You remember Reddit Island, right? The utterly serious, unintentionally hilarious project in which a bunch of Redditors attempt to set up a Reddity miniature utopia on some remote island somewhere? They are still trying to find an island, and apparently that process is … not going so swimmingly.
As Adrian Chen of Gawker notes in a nice long piece on the project, a fortysomething IT guy from Virginia names Mark Wells has been telling prospective Reddit Islanders that he may have found the perfect place for them:
Wells, who uses the handle Citizenpolitician, explained in a series of increasingly breathless posts on Reddit Island that he’d been scoping out a tiny tropical splotch called Current Island. Just off the coast of Bahamian island of Eluthera, Current is sparsely inhabited, and could be a possible option for their settlement. He’d cold-called members of the local government about the possibility of having a few hundred internet nerds settle Current Island. And he had been met with a very promising response.
Or so Wells said. Trouble is — SPOILER ALERT — Chen himself got in touch with Theo Neilly, the Bahamian Member of Parlliament who Wells had said was “very interested” in the Reddit Island project. And Neilly had a rather different story to tell Chen:
Neilly was more than a little surprised when I told him this. He’d never spoken with or even received an email from Wells, he said. He had heard word of Reddit Island, but only because an acquaintance Wells had actually contacted forwarded him the email. … [E]veryone in Eluthera I spoke to was eager to distance themselves and anyone they knew from him the Reddit Island idea.
D’oh!
Wella, for his part, claims that Chen has mucked up a good thing by actually trying to check to see if anything Wells was saying was true.
When Chen contacted the Bahamians, after being asked not to be involved since we were at a delicate time trying to start a process of negotiations, his contact to the Bahamians, making the relationship public, removed all opportunity for any further communication with the Bahamians and I am afraid now that he has gone to the extent of mentioning them in his article, will suffer political fall out because of this. THis is extremely poor journalism and unfortunate not just for us but for those that wanted to find out more about what we had to offer and what could come of that.
This also puts us in a difficult situation because any further communications with other land owners and government representatives in other countries could become publicly abused as this relationship did and end all hopes for negotiating in good faith with those people. It means that going further will be difficult if we are to maintain transparency and be open to the group here because people like Chen will use it to distort and dismantle those efforts.
So, back to the drawing board, I guess. (The whole discussion of Chen’s article in the Reddit Island subreddit is hilarious, actually.)
Let me make a suggestion, guys: Don’t try to go it alone! Basically, what you’re talking about is forming a tiny civilization that will be essentially a bunch of dudes. In the past, you guys have treated the “sausage party” aspect of the project as a liability.
Instead, you should embrace it as a selling point. Team up with some of the fellas over in the Men’s Rights subreddit; many of them seem not to be fans of women at all.
Heck, some of the guys there are ALREADY TALKING ABOUT GETTING AN ISLAND:
MRA Island! Make it a reality.
In related news, a number of years back a bunch of Something Awful goons launched a similar island project. It involved an actual tropical island and everything. It seems to have fallen apart; it’s not clear (since I haven’t actually read anything about it beyond that blog post I linked) if there was any cannibalism involved.
Maybe they should call it Pen Island. [/cheap joke] [/3AM]
Fembot: That could end up with an unintentional subtext of “a man is incomplete without a woman.”
@fembot: There is a book like out there called “Spartan Planet” by A. Bertarm Chaundler. Good book but it could have been better
pillowinhell said
”And um⌠How many of these guys have built so much as a tool shed? Kept a garden large enough to preserve food (hell! Preserved food!), built a road by manual labour, set up a sanitation system, anything?
They do realize that many of the skill sets they need are traditionally feminine ones right?”
I think the island idea is dumb and unfeasible too, but this comment is total BS. Since when is building a tool shed and roads by manual labor or setting up a sanitation system a traditionally feminine skill? I guess they could use some traditionally feminine skills if they wanted some interior decorating done, but I doubt they’d want that.
If they hired a team of people to build infrastructure on the island, I seriously doubt there would be many women on that team if any at all. How many female construction workers do you see that do anything other than holding signs?
Balance: Canning and preserving food is. Cleaning is. Gardening is. Cooking is. Sewing clothes is. First aid and other basic medicine is.
The female planet/ male planet idea was also explored clumsily in the anime Vandread. It had an intersting premise, but it ended up becoming a boring “harem” show with crudely animated CGI mech fights.
