link on his website to an essay written about a world where gender was completely absent, but biology was very firmly recognised.

It's quite striking and I'm not sure I agree with all of it as it actually changes all language too (no no pronouns at all) and I don't think it's humanly possible, but it emphasises the importance of the female body for reproduction and the support that they need to be given in order to do so.

I dislike feeling my biology is an inconvenience that needs a solution to fix it. Bfeeding for me was all about bonding not nutrition. Pg and childbirth were highly significant emotional times for me - not a fun experience like going to the pub, but a deeply transformational experience - almost spiritually bonding with all the generations of women before me who gave birth, and those giving birth today.

It is of course possible for singletons and couples today to have no part of the reproductive process and raise healthy children. It doesn't happen in test tubes, it happens through adoption, surrogacy etc. Aren't we already - for some at least - at that point where the fair sex is marginalised from the messy process of procreation? Medicine, the law and the church have acted in concert to make that happen. Aren't we living in a real-life dystopia? How does feminism respond? If the world swallows the trans-pill, how will sexual preferences evolve?

I also have a view that the more young children know about and see breastfeeding, the less breasts are fetishised.

The fetishisation of which we see harming young girls as they either don't want them due to the negative attention they attract (trans men, non binary mastectomies) or males want them and invade female spaces.

Not you, Ariadne; it was Plan's post above. It's a sore spot with me that female biology is something that women must be freed from rather than something that can be accepted as normal as you say and accomodated as a normal process not an aberration.

Being devil's advocate as right now I'd love not to be feeding a teething toddler but can't be arsed to make the changes...The thing about breastmilk is that it isn't a constant; it changes according to biology.

I've even read somewhere the milk of mothers with boys is different to the milk of mothers with girls due to their biological differences.

It contains antibodies which can be affected by either the mother's immune system or the baby's as their spit triggers an immune response in mum.

The breasts are supposed to have evolved from the immune system.

It wouldn't be an equal replacement as bf is so much more than nutrition.

Also, you're more likely to cosleep if you breastfeed esp if for longer term. There's research by James MCKenna at Notre dame university on cosleeping positively impacting boys in particular (possibly undoing some of the 'man up' sex stereotype stuff) in terms of behaviour and ability to interact positively with peers at school.

This translates into young boys and then men who are more emotionally balanced. Less violent.

Of course, there could be many other factors at play and not just the breastfeeding and cosleeping, but if people think manufactured bm is a like for like "ok that's sorted that argument out," answer, and that it's ultimately feminist, I don't believe it's as straight forward as that in the long term.

So female biology is bad and wrong and worthless then? It does actually make women inferior? Which is why we need to be free from its chains? That sounds more dystopic to me

That isn't what I said. I loved being pregnant but if artificial breast milk had been available I'd have used it.

Female biology is what it is. It certainly isn't inferior or bad or worthless.

But on the other hand I don't elevate it the way it is praised and elevated on this board (all that "only women can grow new people/ only women can feed their babies- it's so awesome" stuff) It isn't awesome- it's just doing what every female mammal is designed to do.

This is why more girls need to be encouraged to code and get into tech.

Scroll down and look at the figures for boys v girls taking computing at gcse and alevel:

www.genderaction.co.uk/background

So female biology is bad and wrong and worthless then? It does actually make women inferior? Which is why we need to be free from its chains? That sounds more dystopic to me.

Yes, you’d think with four children that I liked being pregnant and nursing. I love children, but not what I have to go through to make them. Well nursing wasn’t too bad for me, a boring time sink but I hated being pregnant. From the morning sickness, to being fat and clumsy to the stretch marks and indigestion. The permanent changes to my body. Childbirth is the opposite of fun, an ordeal to get through but with real risk of death!

If I could have gestated my children in an artificial womb in a lab and then picked a newborn up on a scheduled birth day, then taken them home and me and DH could have both fed them lab grown breast milk. No time off work. Not juggling pregnancy and career. No being passed over for a great project, job, promotion because of sexist stigma against women of childbearing age. That would be a feminist utopia to me.

Well, on the other hand not having to be pregnant or nursing can free women from the last biological chains holding us back from equality

Whilst I loved being pregnant I'd have grabbed artificial breast milk with both hands if it had been available. Breast feeding was utterly vile- I'd have been delighted for my daughter to get the benefit of breast milk without my involvement. I'd have been happy to pass over any supposed personal benefit I might have missed out on as nursing was such a ghastly and unpleasant experience. I would have been very happy not to have been a lactating female mammal.

Well, on the other hand not having to be pregnant or nursing can free women from the last biological chains holding us back from equality.
Think, no gender pay gap due to a motherhood penalty.

Technology can free as much as oppress.

When things go right in families, family is always there as shelter of last resort and it’s what stands between the individual and the state, or the individual and the corpocracy.

We have seen increased atomisation in how we live but the family still exists. Sever reproduction from mothering, though, and that’s a death-blow to the family as an institution.

Those who benefit are those who’d prefer individuals have no shelter-of-last-resort and/or no buffer between the individual & the state or the individual & the corpocracy.

As a feminist, I am deeply suspicious when design is led by males and their agenda.

For me, ISIS was the epitome of a culture where women had zero say. A hi-tech version would be equally shit.