Anyone want to talk real life feminist dystopias with me?

[wakemewhenitsallover]

There's currently an assault on language that relates words describing women to reproductive functions and to motherhood.

So we've had women and mothers described as "cervix havers", "birthing parents" , "mentruators", "gestators" etc.

Why? Who does the benefit in the long term?

Let's assume for a moment, that this is very deliberate and funded by a group of people with clear aims in mind.

If so, what would those aims be?

Getting male sexual fetishes validated and legitimised.

Putting uppity women and their pesky rights back in their box.

Providing a huge avenue of entertainment for sociopaths. We are such great supply - look at the amount of time and energy we spend pointing out the patently obvious to gaslighting bastards.

The language thing tests how much control you've got over ordinary people because if you can get basic untruths like 'men can be women' accepted, you know your power is in the ascendant and you can push forward with your agenda.

The trans concept has only exploded in an environment of women's rights. No coincidence. How many men would bother (or did bother) claiming to be a woman in a culture in which women had few or no rights? (With exceptions such as the even worse social cost of being gay in Iran).

At base it's the pursuit of power. As George Orwell describes in 1984.

Like, for example, what if the end goal of many of the corporates / people who are funding trans ideology is transhumanism?

e.g. see Martine Rothblatt - trans rights activist, transwoman and philanthropist - the world's richest "women". Martine has written a book called From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifestoon the Freedom-Form

Martine is aiming for inventing immortality. (Martine also has an AI robot, Bina, based on Martine's actual wife).

It's illegal in most countries to clone humans or create designer babies. It must be very inconvenient for those who want to make use of such technologies legally. But if public opinion changed on that, then maybe the laws could be changed. Perhaps they've identified that attachment to the concept of motherhood is a barrier to acceptance, so they're waging war on it?

Babies born without mothers is not science fiction but the future, suggest scientists

Antibles I wonder if it's really about trans people at all, in the long term?

I wonder if something deeper is going on here and if trans ideology is just the stepping stone....

I remember reading something in Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman about artificial women - sex robots and figures in porn, I think it meant - meaning that men could do away with real, messy, difficult women. You could argue that very feminine transwomen could fulfil this function. All the fun feminine bits of "womanhood" without the boring stuff like pregnancy and periods. Women then get reduced to "gestators" and can be safely ignored.

Article this week:

Homegrown company looks to create breast milk without the need for mothers

SINGAPORE — A new start-up in town is eyeing a slice of the multi-billion dollar infant milk formula industry, by making their own breast milk — no nursing moms needed.

Homegrown start-up Turtletree Labs has found a way to generate milk from stem cells, which it says no other company in the world has done before.

The process, which is pending patent, can produce the milk of any mammal.

Speaking to TODAY on Monday (Dec 23) at its lab at Block 79 along Ayer Rajah Crescent —a space by Agency for Science, Technology and Research (AStar) for budding start-ups —Mr Max Rye, the chief technology officer at the company, said it is taking aim at the infant milk formula industry, which is currently valued at US$45 billion.*

According to market research consultancy Fortune Business Insights, this figure is expected to more than double by 2026.

It immediately reduces you to nothing but your biological function. No longer a whole person, a human being, a character with a range of purposeful functions in society. Just a breeder, on a par with a heffer or a bitch made to breed pedigree dogs before being put out to pasture. It is grossly reductive. And if that is all you are, then rights are unnecessary, respect is unnecessary etc. It's a great shortcut to undoing the fragile progress feminism has made in the last forty years.

For anyone interested in transhumanism - it's the idea that the next stage of human evolution will be self-directed, using technologies that we've developed. So, that could be through the creation of "designer" babies (genetically modified humans, basically). And/or through the merging of humans and technology (cyborgs).

Many people in the tech industries (including some with significant resources) take these ideas seriously and are working towards them.

I'm not quite sure of the relevance of AI per se but rather as a tool to control people, which of course it has huge potential to be. Orwell said that it comes down to the basic desire for power, for power's sake.

Any concept or tool that helps to mix people up and weaken them will do if that's your goal. So I suppose yes, AI, undermining the concept of motherhood and family, replacing the reality of sex with the ideology of gender, undermining dominant cultures via identity politics and physically through mass immigration and imposed multiculturalism which was discussed on another thread. I suppose it all works to destabilise existing power structures at various levels.

Even if ultimately it's just to sell people more stuff rather than a Bond villain wanting to take over the world, the effects may be very disturbing.

thesmallclanger your post reminds me of Lenny Kravitz's (very feminist I thought) song Black Velveteen on just that subject. Including the immortal lyrics "Black Velveteen's cunt smells like strawberry kittens"...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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
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"

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.

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.