I’m sure that has happened at a gas station. I’m sure it has happened at a gas station I was running while I was there. We used to get some really strange people between midnight and 5 AM.
Wizard
Speaking as a former convenience store employee, I can only agree with this.
Victor
Speaking as somebody who never worked at a gas station, I’ve never gotten anybody pregnant at one, but I did get a bj in the cooler. Yes, the employee on duty at the time was involved.
Some Ed
Of course they were involved. Most people not obligated to hang around a gas station don’t hang around gas stations. If they’re at a gas station and decide they’re going to engage in some kind of sexual activity, if they’re not obligated to stick around, they’ll probably go elsewhere.
Gas station employees who are not fundamentally involved in any hanky panky occurring on the gas station premises are fairly likely supposed to break that sort of activity up. They’re also likely to be bored and sex tends to be considered interesting. Either way, they’re probably going to get involved in some fashion, whether it’s by breaking it up, watching, or trying to join in. In some cases, them trying to join in could be one of the most effective and efficient ways they can break it up, so gas station owners probably shouldn’t consider such attempts to necessarily be dereliction of duty, though it’s certainly reasonable for them to take issue with that approach on other grounds.
People who are aroused by gas stations in some way are more likely than average to have jobs there. Note it’s my impression there are few enough of these that people who work at gas stations are not significantly more likely than average to be aroused by gas stations in some way. But if you’re talking with someone about engaging in a sex act with them, and they respond, “Oh, yeah, that sounds cool. Um, could we go to the gas station to do it?” it *is* more likely that they’ll work at one than if they suggest some other location for the activity. Whether that’s because they’re aroused by gas stations or it’s because they go on shift soon and their risk aversion calculations are *much* more concerned about being late for work than they are about being caught at work doing *that* is anyone’s guess.
There’s probably a few ways to look at this that I haven’t detailed, including the one I intentionally avoided mentioning directly. But that said,
Fascinating!!!! And to think that SOME people deem abortion “unnatural”. ?
Students in grade school almost never learn about this. Care to guess WHY?
annarchy
Direct action by the Republican Theocratic Christian identitarian movement. As networked via the Doug Coe, Alex jones, Nen Shapiro, Paul manafort, a myriad of other white supremacist pseudo fascist making a concerted effort for control of women’s bodies instead of a concerted effort for education or a reduction of abortions via birth control or fertility awareness or education or any methodology but instead actually working to make people stupider and more controllable.
That would be my guess and I could add more names but it gets a little bit ridiculous and I’m sure there’s a ton more extremely culpable individuals that isn’t just the front facing figureheads.
Z
It’s quite modern. Until you could feel kicks (about week 20 give or take) it could be considered “blocked menses” and be “unblocked”. Then people got pissed off that half the population had too much autonomy and we had modern pregnancy confirming methods and well here we are.
Because I’m currently reading the electrifying essay Full Surrogacy Now!: feminism against the family by queer feminist Sophie Lewis, let me quote from the introduction:
What particularly fascinates me about the subject is [human] pregnancy’s morbidity, the little-discussed ways that, biophysically speaking, gestating is an unconscionably destructive business. The basic mechanics, according to evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin, have evolved in our species in a manner that can only be described as a ghastly fluke. (…)
It is the specific, functionally rare type of placenta we have to work with—the hemochorial placenta—which determines that the entity Chikako Takeshita calls “the motherfetus” tears itself apart inside. Rather than simply interfacing with the gestator’s bodt through a limited filter, or contenting itself with freely proffered secretions, this placenta “digests” its way into its host’s arteries, securing full access to most tissues. Mammals whose placentae don’t “breach the walls of the womb” in this way can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted fetuses at any stage of pregnancy, Sadedin notes. For them, “life goes on almost as normal during pregnancy”. Conversely, a human cannot rip away a placenta in the event of a change of heart—or, say, a sudden drought or outbreak of war—without risk of lethal hemorrhage. Our embryo hugely enlarges and paralyzes the wider arterial system supplying it, while at the same time elevating (hormonally) the blood pressure and sugar supply.
let me hasten to add, not to give the wrong impression, that Lewis is not advocating against making babies or anything like that. Read her Vice profile i linked to above or listen to her interview on This Is Hell! to get a better idea of her argument than i could possibly provide. She’s rad. Bit hard to read i guess, what with all the neologizing and big words and endless sentences peppered with brackets. she’s still rad though.