What the heck, here’s the first episode, you can see some amusing anti-woman propoganda around 1:40, it’s not too different from some MRAGTOW screeds. The man planet also doesn’t seem like the nicest place…
Jonestown: well-known feminist paradise.
Ahhhhahaha, that discussion about their web site is hilarious. I set up a WordPress site for a friendâs animal sanctuary a couple of years ago and had the whole thing done in a few days. Four days, I think? Sheâs so untechy that she still isnât quite clear on what a URL is, but we got it done and sheâs been running it on her own just fine. These guys are so full of shit.
I love the idea that it will take an advanced programming genius to make a site with some pictures of islands and a PayPal button. Everything is so hard for the Galtian supermen.
Best quote from the article: so far the project has raised “$500 in real money, plus 73 bitcoins.”
@katz
Yes, certainly. Although some of the other men on the planet are happy living without women. Shouldn’t they be given a choice, though, instead of being segregated from women all of their lives? They are being kept in perpetual ignorance, based on a decision someone else made centuries ago (that women are bad). I think the entire novel could end up having a very “misandrist” subtext if the reader wanted to spin it that way. But a planet where women have been purposefully removed because they caused too many problems? It doesn’t get more anti-woman than that. But anyway, it’s science fiction. And I haven’t even written the damned thing.
If they hired a team of people to build infrastructure on the island, I seriously doubt there would be many women on that team if any at all. How many female construction workers do you see that do anything other than holding signs?
…NWO, is that you?
I’ve got a book on housewifery skills from the Victorian era, and it’s amazing how much of it would be at home in a survivalist handbook. Women kept “kitchen gardens” and orchards that were supposed to provide the family with most of its fruits and vegetables, raised and slaughtered chickens, made butter and cheese, baked bread from scratch, and jarred preserves for the winter. My favorite section is on cultivating your own yeast, because how else are you going to brew the family’s beer?
There’s also a lot on basic medical care and tending a sickbed; it’s easy to forget what a big part of people’s lives that was before modern medicine.
Off topic but apparently women outmedaled men in the top three countries: US, China and Russia. This despite having less medals to win. Source
These “live in a world without women” fantasies remind me of the following anime:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saber_Marionette – Saber Marionette: Men live on a planet of only men with female robots that run around and stuff. It’s considered weird to be sexually attracted to the robots, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandread- Vandread: men and women live on SEPARATE PLANETS and men think that women are actually monsters. A man ends up running into a spaceship full of women and hijinks ensue.
I wouldn’t be all that sad if horrible MRA MGTOW misogynists would remove themselves from the planet. There are plenty of decent men out there, after all, who are perfectly fine with living here on planet Reality.
@Reynardine,
Well, FWIW, Jim Jones apparently did claim to be a Marxist, and he had his people out canvassing for Harvey Milk at one point. According to Randy Shilts, Milk knew Jones was scary but accepted the help because…well, when you’re the first openly gay politician in the country, you take help wherever you can get it. Besides, Jones had helped other liberal San Francisco politicians, so Milk wasn’t beyond the pale in accepting Jones’ help at the time.
So, yeah, Jones could credibly claim to be a leftist–which does not in any way mean that other leftists approved of or were responsible for Jones’ horrible acts that later came to light.
Balance really shows his way of thinking when he assumes that the only people who can do traditionally female jobs are women. There are plenty of men that can do them, but probably few MRAs, since they have nothing but contempt for anything associated with women. And they have no clue how hard women work when they “just” stay home and raise kids. But your little utopia is going absolutely nowhere if you can’t grow and prepare food.
I am reading a book on brewing ale/beer in England from about 1300 to 1600. It went from being a completely female dominated industry to being a totally male dominated one in just about two hundred years.
What is traditional is generally probably not that traditional beyond a few centuries.
Wow Nanasha, I had no idea Cyber Marionette had such a creepy fembot plot. I always thought the character designs were hideous (even in the 90s), so I stayed away from it. Dodged a bullet there.
Oops, Saber Marionette. I like my title better.
fembot: Yeah, it’s silly of me to make criticisms of something that doesn’t even exist yet! Jussayin that if you did write it, that would be one thing you’d want to watch out for.
