24 August 2012

Elevatorspacegate

A number of my women friends online have been called gender traitors over the last year or so.  One was sent a tweet yesterday inviting her to kill herself. What does it mean? The word traitor means to betray a trust or a cause or a principle or, apparently, a gender. 

Allegiance to, whatever it is - a country, a cause, a friend, is taken as a given, unquestionable, invioble; any deviation from the expected loyalty is seen as  unthinkable, as incomprehensible, as traitorous, and deserving of punishment.

So, what does the term 'gender traitor' mean?
Obviously, it means that you have somehow betrayed women, as women. How have you done that? 

Some aliens arrive at earth in an elevator. They stop short of the ground floor....just in case. They observe that the planet is dominated by a single species who reproduce sexually. This is interesting to them, because they don't.  They observe that natural and sexual selection has produced marked physical and psychological differences in the make up of each sex. They observe that having, (so far), successfully negotiated the survival imperative, the species has advanced to form complex cultures with a notable degree of variance.  They also note that a feature of this rapid cultural development includes a considerable increase in tension between the two sexes of the species, different factions of which seem to concentrate on hating one another.

'They must have radically different interests,' thinks the alien anthropologist.

'Beyond survival,' says the capt 'most species take what they can get...we're no different, we just don't have the complication of sex, whereas their biology produces obvious conflicts of interest.'

'Do you mean that each sex somehow sees itself as a victim of the other in this conflict?'

'Exactly so....so, what they need, (instead of beating the shit out of each other), is something sufficiently threatening to their survival to unite them.'

'Let's invade then.'

'Righteeoh. Fancy a coffee?'

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