Laura
Wow! Fascinating! Thank you for the reference — something interesting to look forward to.
i mean… we already are. our bodies are augmented by synthetic hormones and all sorts of technologies already. not to mention intellectual technologies, and ideological weapons such as queer intersectional feminism.
i suggest we focus on liberating the resources we do have rather than plan for some techno-utopian future, because 1) we have the means of living in a worldwide techno-utopia now, and 2) without a revolution any technology we develop will only benefit a tiny fraction of humankind at the expense of the many.
How about we take it one step further? ’cause honestly, we might just have to. Between a planet that’s gonna become increasingly unlivable to ordinary humans thanks to climate change, as well as the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it, humans for the sake of their survival may just have to alter their physiology on a fundamental level.
“the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it”
citation needed?
On the subject (and sorry for being that guy) I cannot recommend enough another (equally exhilarating) book i’m currently reading called “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber (RIP) and David Wengrow, where they challenge, based on anthropological and archeological evidence, the hegemonic narratives betrothed to the western collective consciousness by the Enlightenment (especially Hobbes and Rousseau) about how unequal social hierarchies emerged. They conclude that all such reasonings are post-hoc and thus ideological, not scientific.
their own fundamental axiom, or bias if you will (which they proudly acknowledge rather than obfuscating it) is the simple, illuminating belief that human societies have always been political, in the sense of making collective choices based not on some innate human nature but a complex combination of environmental and cultural factors. yay anarchist science <3
Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t referring to how class-based societies emerged but rather how to break the cycle.
Be them political parties or religious cults, social pyramids always replace themselves on the foundation of revolutionary groups who’s success depends much on how well they meet (or appear to meet) the needs of vulnerable people.
But what if we made it so that humans were no longer vulnerable in at least the ways that mattered the most? What if we altered the human body to that its most basic needs, from food to water to shelter, were guaranteed by the energy of the sun’s rays? Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?
…also because you use the impersonal “we” (a convenient sleight-of-hand which i also struggle to avoid as seen in my own comment you responded to) i feel compelled to point out once again that our world is in no way structured so that technological progress will go boink for all. knowledge is power, and power is at present extremely concentrated so that top-down approaches are highly unlikely to improve the well-being of most of humankind.
at best the worldwide upper-middle-class (which most of us around here belong to regardless of our relative positions in our respective industrial states’ populations) will see some marginal returns, always conditional on the precarious balance of power we still have the agency to maintain against the plutocrats. Revolution, i tell you.
but ykw by all means go forth and figure out an open-source way of delivering human metabolism from heterotrophy. i’m all for it, i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Z
There’s no need. Read Childbirth Without Fear. Birth is akin to a sports injury. But, like, we don’t freak out about how no one should be playing hobbyist volleyball.
I do believe some people are more genetically predisposed to healthy pregnancy – and, to me, it makes sense to have a small handful of superbirthers in a tribe where most people don’t.
Say you have a population of 10 people. (This is too small to be viable I know)
If one person can safely have 10 babies who survive to adulthood – then the population has been replaced and 9 people haven’t had to give birth once. Assuming the standard 50/50 sex split, that’s 4 folks with a uterus who didn’t need to have kids.
Say you have a population of 20 and want to have a population of 30. (Reminder – 10 people were born with a uterus)
Two people each have 10 kids. That’s 20. The 8 other people combined would only have to have 10 between them, which is 1-2 each. A few people could choose to be childfree and the population goal is easily met.
Some people are naturally, innately childfree and have no desire to have kids – then you’ve got quiverfull people who have over 15.
To me, the answer seems pretty obvious – stop bullying childfree people into unwanted kids and support the people whose body says “yes more pregnancy please”.
And in case you think I’m just so out of touch I don’t know how hard pregnancy and birth are – 3 births, 1 herbal abortion, a deep desire to carry as many babies as I can and mourning that we don’t have the resources to support 6+ kids.
I’m one of the people whose body is like “fuck yes have all the babies”.
BBCC
Please don’t. Grantly Dick-Read was a misogynistic asshole who believes women who didn’t want to give birth were defying the natural order. There’s no need for scaremongering about giving birth though. Some people have horrific pregnancies and births and some don’t. Acting like it’s a uniquely horrific, unsurvivable experience isn’t helpful and neither is acting like it’s a harmless walk in the park that everyone is suited for, even if they die giving birth, as Dick-Read did.
