The man behind The Black Pill blog – formerly known as Omega Virgin Revolt – would like to go his own way, he really would. But he’s been feeling a bit stymied on that front, because no matter where on earth he might go, it doesn’t seem far enough away for him.
In a recent post, he looked at some of the solutions that have been suggested for discerning Men Going Their Own Way like himself, and found them all a bit wanting.
Becoming an expat?
I have been sympathetic to the idea of expating, but I haven’t really seen its value. Most men who do it think they can find a different type of woman outside of the US or outside of Western countries. While that may appear to be the case for now, women are the same everywhere … Wherever you go, there you are in a misandrist nation and culture.
What about going somewhere where there aren’t any women – or men – at all? Still not good enough.
Even more radical expating ideas like seasteading, cities in Antarctica, etc. still are too limited. It’s too easy to travel to anyplace on Earth so such places can’t be used to escape women and manginas.
So Mr. Black Pill decides to look beyond the confines of this puny planet.
[W]e have to look to space to escape women and manginas.
But not even a one-way trip to Mars will get Mr. Pill far enough away from his earthly tormenters.
Even then the Moon, Mars, and anywhere else in the solar system probably still won’t be enough (although they too can be used as stepping stones for further expating/escape). We need to look to other star systems and beyond.
Mr. Pill has his eye on one star system in particular:
We need to look towards a place like the Tau Ceti star system. Places like that are where we can develop a civilization completely free from matriarchy.
Hmm. Tau Ceti is a sun-like-star only 12 light years away, and one of its planets may lie in what scientists describe as the “habitable zone” — neither too near or too far from Tau Ceti to support life. That’s the good news. The bad news? Well, the planet in the “habitable zone” has five times the mass of earth. (Not a good planet for basketball. And you can forget about getting help from friends when you move.) Oh, and it’s being pretty much constantly battered by meteorites from the giant cloud of space debris that orbits Tau Ceti.
But no worries! Mr. Pill is confident that we can work out these little kinks.
While the planets around Tau Ceti may not be ideal for us, this isn’t a problem. Terraforming will take care of some of it. The rest can be handled by genetic engineering and/or becoming cyborgs. This is a good thing because we need to remove genetics that predispose us to be manginas anyway so we might as well make more changes while we’re at it.
Could we have tails too? I’ve always wanted a tail.
You may think this is some far off future that you will never see in your lifetime. While it will be a long time before there’s an exodus to another start system like Tau Ceti, other parts of this vision are already in progress. For example, the development of cyborgs in primitive form is proliferating in areas such as finance.
It’s true. Soon all bankers will look like this:
Mr. Pill ends on a hopeful note:
While no one is going to be getting on a spaceship to another star system tomorrow, this is a vision we can realize. …
Just as our ancestors had to choose to leave the Great Rift Valley a long time ago to find a better life, we must do the same on a larger level. It’s going to take a long time and a lot of work, but we must do it. It’s the only way to build a better human civilization.
There’s really only one way this plan could fail, and that’s if Mr. Pill’s counterparts arrive at the Tau Ceti system a couple of hundred years from now only to discover its habitable planet already inhabited.
By these gals.
Or maybe these, with a scantily clad mangina in tow:
Looks like Aitch is right. The person in the silver shirt is a man named Trent.
Here’s Riker trying to put the natives at their ease.
Airdate January 25, 1988. I wasn’t yet 9 years old.
The last image is indeed from ST:TNG. It was an episode which featured a matriarchal society, based on (wait for it) evo-psych! The women were larger and stronger than the men, and so assumed political control, too. The two women were high ranking government types, and the man was a PA type (and sex toy, though that was more implied than openly stated). The conflict with the Enterprise crew came from some Feds whose ship had crashed on the planet some years before. Somehow, all the crash survivors were men (IIRC). They were stuck on the planet, and some of them fell in love with and then married local women. Then, they started supporting a guerilla movement to overthrow the matriarchy (the brunette’s hubby was one of the ring-leaders). The Enterprise was called in to get the trouble making aliens and take them home, but, when Picard et al found them, they didn’t want to leave, because LOVE.
