By David Futrelle
The misogynistic doofuses who call themselves Men Going Their Own Way have some, well, intriguing thoughts about human biology.
Consider this proposal from a MGTOW Redditor called omino23, who thinks that human wombs could be used for much more than just making babies.
Yeah, ladies, stop bogarting all the wombs! We want to make some kickass iPhones! And maybe some awesome video game consoles that sort of might be alive, like the one from David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ:
(Note: Not all women have wombs and not everyone with a womb is a woman, not that this really seems to be a consideration to omoino23.)
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@ Snowberry:
…things can get pretty stupid if the person making them believes that they’re extra super objective masters of logick.
I particularly appreciate your archly pretentious spelling of “logick” to parallel Aleister Crowley’s “magick”; it’s probably something that the Scientific People from The Stars My Destination prided themselves on mastering.
(A fun cultural experiment: cosplay a classic and visually distinctive literary SF character from a work that has never been adapted to video media, and see if anyone recognizes who you’re supposed to be. I mention this after having sported Gully Foyle’s iconic facial tattooing at a Halloween party in the early 80’s without anyone getting the reference; to be fair, this took place at the sort of punk nightclub where “NOMAD” lipsticked on one’s face would fall right into context as a style statement.
Molly Millions from Neuromancer would be another good choice for the purpose–and no, the film Johnny Mnemonic doesn’t count as an adaptation. )
You could have a “3D printer” as advanced as a woman’s womb without a woman.
It’s called “any other mammal on earth”.
The things a human womb does during pregnancy are no more spectacular than the work done by the womb of a goat, a bear or porcupine.
No a kangaroo, though. Marsupial wombs are half-assed.
@ full metal ox
It would be so cool if you could use make up that only showed up when you were emotional!
“Stop! Asking me! Who I’m meant to be!!!….Oh, there you go.”
@ Fenton
I like platypuses. They produce both eggs and milk. They’re basically living custard machines.
Or whatever it is you call a field goal, a missed field goal, an interception and nine punts….
Full disclosure, I didn’t watch it, put I perused the write ups this morning… the phrase “worst ever” was traded freely….
They’re perfectly adequate nonetheless, as marsupials are born half-done!
I would totally print iPhones and game consoles with my 3d uterus!!
Why have we never thought of this before? This is actually a grand idea.
Those of us with uterine printers could mass market the shit out of all our awesome new tech and totally take over the world and claim it for all women (regardless of womb-bearing status).
Oh right, we are supposed to fight for gender equality, too. I guess we could do that first. If we must.
I’m not convinced that these men are making a good enough argument for why we should rescue them from their supposedly threatened existence, though.
For starters, they should smile more. Maybe they’d look pretty if they smiled.
Leaving aside most of the staggering wrongness of this question, what the hell kind of logic is “hey, this one thing is capable of performing a very complicated task! I bet it will be able to complete other, utterly unrelated but also extremely complicated tasks as well!”
It’s like going “hey my computer is capable of performing three thousand million tasks/calculations per second, clearly it should be able to cook me a sixteen-course dinner, too!”
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
Guinea Piglets are born 100% done. They feed themselves solid pellet food right out the gate. Clearly the Guinea womb is advanced—what a shame they’re only big enough to 3D print out microchips and such.
I don’t know what y’all are talking about.
Obvs first you 3-D print your house, then your couch, then your bon-bons.
After that what’s the point?
Clearly only men with uteruses will be 3D printing iPhones.
@Crip Dyke
You just made me realize that I’m a man with a uterus.
Existential crisis: loading….
Aren’t the Tleilaxu kind of the bad guys?
I love the idea of using “logick” for deeply flawed thinking. or maybe “Logick TM”.
I mean stuff like, “Let’s kill and enslave everyone to get rid of the psychopaths” or “Men can’t be expected to control themselves any better than toddlers and should therefore be in charge of everything.”
I love the “just as soon as we can completely master making DNA do whatever we want it to… then we’ll definitely be able to create our i-pod on demand scifi nightmare, remove the uterus-havers sole reason for existence and get rid of the womenz…”
Yes, well, until then, hey.
As soon as this pub closes
The Revolution starts
Um… it’s been 20+ years since I’ve read the Dune series… but wasn’t it eventually revealed that the axolotl tanks actually Tleilaxu women?
Even the group these idiots are aspiring to be couldn’t get rid of the women, they just enslaved them.
@Weird Eddie:
The first Sunday in February is always a significant calendar point for me, as The Week Avocados, Pop, and Snack Nuts Go On Sale. (This year, immediately following came The Week Soy Sauce, Tofu, and Gingerroot Go On Sale. I follow a personak retail foraging calendar as attentively as a bear awaits the salmon run.)
I’m afraid I missed the big colonial sheepherding re-enactment in Atlanta–that’s what Patriots and Rams would’ve been doing at a massive public gathering, right?
@Citerior Motive
Arguably the greatest villains in the Dune universe sea of villains.