I agree with you in principle – let people have as many children as they want to have (even if the number is zero) but I think some people struggle with that idea, especially if it might mean NOT meeting population goals. Not every ‘superbirther’ wants to give birth to ten plus children. Hell, a lot of those Quiverfull people were raised in an environment that was heavily against birth control or other methods of ending or preventing pregnancy and to believe it was their duty to have as many children as possible. I’d hardly call that a model of reproductive freedom either.
I am sorry to hear you don’t have the resources the number of children you want. I hope somehow your situation changes for the better or that you can become a surrogate! It sounds like you’d be a good one.
Clif
Also
“Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?”
Yes. I believe the answer is yes. Because humans.
Z
I’m one of those crazies who enjoys giving birth and has a good time of it. Honestly I genuinely lament that you have to make a lifetime commitment to go through it and I’m debating becoming a surrogate. So her argument feels eh.
I also did an herbal abortion when I accidentally got pregnant and was in a terrible place to have a kid. Without much issues because a well done herbal abortion can be safe – we just like scare tactics in our pregnancy.
Then, I’m also a man, so maybe I just missed some of the memo about how pregnancy and birth are supposed to be so excrutiating.
on the contrary, you sound like you would get along fabulously with Sophie Lewis. again, i’m just quoting a bit from the intro where she lays out some biological facts so as to “de-naturalize” or de-mythologize pregnancy. but she’s all for communal surrogacy and child-rearing =)
basically her argument as best as i can make out from my vantage point somewhere into chapter 2 is that “surrogacy” as it is defined under patriarchy is contrasted with “natural” pregnancy, and she’s like “who came up with that silly dichotomy, all pregnancies and all the labour of reproduction is basically surrogacy since children don’t (or shouldn’t) “belong” in any sense to their biological parents, let’s explode those categories and redefine pregnancy as a task that is freely undertaken for the common good under a socialist utopia”
also part 2 of her argument i think is gonna be sth like, “in the meantime since we do live under patriarcal white supremacist capitalism, we need to stop stigmatizing surrogacy and matronizingly talk over the surrogacy workers themselves, and instead stand in solidarity with them, and empower them to unionize and so on.”
gestators of the world unite, if you like ✊
BBCC
I’m glad your pregnancies went so well, but it’s got nothing to do with missing a memo. People are different and a lot of it comes down to hips, pelvis size and shape, uterus size and shape, vaginal canals, etc. And sometimes just luck – some people have a perfect pregnancy and then a subsequent one is miserable. Bodies are weird.
Masumi
Wow, I had no idea. That’s crazy. And pretty creepy. Parasitic fetuses, basically.
yeah i mean, as Z pointed out, besides the mainstream (and very loud) discourse about how beautiful and miraculous or whatever bearing a child is supposed to be (always, for everyone— well every straight, happily married cis woman at least), the passage i quoted fits into a smaller genre of dissident discourse that has also produced a certain normativity in some circles about how pregnancy is indefensibly creepy and brutal.
as always reality is more complex. i feel like i did a bit more justice to the author by attempting to sum up her overarching thesis in response to Z above, but if you’re interested i strongly suggest looking her up and finding interviews and stuff. The book is really interesting (if, again, a bit daunting at times).
(ps evolution doesn’t have a “top”) (i know you know but i can’t not say it) (sorry) (it’s such an all-pervasive framing and it’s very very problematic) (also it’s not a “game” although i realize you’re using the word in a metaphorical sense, but thinking of “evolution” as a “force” or a “game” or some other kind of reducible object has driven so many otherwise well-meaning people to devise terrible, terrible ideas to try to “hack” it or “harness” it. We need better metaphors is what i’m saying) (fwiw mine is that “evolution” is just another word for “history”) (but people have tried to hack history too, so idk maybe the problem is really just human hubris) (which we absolutely should try to hack) (to pieces) (kbai)
BTW I don’t think caffeine makes you mean spirited, I appreciate your writing here!
But if you’re still worried, take a little bit of weed with it to even things out, 1 mg THC should do the trick!
