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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@Gaebolga:
I managed to get through all the Dune books but I found them a chore by the end of it. tbh, I think Hebert should have called it a day after the first one.
My favourite novels of Herbert’s are not from the Dune sequence but the less well-known “Bureau of Sabotage” ones, Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment. They’re a lot shorter for a start! They’re set in a universe with a Federation-type setup called the ConSentiency. The protagonist of both novels, Jorj McKie, is an agent of the titular Bureau of Sabotage, which exists to ensure that the wheels of government turn at just the right speed– to them, reckless government enabled by technology is every bit as dangerous as hidebound bureaucracy to the interests of sentient life. The main difference between them and the Dune novels is the aliens: whereas there are hardly any alien species mentioned in the Dune universe apart from the non-sentient sandworm, it’s like Herbert was in competition with himself to stuff as many bizarre sentient species into these novels as he could manage: the amphibian Gowachin whose legal system incorporates a “court-arena” where one can manoeuvre the participants into ritual combat; the PanSpechi who have a single consciousness but five bodies, only one of which is active at any time (what happens to the other four? No-one knows– and the PanSpechi get really testy if you ask!); or the Caleban, who work the “jumpdoor” system that binds the ConSentiency worlds together and whose minds are utterly incomprehensible to anyone else’s (what the Caleban are is the plot point of Whipping Star). They definitely fall into the category of “weird SF”.
Yes, and I liked it a lot. It’s been a while since I read it, though, I must dig it out again.
I’ve not read that but I do have a Cthulhu Mythos short story by him in a collection that’s very good.
James Tiptree, Jr./ Alice Sheldon was a goddess. Everything of hers that I’ve ever read has touched me deeply. She had a gift for seeing the cruelty in the human condition that no other SF writer had… how she could take some hoary old pulp sci-fi trope and show you the pain and the horror that was hiding in plain sight in it all along and twist it and twist it until you could barely continue reading what she wrote. A genius, like you say.
Yeah… somehow I doubt DNA could ever produce an object that lacks DNA.
@Cat Mara:
Speaking as someone who read Dune back when I was about twelve… I’m right with you. The ConSentiency/BuSab stories are far better, and I wish they were better known. Admittedly, at least one of the early short stories reads like Herbert was trying to channel Laumer’s ‘Retief’ character.
(I started reading Fantasy/SF early… one of the advantages of having a father with a subscription to Isaac Asimov’s SF magazine and a mother who wanted to encourage reading. One of my friends at school got me to read Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes back when I was eleven. Now that was a trip.
And yes, Tiptree/Sheldon was amazing in her grasp on how people think. And very good at using that to twist the knife just a little deeper. Not surprising from someone who did military intelligence work.
Would mgtows be classified as guys with womb envy/womb obsession? Hate the woman, but envious that some of them can have babies? It’s always makes my skin crawl when they talk about womens reproductive system like that in general.
@tohka
That would be the most polite classification anyone could prescribe, one that befits their white manbaby status.
But I have a feeling they would take it way too seriously and begin using it as an excuse for everything…as though it’s perfectly understandable and legitimate to hate or obsess over anyone else’s genitals, because they’re the victims here!
I’ve never read any of the Dune books, but having immersed myself in fantasy and Sci Fi from a young age I have picked up the things in the ether, as it were, about Dune. Even I know the Tleilaxu are the bad guys. You don’t want to be like them at all, MIGTOWs, not if you want any credibility.
Umm… The womb is kind of just a stretchy bag. The instructions for building the baby come from it’s DNA. It’s own cells do all the replicating. The womb provide s a safe place and the raw materials but it’s no a printer. This guy needs to take a biology class.
Or maybe the MGTOWs secretly dream of a society like the Kzin. The Heroes (alpha males) rule over all, while all the females were genetically engineered to be sub-sapient. In essence the MGTOW dream society.
Except that pretty much the only males allowed to breed are the Heroes and their loyal retainers, neither of which would describe these guys at all.
Plus the fact that there are some few pockets of Kzin settlements that were established by one of the more advanced races before the engineered sub-sapients took hold. Not to mention the throwbacks among the engineered who are biding their time until they can be free again.
So maybe the MGTOW not-a-dream society once it’s examined a bit closer.
(As an aside, are the renamed Kzin part of the online Star Trek game? Does anyone know off the top of their heads?)
Bug Martini and XKCD covered this topic too, but the difference is that Bug Martini and XKCD are funny.