More on "reduction to violence"

[Cyborg Girl]

by someone more qualified to comment on it:

http://thebaffler.com/blog/fear-feminis ... urie-penny

This doesn't dwell for long on the notion, but gets the gist, and how it fits into sexism. Men are generally better at violence than women; violence is more socially important than anything else; therefore, men are more socially important than women. Or something like that. The base assumptions are stupid, but who cares, It's Tradition.

(Likewise, the thing where feminism and femaleness is conflated with emotion and anti-science, and emotion and science/logic are considered incompatible opposites... And pardon me, I need to spend a pleasant few minutes vigorously banging my head on my desk.)

But. I'm much less optimistic than Penny about a feminist future actually happening. Which is why I have this huge, huge bug about maintaining notions of women's rights even through complete social collapse, right up there with things like the germ theory of disease. The bulk of human history shows that survival is a lot easier than respecting women.

[Cyborg Girl]

BTW, an aside. Penny mentions Octavia Butler, so I'm just going to put something out there... Octavia Butler's entire shtick was, basically, biological determinism. Almost all her stories have biology, rather than society, exerting the strongest influence on human behavior.

But the alt-right hates her work, and her, anyway. Probably because the societies that she comes up with, from those biologically deterministic assumptions, are not congruent with white supremacists' power-trip fantasies.

Biological ideas about behavior seem to get a bad rap, but bigots only like biology when they can cherry-pick it. The problem is the bigots, not the biology.

[SciFiFisher]

There are some SCIFI stories that don't actually envision a post-apocalypse society that is solely based on Men Rule OR Women Rule and they SCREW IT UP anyway.

But, I get what the writer is trying to say. She probably could have said it using about 2000 words less. Apparently no one told her that really long blog posts rarely get read completely. I will admit I did a fair bit of skimming.

And for the record there is a LOT of Post Apocalyptic SCIFI that does envision some extremes in the social order after the collapse of the "Mostly White Privileged Capitalist World Order".

I recall one story that postulated People of Really Dark Color being the dominant race. Nuclear winter created a real shortage of high quality protein sources and plant life just wasn't what it used to be. Come to find out if you keep in breeding white people and don't teach them to speak much they taste just a lot like pork.

hmmmm.... Maybe this does explain the KKK. Those poor boys is a skeered of being et.

She does get it mostly right that many writers do default to postulating a type of de-evolution or skewed evolution in the social and cultural norms that may occur in the future for various reasons. I think writers, especially fiction writers, are almost obligated to hold up a mirror to us that often distorts, magnifies, or reveals a very dark side of the human psyche. The idea being that when confronted with our own internal darkness we will reject it and embrace a higher moral ground.