And yet… just reflecting on my earlier post proclaiming how despised the Tleilaxu were… I think that the MGTOWs, much like incels have made peace with the fact that they are history’s villains and actually relish that status. They like to think of themselves as having some kind of “speaking truth to power” knowledge and the way they’re reviled is the exact reaction they’re looking for.
What actually makes me a tad disturbed is that anybody read the Dune novels and thought “Wow, this is the future I want for humanity!” As seemingly AI-phobic as Herbert’s world is, the Butlerian Jihad ultimately left humanity mired in the same feudalism of the middle ages and literally the only path for the species to survive was to conduct bloody holy wars for a generation, followed by millennia of an oppressive regime meant to force humanity apart into the cosmos.
It’s hardly a humanist work. If anything, its theme is “change for the good of the species, even if you have to stack it upon the corpses of billions.” And that’s not even getting into the depiction of women in the work. Seriously, the Honored Matres are like the very man-hating feminist hordes that these guys cook up in their fever dreams, only turned up to 11 with martial prowess and bizarre sexual sadism. I always wondered whether or not Herbert was playing out some kind Dali-esque anxiety/fantasy between them and the Bene Gesserit, but we’ll never really know.
Needless to say, as much as Herbert’s work fascinates me, I don’t exactly find myself revisiting it for a lark. Except the Lynch movie, that one is just goofy enough to be fun.
David Brin had a short story about wombs being used to create useful technological products; however he wasn’t impressed with the baby but rather the placenta – the products in question were biological filters.
Also, the womb-havers were in charge of what they made and what they sold it for, and dudes were only tangentially related to the main storyline so already 1000% more sensible than miggies.
I don’t recall the name of the story, I think it’s in his short story collection, Otherness.
Weirdly, I could never get into the Dune series. 12-y-o me liked the Lynch movie but mainly because it had Sting in hotpants. Also the sandworms were pretty neat, I guess.
All this is making me want to make something with a 3D printer, but I don’t have one, so I guess tonight’s after-dinner plans involve going through the kitchen drawers to see if I still have any shrinky-dink plastic.
@Katamount : they don’t want to be the villain or the good people. They want to be the awesome one.
Which is why it’s probably more effective to remind them that the Tleilaxu, more than villain, are pathetic, ineffective losers with delusions of grandeur.
If I wanted to be a villain in Dune, I would be the God Emperor. Barring that, since it’s a bit too self-aggrandizing, I would settle at least on the Harkonnen. They are inefficient slavers who consistently undervalue cooperation and goodwill, but at least they are focused on the task, and can actually suceed from time to time.
Though hardly relevant outside of Finland, one of them even has an English Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna-Leena_H%C3%A4rk%C3%B6nen
(Reportedly, the name Harkonnen was indeed based on a Finnish surname someone saw in a California phone book)
While we’re talking weird sci-fi, and since Dune has already been mentioned, I’ll just throw in Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden, a kinda-maybe dystopian novel which features women being paid to grow all sorts of artifacts in their re-nano-engineered “3D printers”.
That’s exactly what I thought.
To echo @NelC, speaking of weird SF, I recently finished reading Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Now that was weird, stylistically at least, in the way Russ shifts the viewpoint of who is telling the story at any given point in the novel. It’s about 4 women from different parallel universes/ timelines that begin to intersect: one from one similar to our own and who is basically an author surrogate for Russ herself; one where the Great Depression never ended; one from a future Earth called “Whileaway” where all the men were killed by a plague and women reproduce by ova fusion; and one from an Earth where the “war of the sexes” (the novel is pretty cisnormative as you’d imagine, given when it was written, 1970) has become an actual war. I found it a bit exhausting to read, to be honest, because of the viewpoint shifts, but it’s absolutely bursting with ideas. And when Russ goes on a rant about certain things, she’s so on the money it’s scary.
(The novel also contains an example of a male sexbot, something that would probably cause the MRAs to clutch their pearls and summon the fainting couches, though it’s more like a replicant out of Blade Runner than a robot: basically, it’s a male clone grown without any higher brain functions. Jael, its owner from the “war of the sexes” timeline, is amused how squicked out by it the other women are…)
Oddly enough, that was the same age I read Dune.
I truly loved the first book, but had to really force myself to finish Dune Messiah, and then gave up on Children of Dune about a third of the way in; I’ve been told by a couple of people that I would probably like God Emperor of Dune, but at this point I’ve picked up enough of the plot through pop-cultural osmosis that I don’t have much interest.
@Cat Mara
Have you read Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep? It sort of qualifies as weird SF. But I’d say the weirdest SF novel I’ve read is Radix by A. A. Attanasio.
And the weirdest science fiction I ever read was a short story by James Tiptree Jr., a first-person account of a deeply alien mating process that gets interrupted by an invasion of disgusting otherworldly horrors that we later figure out are probably humans. It was in an anthology, and I’ve never been able to remember the name of the story or find it again. It did, however, spawn a lifelong respect and awe for Ms. Sheldon’s abilities as a writer, which has been reinforced by every single thing of hers that I’ve ever read. She was a literary genius of the highest caliber.