(yet again I shouldn’t really be offering advice like this from personal experience that depends on having a very specific set of neurodivergent stripes, but still, there it is)
oh thank you but don’t worry i stand by every word in this thread =D
i’m just extreeemely wary of sarcasm because… eh, family issues probably: my 1-year-younger sister was super obnoxious as a teen and using every rhetorical trick in the book to “win” arguments in ways i found infuriatingly disloyal, and i guess i grew up believing the myth that civil & rational discussion unfailingly produces truth and justice. anyway, that’s all in the past, i love my sister and her devastating wit now, but i guess i do still carry with me that unease about edgy banter. I got better, i am now capable of doing it with close friends when i know there’s no way they will feel attacked, but i try as much as possible to avoid it in situations where i lack control over the other person’s reaction; like, in writing, and online, and with strangers…
….also, just popping back in here to inform you all that the plural of mongoose is mongeese. Some will point to dubious sources like dictionaries alleging it’s actually “mongooses” and to that i respond: Merriam-Webster, schmerriam-schmebster.
it’s mongeese, and yes i will die on that hill, that will be all
I know you’re probably joking but it honestly irritated the hell out of me. Yes the doctor is a place you should 100% feel safe showing up in a bathrobe while farting.
[me as a doctor]: “Do not even THINK of speaking to me unless you are wearing a corset and SEVERAL petticoats. I’ll not tolerate common guttersnipes in my office.”
But then Dorothy won’t be able to take credit for helping Joyce with this Jennifer, and isn’t that what’s really important
Seriously Dorothy was literally just making excuses for why she hasn’t tried to help Joyce, it feels really shitty for her to then swoop in once it’s clear there won’t be a huge freakout
Honestly starting to suspect she helped Joyce with her vision issues to feel good about herself rather then out of any real concern for Joyce
Jamie
I feel like you’ll be surprised at how often that’s the case.
TrueVCU
Eh, it’s not shitty but I don’t think we’ve seen anything to make us think Dorothy is quite THAT cynical about her personal relationships
TrueVCU
Sorry meant to say it’s not NOT shitty, IE everyone calling out Dorothy for swooping in after avoiding the issue because Billie opened the door to actually pursuing a solution is correct.
Rabbit
I mean, isn’t that what she did with the RA position? I mean ROZ wasn’t a great alternative, but…
Ed Callahan
One of Dorothy’s objectives in becoming RA was to keep Becky a secret. A new person would not be as distracted by depression/misery/guilt as Ruth was and would notice the loud redhead that was not Carla.
Jon
Yeah, screw Dorothy for *checks notes* realizing Jennifer was right, changing her stance, and trying to help. The absolute gall.
Agemegos
And keeping Joyce’s confidential information on file in case of emergencies.
I do think the fact that she is speaking about Joyce in the third person is significant here. For emergencies it’s great to have her info. But Joyce is RIGHT THERE and she’s offering TO JENNIFER to do it. That’s weird.
Agemegos
Perhaps it is to indicate how she conceptualises what she is doing. In her unconsidered view Jennifer and not Joyce is the person with agency, and she is steeping in to assist with (and perhaps put her own stamp on) an undertaking of Jennifer’s.
Agemegos
For “steeping” read “stepping”.
Pylgrim
Don’t knock it. Think of ALL the people who /do harm/ to others in order to feel good about themselves. True altruists are few and far between, so I’ll gladly take every self-serving helper I can find.
Azhrei Vep
I mean, really, aren’t all helpers self-serving? I don’t know of anybody who hates helping people but does it anyway. They just won’t bother. I would know, it’s why I don’t bother helping people.
So what if someone’s doing it to make themselves feel good, or look good, so long as they’re doing it.
Agemegos
Just so. Any motivation can be analysed as “… in order to self-affirm”, and this makes not difference at all.
Honestly it’s nice to see some more character flaws in Dorothy. She doesn’t always have the moral high ground in every situation and can be selfish as well. Dorothy has a lot of expectation of perfection around her even in comic she gets criticized for trying to be too perfect and has been called boring because of it. This is rather humanizing for her.
Yeah. It’s also kinda cool to see her attempts to be perfect as a character flaw and even as self-centered, to an extent. I know in my experience, trying to be perfect and make everyone happy led to occasionally causing more harm than “allowing” (accepting, really) myself to be “not perfect” would’ve.
