Dammit, Lance Part 2: Twisty Liberates Babies From Their Cribs!

Good ol' Lance found me a ripe one: Twisty Faster slightly further off the deep end than normal. (Maybe she's kidding, kind of? I can never tell.)

Lots of the ideas put forth by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex intrigue the fuck out of spinster aunts, but none intrigues the fuck out of them like this one: that in a post-patriarchal society, culture (inclusive, I am happy to say, of art) will become irrelevant and extrinsic and die a long-overdue death, whereupon humans, freed from the prison of domination, will transmogrify into giant intellects pretty much throbbing with contentment.
So what you're saying is that a post-patriarchal society will not feature humans. Or intelligent sociable organisms of any kind. Maybe blue-green algae? They don't have sexes and they don't do much dominating. Don't do much else, of course, but such is the price of equality.

(Fuck, I just looked up blue-green algae and it has role differentiation within its colonies that might be considered "domination." The patriarchy is everywhere!)

No culture, no domination. Well, if there's no culture, how the hell will we know things? Culture brings deleterious beliefs with it, yes, but that's a side effect of culture bringing all beliefs. Learning biases and inaccuracies from each other is better than learning nothing from each other and starving to death trying to reinvent agriculture.

As for no domination, that works great in groups up to about twenty. (Well, in some book I read. In reality most groups of two end up with a clear leader.) After that you run into the problem that people's cultural-preconception-free self-assigned roles won't match up with the group's needs, and once again you can't even produce food, much less airplanes and insulin.

What about the children?
These are legitimate concerns for persons whose experience is confined to the intellectual suffocation demanded by life in a primitive, violent dystopia. Which is just about everybody.
Certainly we couldn’t, at this point in human evolution, just start turning the kids loose in the world. It is unthinkable that they should not spend their idyllic first years in thrall to one or two adults who will educate (socialize) them according to the adults’ personal “values,” meaning, of course, the DNA necessary to replicate patriarchy. This indoctrination period is known as “raising” children, and differs from raising tomatoes chiefly in that tomatoes are given quite a bit more freedom to be themselves.
Oh what the fuck.

I can't even argue about this without looking stupid. It's like explaining why houses have roofs. Do I actually have to spell out that firstly kids can't feed and shelter themselves, and secondly if you don't "indoctrinate" them they won't know anything? Also, if your house didn't have a roof birds would poop on your bed.

Raising children is thought to be both a moral obligation and a deeply fulfilling endeavor. When people, especially women, reproduce and fail to take sufficient interest in the deeply fulfilling endeavor of hammering patriarchal ideology into their kids, they are described by people who do do this (i.e. “good” parents) as “bad” parents.
Hey, if your beliefs lead you to not have kids, awesome, have fun, you're doing the gene pool a favor. But once you've had the kids you've got a goddamn responsibility. No one's calling you a bad parent if you don't give girls little pink aprons and boys little blue police cars; if people are saying that then you're failing at something much more fundamental.

Say, for example, that because of changes engendered by the feminist revolution, kids wouldn’t need to be raised at all. They could flit about the countryside according to whim, just like anybody else. Why not? They wouldn’t be kidnaped or raped or sold into sex slavery because, remember? dominance and submission is a thing of the past.
I was not aware that you could culture-change away all violence in the world. Can you do ingrown hairs, too?

The kids would choose the people they wish to hang out with, which people may or may not include their biological parents.
Sometimes that would be no one, if biological parents are equally "free" not to care for their kids. Or sometimes that would be the people with the most candy and toys to offer. Four-year-olds are not noted as great judges of parenting competency and good faith. (Or perhaps it's just my cultural perception of four-year-olds that makes me think that! I imagine that a post-revolutionary preschooler would not only be a master of human relations and nuclear physics, they would be six feet tall.)

The parents would be relieved of their neurotic, self-absorbed obsession with their own offspring, the kids would be free from enslavement as low-status sub-beings in a nuclear family to which they belong only as an accident of birth.
Still not over that time you had to mow the lawn even though you didn't wanna, huh?

Firestone asserts that after the feminist/proletarian revolt, humans, unfettered by class and culture and power differentials, will be free to “realize the conceivable in the actual.” We’d become giant pulsating globs of happiness.
Thus would art take a powder! Hallelujah! At least, art as we know it — that ponderous, self-absorbed, interpretation, or anti-interpretation (whatever!), of reality, with an audience manipulated by a creator — would cease to be.
I'm not sure what hating on art has to do with anything. But at this point in this post I can't remember what anything has to do with anything and I'm no longer sure if I'm awake or dreaming or in the grip of a fevered Robitussin vision.

Imagine: oppression of children, gone! Imagine: war, gone! Imagine: art, gone! All made irrelevant by human evolution into pulsating, contented geniuses. Gone is the power differential between parent and offspring, homeland and enemy, audience and creator. Blamm! Revolution fixes everything.
I think the only "revolution" that could fix this would be bigger than women just abandoning men. Bigger than women fighting men. Bigger than everybody fighting everybody. It would be the dissolution of human beings into bodiless entities of pure philosophy, stripped of all needs and emotions and associations.

...So, uh, let me know how that works out for you!



(I'll hack on the comments tomorrow; even a lot of Twisty's commenters admitted to not making head or tail of this one. But plenty of them added their own crazypants to the mix. Or better yet, said "Well, I don't understand this but I'm sure Twisty is just too smart and advanced for me," which is an attitude I never seem to get out of my commenters.)