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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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

Flora wins the Internet today 🌟

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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/

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

‘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?

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.