Justnobodyfqwl
Yeah, I feel like this comment section has this weird hang up where they get really personally offended by every action every character takes like they know them IRL and aren’t like… fictional characters who can and should have interesting flaws that move a story along. So many people read everything every character does in the worst possible faith when to me my reaction is a lot closer to yours- “oh it’s kinda cool that we’re seeing the limits of Dorothy’s perfectionist friend manager runs role and the ways that her own stress can cloud her judgement, especially when Joyce is clearly relating to and understanding the equally depressed and angry Billie more”
386 thoughts on “Appointment”
Ana Chronistic
“GO AWAY YOU MATERNAL VULTURE, IT IS I, MATERNAL FERAL DOG WHO WILL CARE FOR HER”
idk
alt: bc if you show up in a bathrobe, farting, they might immediately prescribe Gas-X and a colonoscopy instead
Ana Chronistic
alt-text: I mean SURE you COULD get pregnant at a gas station, that is totes a thing that can happen
Opus the Poet
I’m sure that has happened at a gas station. I’m sure it has happened at a gas station I was running while I was there. We used to get some really strange people between midnight and 5 AM.
Wizard
Speaking as a former convenience store employee, I can only agree with this.
Victor
Speaking as somebody who never worked at a gas station, I’ve never gotten anybody pregnant at one, but I did get a bj in the cooler. Yes, the employee on duty at the time was involved.
Some Ed
Of course they were involved. Most people not obligated to hang around a gas station don’t hang around gas stations. If they’re at a gas station and decide they’re going to engage in some kind of sexual activity, if they’re not obligated to stick around, they’ll probably go elsewhere.
Gas station employees who are not fundamentally involved in any hanky panky occurring on the gas station premises are fairly likely supposed to break that sort of activity up. They’re also likely to be bored and sex tends to be considered interesting. Either way, they’re probably going to get involved in some fashion, whether it’s by breaking it up, watching, or trying to join in. In some cases, them trying to join in could be one of the most effective and efficient ways they can break it up, so gas station owners probably shouldn’t consider such attempts to necessarily be dereliction of duty, though it’s certainly reasonable for them to take issue with that approach on other grounds.
People who are aroused by gas stations in some way are more likely than average to have jobs there. Note it’s my impression there are few enough of these that people who work at gas stations are not significantly more likely than average to be aroused by gas stations in some way. But if you’re talking with someone about engaging in a sex act with them, and they respond, “Oh, yeah, that sounds cool. Um, could we go to the gas station to do it?” it *is* more likely that they’ll work at one than if they suggest some other location for the activity. Whether that’s because they’re aroused by gas stations or it’s because they go on shift soon and their risk aversion calculations are *much* more concerned about being late for work than they are about being caught at work doing *that* is anyone’s guess.
There’s probably a few ways to look at this that I haven’t detailed, including the one I intentionally avoided mentioning directly. But that said,
TL;DR: Of course they were.
milu
well that was satisfyingly exhaustive =) thank you.
Clif
But was it completely theoretical or backed by empirical evidence?
Ophidiophile
Only happens at full service gas stations.
Shadowsnail
Nice.
Sirksome
I see your MATERNAL FERAL DOG, and raise you A MATERNAL MONGOOSE, Jennifer really exudes mongoose energy to me.
Jamie
Mongoose really says underdog to me and Jennifer really doesn’t do underdog.
Laura
Mongoose really know how to manage their own reproductive systems!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31795853/
The Wellerman
Fascinating! Goes to show that unfortunately, you humans are definitely NOT top of the evolution game in everything! ?
Laura
Actually, animals across the kingdom animalia will spontaneously or use herbs to end pregnancies in response to relationship changes, changes in living situation, social conflict, stress and trauma, resource scarcity, fetal illness or nonviability, and for many reasons.
Humans just use more advanced methods to exercise the same reproductive selectivity that other animals do.
See, e.g.:
Elephants, with borage: https://www.eolss.net/sample-chapters/c03/e6-79-19.pdf
Chimpanzees: https://asknature.org/strategy/eating-leaves-to-control-reproduction/#.U5dCpRCVDYQ
Gelada monkeys: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-bruce-effect-why-some-pregnant-monkeys-abort-when-new-males-arrive
and others (but I only get 3 links before my post gets flagged as spam).
