This may be a bit of a spoiler for people who haven’t read The Screwfly Solution, read it at that link first if you would like. It’s a 5-10 page short story.
A classic science fiction apocalypse is the alien-invasion storyline, wherein a technologically superior race attemts a violent overthrow of humanity. Case in point is War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Yet these stories seem banal, created on the base belief that an alien species would even bother with our barbaric style of warfare. Aliens, especially aliens advanced enough to travel between stars, would likely be from one of three camps: they may just not care about us, being so insignificant in this sea of stars; or else they may be so heartless so as to wipe everyone off in a single stroke, or, as in the case of a great piece of Sci-Fi literature, The Screwfly Solution, they will simply give humanity the tiny nudge it needs to kill itself off.
What does this have to do with male chauvinism? In the story, the aliens release a virus which slowly leads the natural sexual urges of men towards women to become more and more violent and less useful for reproduction. Surprisingly, this would be an easy thing to do considering how similar the emotional and psychological states of lust and rage are. Even more important though is how after the men are infected with the disease, they quickly develop a religion, called the “Sons of Adam,” to cope with their conflicting emotional states and begin to regard femininity as the thing that brought “man” down in the Garden of Eden. Even though women are the source of all life for humanity (without women, you don’t have kids), the preexisting male attitude towards women as secondary or somehow dirty is amplified until they begin to kill them off in various brutal fashions.
After reading about a cultish offspring of the Mormon religion and their compound in Texas ,a small scale yet extreme example of chauvinism in action, I was reminded of this story. The abuse that was going on towards the women was horrific, made even more so by the fact that it was grounded in a religious and spiritual belief. Underage marriages, children and very young women being essentially raped by their “husbands.” All of it horrific and hopefully all to be punished duly in a court of law. What made me incredibly sick though was the fact that not only were they abusing these young women and their own children, they were openly grooming the next generation of men in the compound to follow after them in their extreme chauvinism and abuse of women and children. Thankfully it was stopped before the cycle could come around and compound itself again. That next generation could easily have fallen into a deeper abusive cycle which would have made the first round seem gentle in comparison. The first generation at least had some external inputs that there are limits to what they can do or not do. The next one would lack that entirely because they would never have seen any reason not to behave in that fashion.
The easy route would to disregard this display as the work of fanatical preachers and their handfuls of followers. Yet, it is not only those who are religious who abuse women to this degree. In Iraq, there has been story after story about young female employees of the private firms there being violently raped (and in some cases illegally detained to prevent them from reporting the rape). More sick examples of what some men will do if given the opportunity, and yet they do not have to face the consequences. When I read the first story about this, I was disturbed by how much these private corporations are acting to protect the rapists. It clearly sent a signal to other employees working at these corporations that this behaviour is acceptable and will not be punished. I’ve seen further stories proving my fears. Sadly, it seems like things will get worse amongst those corporations though before anybody decides that this behaviour needs to be punished in a court of law.
Sadly, it was also easy to convince myself that these are an exception, something that happens on an extremist compound thousands of miles away from me, or in a lawless country where violent rape seems to be perfectly acceptable. That is, until I heard an undergrad athlete at my university talking to his friend about the girl they met during their previous excursion to the bar. His buddy asked him, “So, did anything happen?” He responded, “Well, it worked just as planned, she passed out and…” It sickens me to even type out exactly what he said, but in short he described how he had given her some form of roofie, took her back to his place and had his way with her all night long. After which he was high-fived by his friend.
This behaviour speaks ill of our society and what it encourages, and bodes ill for our future. Has an entire generation or more of fathers completely failed to instill any reasonable respect for women?
1h