@katz
Yeah, I’m not sure how I could avoid that. I mean, I do think that for most people, having a partner to love and who loves them back is integral to happiness. ( I should point out that on this planet, men do not have romantic relationships with other men and they are celibate, though masturbation is treated as a normal ritual, like brushing your teeth) But I do understand that it’s ok if people don’t want a partner, and that is fine. So, I guess I don’t know how I could avoid the message “you need a woman to be happy,” when really the important point is that women deserve to exist. ? It’s confusing.
I hope the MGTOW jump at this great opportunity to live on a private island. It’s so easy, too! Here’s what to do:
Step 1: Watch Cast Away a few times to prepare yourself for the challenges of island living.
Step 2: Send your life savings to some guy on Reddit.
Step 3: Enjoy your tax free, woman free paradise!
*Disclaimer: This plan does not account for how you will get food, fresh water, medical care, or shelter on your island paradise. Hopefully, these insignificant details will work themselves out.
At least the MGTOw talking about an tree- sorry, island-house are finally discussing going their own way, rather than *just* the evils of women.
@fembot
Is it integral to the plot that they fall in love?
@Molly
I guess not. But they do have sex. And I’m a big fan of love stories, though, provided they are well written and not some Nicholas Sparks crap. I guess I’m a romantic đ
Just out of curiosity, what don’t you like about the love part?
fembot:
Hmm. In what you’re describing, I’d say the primary dystopic feature is the no-relationships aspect, not the no-women aspect; you could write an interesting story around “no sex, no dating, no marriage, no families” without the gender-segregation part at all.
Maybe there could be a gay couple that also want to run away so that they can get married, too (star-crossed same-sex lovers would, after all, be way more common than heterosexual lovers of any variety). Or, if the focus is on womens’ right to exist, maybe there could be focus on them and the interaction, such as it is, between them and the male planet. Are the men waging a war to eradicate them, like in The Female Man? Is there a big government effort to suppress knowledge of their existence?
(I’d personally be inclined to not make it a romantic relationship and just have them become friends and the guy be interested in joining her culture just because he finds her interesting and he’s intrigued by the greater diversity of her culture, but that’s just more my style, not the correct/only tack to take.)
This. Culturally, all traces of women are gone. The men on the planet do not know that the human species has women. The woman, however, is from an Earth like planet where the different genders all mix.
I feel like this has been explored a lot, already, (Logan’s Run, Brave New World, The Giver, etc.) The point is that the men on this planet have radically altered nature, because they had become so misogynistic they honestly thought they were saving humanity by getting rid of women. But the sex drive is still present in these men, they just channel it or suppress it. I guess some men would still be gay, but since it’s forbidden, they can’t be together openly. Or maybe they take pills that destroy all sexual/romantic/emotional impulse. Maybe when the woman meets the man, she tells him about sex, and convinces him to stop taking the pills so he begins to feel attraction to her.
I guess it could also be possible that when the men finally do see a woman, they are repulsed rather than attracted to her, because she is so foreign to them.
Fembot: That also reminds me of a plot in one episode of the very strange sci-fi show Lexx. There are four, er, people flying around in the galaxy on the most powerful warship ever, the Lexx. There’s Stan, who’s the most un-attractive man in the universe. Zev, a traditionally hot woman who once had her brain operated on making her constantly horny. Kai, who’s a zombie, and a little robot head that’s lost its body and is in love with Zev. A lot of the eps are driven by Zev’s and Stan’s quest to get laid. They can’t fuck each other, because Stan is the only male in the universe that doesn’t turn Zev on. Zev is always trying to get it on with Kai, but he can’t have sex due to being a zombie. Stan’s inability to get laid anywhere is due to him being so incredibly unattractive, while Zev just has terribly bad luck all the time and continuously bumps into guys who wants to save sex for marriage, or are only interested in stealing the awesome spaceship, or something else is gonna get in the way at the last minute when she’s gonna get it on with someone.
Anyway. In one ep they arrive at a male-only planet that was founded by this real misogynist. Most of the men, however, grew up there and simply don’t know that women exist. Once a year they have a traditional orgy when all the men go together and bang each other. When the crew of Lexx arrives, it turns out that only ONE man in the group was naturally gay. Everyone else goes completely gaga over Zev and she pretty much bangs the entire society. Mr Misogynist goes all foamy at the mouth and tries to think of ways to get rid of this terrible female. He murders one of the men of the planet and tries to frame the crew of Lexx for it. I don’t remember exactly how the story goes since it was a long time since I watched it, but somehow his scheme is revealed and he then blows up the entire planet (although our heroes escape).