The Wellerman
Fascinating!!!! And to think that SOME people deem abortion “unnatural”. ?
Students in grade school almost never learn about this. Care to guess WHY?
annarchy
Direct action by the Republican Theocratic Christian identitarian movement. As networked via the Doug Coe, Alex jones, Nen Shapiro, Paul manafort, a myriad of other white supremacist pseudo fascist making a concerted effort for control of women’s bodies instead of a concerted effort for education or a reduction of abortions via birth control or fertility awareness or education or any methodology but instead actually working to make people stupider and more controllable.
That would be my guess and I could add more names but it gets a little bit ridiculous and I’m sure there’s a ton more extremely culpable individuals that isn’t just the front facing figureheads.
Z
It’s quite modern. Until you could feel kicks (about week 20 give or take) it could be considered “blocked menses” and be “unblocked”. Then people got pissed off that half the population had too much autonomy and we had modern pregnancy confirming methods and well here we are.
milu
Because I’m currently reading the electrifying essay Full Surrogacy Now!: feminism against the family by queer feminist Sophie Lewis, let me quote from the introduction:
What particularly fascinates me about the subject is [human] pregnancy’s morbidity, the little-discussed ways that, biophysically speaking, gestating is an unconscionably destructive business. The basic mechanics, according to evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin, have evolved in our species in a manner that can only be described as a ghastly fluke. (…)
It is the specific, functionally rare type of placenta we have to work with—the hemochorial placenta—which determines that the entity Chikako Takeshita calls “the motherfetus” tears itself apart inside. Rather than simply interfacing with the gestator’s bodt through a limited filter, or contenting itself with freely proffered secretions, this placenta “digests” its way into its host’s arteries, securing full access to most tissues. Mammals whose placentae don’t “breach the walls of the womb” in this way can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted fetuses at any stage of pregnancy, Sadedin notes. For them, “life goes on almost as normal during pregnancy”. Conversely, a human cannot rip away a placenta in the event of a change of heart—or, say, a sudden drought or outbreak of war—without risk of lethal hemorrhage. Our embryo hugely enlarges and paralyzes the wider arterial system supplying it, while at the same time elevating (hormonally) the blood pressure and sugar supply.
milu
let me hasten to add, not to give the wrong impression, that Lewis is not advocating against making babies or anything like that. Read her Vice profile i linked to above or listen to her interview on This Is Hell! to get a better idea of her argument than i could possibly provide. She’s rad. Bit hard to read i guess, what with all the neologizing and big words and endless sentences peppered with brackets. she’s still rad though.
Laura
Wow! Fascinating! Thank you for the reference — something interesting to look forward to.
The Wellerman
Makes me wonder if it’s at all possible to augment the human body to work more like this when it comes to reproduction.
milu
i mean… we already are. our bodies are augmented by synthetic hormones and all sorts of technologies already. not to mention intellectual technologies, and ideological weapons such as queer intersectional feminism.
i suggest we focus on liberating the resources we do have rather than plan for some techno-utopian future, because 1) we have the means of living in a worldwide techno-utopia now, and 2) without a revolution any technology we develop will only benefit a tiny fraction of humankind at the expense of the many.
The Wellerman
How about we take it one step further? ’cause honestly, we might just have to. Between a planet that’s gonna become increasingly unlivable to ordinary humans thanks to climate change, as well as the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it, humans for the sake of their survival may just have to alter their physiology on a fundamental level.
milu
“the same fucking class-based societies they keep persistently arranging themselves into no matter how hard they try to avert it”
citation needed?
On the subject (and sorry for being that guy) I cannot recommend enough another (equally exhilarating) book i’m currently reading called “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber (RIP) and David Wengrow, where they challenge, based on anthropological and archeological evidence, the hegemonic narratives betrothed to the western collective consciousness by the Enlightenment (especially Hobbes and Rousseau) about how unequal social hierarchies emerged. They conclude that all such reasonings are post-hoc and thus ideological, not scientific.
their own fundamental axiom, or bias if you will (which they proudly acknowledge rather than obfuscating it) is the simple, illuminating belief that human societies have always been political, in the sense of making collective choices based not on some innate human nature but a complex combination of environmental and cultural factors. yay anarchist science <3
The Wellerman
Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t referring to how class-based societies emerged but rather how to break the cycle.
