Peering into the future
It’s a funny old place, this 21st Century, politically-correct, equal opportunity driven, gender neutral or fluid (whichever it is, I’m getting confused these days) world we live in.
The latest retailer to fall foul of the do-gooders – or is it ‘game changers’? – is John Lewis, for apparently abandoning the notion of gender-specific items upon its children’s clothes racks. Some argue that this is a huge step forward, others shake their heads in disbelief on the ‘conservative’ basis that, if you allow everyone to make their own mind up about everything including their gender identity, then everybody will always be a victim of somebody else’s discrimination if they don’t come out on top in the struggle to survive and win in the great race of life.
And being a ‘victim’ – or going along with the PC-brigade’s theory that, if you are unsatisfied with your position in society and are having a hard time of it, then de facto it’s always somebody else’s fault and never your own, even if all you do is sit around on your backside waiting for hand-outs – has become an all too ‘dependent’ way of life for a sizeable section of the population.
Even going back to my heyday in the second half of the 20th Century when women were breaking down barriers in every direction and gaining all kinds of new freedoms, some of which were long overdue and some of which various proto-feminist groups have misappropriated and taken in an ever-widening variety of sometimes bizarre directions, we still had a sense of humour and frankly, if you don’t hang on to that lifeline, you can get crabby if not batty.
Recently I chanced upon some cosy and light-hearted one-off two-person panel programme on ITV called Possibly … The Best Adverts In The World.
This was recorded in front of a studio audience, hosted by actor Hugh Dennis, and the ‘scheme’ of it seemed to amount to inviting quest celebrities (for the transmission in question these were Angus Deayton and Chris Kamara) to nominate their favourite and/or funniest advertisements from the UK’s glorious past in order to decide which were the worst/best.
I do have to admit that the rampant sexism on display in nearly every advertisement of the 1950s through to the 1990s era set ‘in the home’ was not only pronounced in the extreme but actually hilarious, not perhaps that the more rabid members of my fellow sisterhood would necessarily agree.
My attitude towards the sexism of those times – and indeed some of the often unwanted sexual attention rife among certain sections of the male of the species – was as per my dear grandmother’s approach and advice (and that was borne of the female experience of a generation and a half previous to mine), i.e. “Just get on with it, dear …”
One of the fun sayings doing the rounds amongst my female friends during my working life was “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”.
It was perhaps a bit of a clunker – and indeed probably wasn’t ever true unless you were of other than a heterosexual persuasion – but it had a certain zing to it and used to make us laugh over a glass or two (or bottle) of sauvignon blanc after work in one of the many female-friendly bars that proliferated around the Chancery Lane/Fleet Street area of London in those days.
The irony is that in the last year or two, with the medical advances being made in the area of IVF and more recently the cultivation in laboratories of human sperm, the theoretical possibility has gradually dawned upon the thinking classes that – quite genuinely – the time may not be too far away when women could organise a systematic programme of human reproduction that need not involve the input of men at all.
If you see what I mean.
It occurred to me the other day that if this Nineteen Eighty-Four/Brave New World vision of the world did come to pass, my hunch would be that at least one section of the sisterhood would go off to try and set up a perfect world in which men did not exist.
And why not? In the 21st Century this would simply be another new ‘lifestyle choice’ that would qualify for Government propaganda support, benefit payments and indeed protection from discrimination – wherever that might be ‘discovered’ or perceived to have been suffered by the ‘victims’ – by everyone else.
Simples.
Another female in-joke with a degree of currency is the old staple that true equality – and indeed a proper, caring approach to the pain of childbirth etc. – will only ever occur on the day that men can have babies.
And then last night I came across this piece by Helen Sedgwick on a new development in medical science – the creation of artificial wombs – as appears upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN
Touché!
Now it seems we may also be only a whisker away from a situation where men will no longer need women.
After all, why would men need us once the day has dawned that they can grow their own children in artificial wombs? You can just picture the scene. In their own little minds, they’d be perfectly content going down the pub every evening and then staggering home to their very lifelike and submissive sex robots, whilst other ‘childd-minding’ robots looked after the family.
Of course, all of the above remains mere conjecture at the moment. But these things may not be too far off. And let us not forget that, once the forces of true Artificial Intelligence really begin to get a grip, there may not be a need for a human race at all …
I guess that will be about the time when, about 75% of all animal species have been rendered extinct by the irredeemably callous approach of humans to the future of the planet, and those of us still living will be carving out a living of sorts in a series of municipal ‘human zoos’ to which a by-then superior race of robots – and their metallic children – will be able to go on day outings to marvel at the few remaining examples of the natural world.
And by then the likes of you and me will be appearing ‘on stage’, under watchful supervision by zookeeper robots of course, acting out a 21st Century version of one of the 1950s and 1960s zoo chimps’ tea parties once so beloved by wildlife TV presenters such as Johnny Morris.