I read it as social commentary about the evils of patriarchy, but I was a teenager at the time, so might have misinterpreted. Also, I don’t remember exactly how the episode ended, as the struggle was more interesting to me than the out come. Hope that helped!
Oops! Ninja’d! Late to the thread, again.
Permanent concussion from all the hard chairs, perhaps?
Sadly, I don’t think Trent is gender non conforming in the context of the episode. Angel One is a planet ruled by women. It’s fairly heavy-handed gender-role-reversal IMO.
The only reason I can think of why the men get plunging necklines is because the show-runners thought the role-reversal meant dressing men like women dress here-and-now. It doesn’t seem very female-gaze-y to me.
Someone take my hyphen key away from me.
Thanks guys! I was really curious, and y’all have totally answered all my questions. I knew I could count on you!
RE: Falconer
Yeah, I was a little disappointed in that, I thought it was maybe a case of a society where everyone was women, regardless of what bodies they had. (Like the Finder comic.) But I can live with the real answer.
Not to worry, your explanation of the ep was an extra bonus and made more sense than my link. 🙂
Nope, your link was better! I had forgotten about the secondary plot.
@grumpyoldnurse:
I’m not surprised, it sounds like the B plot was eminently forgettable.
Actually, for some snark-tastic fun, here’s Wil Wheaton reviewing that episode (!)
http://www.aoltv.com/2008/03/28/star-trek-the-next-generation-angel-one/
Snerk!! I really, really like Wil Wheaton. Or, at least, the image of him that I have in my head based on that review and various other non-personal contact stuff I’ve seen about him.
Wahl, hi and welcome! Are we really getting comments from McMurdo? THAT IS SO COOL. Have a Welcome Package!
leftwingfox, that review was a hoot! Especially the bits about Tasha and Troi’s reactions to Riker’s twink-suit.
::goes off to find pics of episode::
Now I’m reminded of the TNG episode where Riker romanced a sexless alien who nevertheless identified herself as a woman. Interesting premise that could’ve made for a great pro-LGBT (sorry if I’m missing anything) message, but they mucked it up pretty badly.
One, all of the alien’s species were played played by woman. Not a bad idea in itself but the effort put into making them seem biologically sexless basically amounted to giving them all bowlcuts and generally looking like offensive lesbian stereotypes. Two, in an episode that constantly talked about the sexual interactions between humanish beings, not once did the enlightened 24th century characters mention that hey, sometimes people are attracted to others of the same sex, or that even among humans some people aren’t happy with their birth sex.
This has been a major oversight in the Star Trek franchise IMO, but I always assumed it had more to do with the networks than with Rodenberry’s views (he did once say he thought homosexuality was a disease, but he later came around and apologized for having thought that way). I know they tried to hint at it, as in the episode you mentioned, or a later (I want to say DS9) episode that used an alien disease as a metaphor for AIDS. I like to think that if Trek were on now it’d have plenty of gay and possibly non-binary-gendered characters.
As for the episode David used in the OP: yeah, it was really heavy-handed, but that’s Star Trek for you. It’s all heavy-handed. If folks are interested in a slightly more serious and well-thought-out inversion of sexism, there’s a book called “Egalia’s Daughters” that you might want to check out.
I suppose in an enlightened 24th century technology might allow transsexual people to transition from the genetic level up and be so routine nobody brings it up.
Anyone who mentions Profit and Lace will be sent to work in Neelix’s kitchen.
Am I alone in seeing a teensy weensy technical problem with making a very long interstellar voyage and then maybe spending centuries terraforming a planet – without any women? Oh yeah, cyborgs and genetic manipulation. Except if you can be a cyborg, why terraform? My, isn’t that nice fresh chlorine atmosphere refreshing today? If you can genetically manipulate, maybe they can create non-sentient females, like Larry Niven’s Kzin.