Be them political parties or religious cults, social pyramids always replace themselves on the foundation of revolutionary groups who’s success depends much on how well they meet (or appear to meet) the needs of vulnerable people.
But what if we made it so that humans were no longer vulnerable in at least the ways that mattered the most? What if we altered the human body to that its most basic needs, from food to water to shelter, were guaranteed by the energy of the sun’s rays? Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?
milu
…also because you use the impersonal “we” (a convenient sleight-of-hand which i also struggle to avoid as seen in my own comment you responded to) i feel compelled to point out once again that our world is in no way structured so that technological progress will go boink for all. knowledge is power, and power is at present extremely concentrated so that top-down approaches are highly unlikely to improve the well-being of most of humankind.
at best the worldwide upper-middle-class (which most of us around here belong to regardless of our relative positions in our respective industrial states’ populations) will see some marginal returns, always conditional on the precarious balance of power we still have the agency to maintain against the plutocrats. Revolution, i tell you.
milu
wrote that before reading your reply, but i think it applies perfectly…
milu
but ykw by all means go forth and figure out an open-source way of delivering human metabolism from heterotrophy. i’m all for it, i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Z
There’s no need. Read Childbirth Without Fear. Birth is akin to a sports injury. But, like, we don’t freak out about how no one should be playing hobbyist volleyball.
I do believe some people are more genetically predisposed to healthy pregnancy – and, to me, it makes sense to have a small handful of superbirthers in a tribe where most people don’t.
Say you have a population of 10 people. (This is too small to be viable I know)
If one person can safely have 10 babies who survive to adulthood – then the population has been replaced and 9 people haven’t had to give birth once. Assuming the standard 50/50 sex split, that’s 4 folks with a uterus who didn’t need to have kids.
Say you have a population of 20 and want to have a population of 30. (Reminder – 10 people were born with a uterus)
Two people each have 10 kids. That’s 20. The 8 other people combined would only have to have 10 between them, which is 1-2 each. A few people could choose to be childfree and the population goal is easily met.
Some people are naturally, innately childfree and have no desire to have kids – then you’ve got quiverfull people who have over 15.
To me, the answer seems pretty obvious – stop bullying childfree people into unwanted kids and support the people whose body says “yes more pregnancy please”.
And in case you think I’m just so out of touch I don’t know how hard pregnancy and birth are – 3 births, 1 herbal abortion, a deep desire to carry as many babies as I can and mourning that we don’t have the resources to support 6+ kids.
I’m one of the people whose body is like “fuck yes have all the babies”.
BBCC
Please don’t. Grantly Dick-Read was a misogynistic asshole who believes women who didn’t want to give birth were defying the natural order. There’s no need for scaremongering about giving birth though. Some people have horrific pregnancies and births and some don’t. Acting like it’s a uniquely horrific, unsurvivable experience isn’t helpful and neither is acting like it’s a harmless walk in the park that everyone is suited for, even if they die giving birth, as Dick-Read did.
I agree with you in principle – let people have as many children as they want to have (even if the number is zero) but I think some people struggle with that idea, especially if it might mean NOT meeting population goals. Not every ‘superbirther’ wants to give birth to ten plus children. Hell, a lot of those Quiverfull people were raised in an environment that was heavily against birth control or other methods of ending or preventing pregnancy and to believe it was their duty to have as many children as possible. I’d hardly call that a model of reproductive freedom either.
I am sorry to hear you don’t have the resources the number of children you want. I hope somehow your situation changes for the better or that you can become a surrogate! It sounds like you’d be a good one.
Clif
Also
“Would any human, then, be willing to give themselves over to groups that claim to act in their interest, merely to repeat the cycle of swapping one social pyramid for another?”
Yes. I believe the answer is yes. Because humans.
Z
I’m one of those crazies who enjoys giving birth and has a good time of it. Honestly I genuinely lament that you have to make a lifetime commitment to go through it and I’m debating becoming a surrogate. So her argument feels eh.
I also did an herbal abortion when I accidentally got pregnant and was in a terrible place to have a kid. Without much issues because a well done herbal abortion can be safe – we just like scare tactics in our pregnancy.
Then, I’m also a man, so maybe I just missed some of the memo about how pregnancy and birth are supposed to be so excrutiating.
