Limiting Men

The Age of Limits conference that took place over Memorial Day weekend has sparked quite a bit of buzz, especially around gender issues.

I have two thoughts about it.

One is the essential difference between collapsetarians and doomers.

Collapsetarians think they will survive – they believe there will be another human bottleneck event after civilization collapses – and they are determined to survive it by any means necessary.

This is partly the sticking point.

If collapse aware people – who presumably have the intellectual capacity to dig into how and why we got here (on the brink of collapse) in the first place want to take dominion and patriarchy with them through the bottleneck – well, to the rest of us, that seems pretty fucked up.

But they appear to be very ready to turn women into reproductive factories, to ensure that biology is destiny.

Doomers believe that human extinction (along with 99.9% of everything else alive) is “baked in” to the total collapse equation.

Between climate change, methane release, ozone, ocean acidification, and dwindling resources on a finite planet, the roll of the dice for homo sapiens – cause of the above – appears to be snake eyes.

Doomers call the belief in human survival of collapse “hopium”. Once the grids go down all over the world, the nuclear power plants all go poof!

We may “survive” that for a while, but we’re not going to be feeling too good. Radiation sickness may put a little dent in physical prowess. It’s hard to be menacing when you’re puking your guts out.

Sure, cultural difference may explain why there wasn’t rampant violence in Nagasaki or Hiroshima after those atomic events. But pain and sickness and shock had to have been in the mix, as well.

For doomers, survival post collapse isn’t really part of the equation. Most of us speak quietly of suicide after a certain point.

That perspective provides a little distance from the human drama that collapsetarians like to project for the future. It is what separates us from the doomsday preppers and apparently it is what separates us from collapsetarians.

There is no survival. Cormac McCarthy got it pretty right, I think, in The Road. Not only humans will die, but the whole planet, more or less.

We’re standing on the beach of doom, folks. We can argue and debate and cajole, but the reality is that humans have really done it this time. We aren’t going to survive long term.

I’ve been called Cassandra in the past but perhaps Lysistrata is more appropriate. She urged Greek women to withhold sexual “favors” from their husbands until they ended a war. Perhaps what we need is an update to that, perhaps what we need to do is to withhold the means of reproduction.

Rape features prominently into any survival scenario, so it doesn’t much matter if you are lesbian. Contraception won’t be available post-collapse. Neither will hospitals, antibiotics or autoclaves.

So if you are an adult female and fertile, probably the best thing you can do for yourself and for the planet is to have a tubal ligation soon. Real soon.

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Gender has been a hot topic in a couple of the internet places I frequent.

DGR and two of its founders, Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, have come under attack as being “trans phobic”.
I admit up front that I don’t fully understand the nuances of the disagreement between the RadFeminists and the Trans people, because they are defining the words “sex” and “gender” in different ways and then the disagreement spirals out from there.

From my perspective, when I look at nature, I see two sexes: male and female. Males have one set of body parts and females another and then there are the body parts common to both.

Gender is about culture, roles, conditioning and as such it is much more difficult to pinpoint causes and effects.

As I understand the ignition point on this particular flare up, it was that a Trans person wanted access to a woman only space at a convention. The women discussed it, and decided to deny access. The person then became verbally and physically confrontational. And it went downhill from there.

It raises the age old question. Does a woman’s “no” mean “no”? Does a woman have the right to deny access to anyone, to control (to whatever extent) their personal space?

I think the answer to that question is yes. DGR, Jensen and Keith are on record as saying the answer is yes.

This does not deny a Trans person’s humanity. This is not violence. This is not phobic.

A sensitive, aware and caring person, when told no, takes no for an answer. To become confrontational, to demand, is entitlement in action.