Childbirth Without Fear is a much better read.
milu
on the contrary, you sound like you would get along fabulously with Sophie Lewis. again, i’m just quoting a bit from the intro where she lays out some biological facts so as to “de-naturalize” or de-mythologize pregnancy. but she’s all for communal surrogacy and child-rearing =)
basically her argument as best as i can make out from my vantage point somewhere into chapter 2 is that “surrogacy” as it is defined under patriarchy is contrasted with “natural” pregnancy, and she’s like “who came up with that silly dichotomy, all pregnancies and all the labour of reproduction is basically surrogacy since children don’t (or shouldn’t) “belong” in any sense to their biological parents, let’s explode those categories and redefine pregnancy as a task that is freely undertaken for the common good under a socialist utopia”
milu
that last line should be, “redefine surrogacy”
also part 2 of her argument i think is gonna be sth like, “in the meantime since we do live under patriarcal white supremacist capitalism, we need to stop stigmatizing surrogacy and matronizingly talk over the surrogacy workers themselves, and instead stand in solidarity with them, and empower them to unionize and so on.”
gestators of the world unite, if you like ✊
BBCC
I’m glad your pregnancies went so well, but it’s got nothing to do with missing a memo. People are different and a lot of it comes down to hips, pelvis size and shape, uterus size and shape, vaginal canals, etc. And sometimes just luck – some people have a perfect pregnancy and then a subsequent one is miserable. Bodies are weird.
Masumi
Wow, I had no idea. That’s crazy. And pretty creepy. Parasitic fetuses, basically.
milu
yeah i mean, as Z pointed out, besides the mainstream (and very loud) discourse about how beautiful and miraculous or whatever bearing a child is supposed to be (always, for everyone— well every straight, happily married cis woman at least), the passage i quoted fits into a smaller genre of dissident discourse that has also produced a certain normativity in some circles about how pregnancy is indefensibly creepy and brutal.
as always reality is more complex. i feel like i did a bit more justice to the author by attempting to sum up her overarching thesis in response to Z above, but if you’re interested i strongly suggest looking her up and finding interviews and stuff. The book is really interesting (if, again, a bit daunting at times).
milu
(ps evolution doesn’t have a “top”) (i know you know but i can’t not say it) (sorry) (it’s such an all-pervasive framing and it’s very very problematic) (also it’s not a “game” although i realize you’re using the word in a metaphorical sense, but thinking of “evolution” as a “force” or a “game” or some other kind of reducible object has driven so many otherwise well-meaning people to devise terrible, terrible ideas to try to “hack” it or “harness” it. We need better metaphors is what i’m saying) (fwiw mine is that “evolution” is just another word for “history”) (but people have tried to hack history too, so idk maybe the problem is really just human hubris) (which we absolutely should try to hack) (to pieces) (kbai)
The Wellerman
Classic Milu ?
Great to have you back, friend!!! ?
milu
hehe =) thanks mate, good to be back (for now) =)
The Wellerman
BTW I don’t think caffeine makes you mean spirited, I appreciate your writing here!
But if you’re still worried, take a little bit of weed with it to even things out, 1 mg THC should do the trick!
(yet again I shouldn’t really be offering advice like this from personal experience that depends on having a very specific set of neurodivergent stripes, but still, there it is)
milu
oh thank you but don’t worry i stand by every word in this thread =D
i’m just extreeemely wary of sarcasm because… eh, family issues probably: my 1-year-younger sister was super obnoxious as a teen and using every rhetorical trick in the book to “win” arguments in ways i found infuriatingly disloyal, and i guess i grew up believing the myth that civil & rational discussion unfailingly produces truth and justice. anyway, that’s all in the past, i love my sister and her devastating wit now, but i guess i do still carry with me that unease about edgy banter. I got better, i am now capable of doing it with close friends when i know there’s no way they will feel attacked, but i try as much as possible to avoid it in situations where i lack control over the other person’s reaction; like, in writing, and online, and with strangers…
milu
….also, just popping back in here to inform you all that the plural of mongoose is mongeese. Some will point to dubious sources like dictionaries alleging it’s actually “mongooses” and to that i respond: Merriam-Webster, schmerriam-schmebster.
it’s mongeese, and yes i will die on that hill, that will be all
RassilonTDavros
Plays “Eighth Wonder” on the hacked Muzak
Laura
Love that song!
Sirksome
You got something against bathrobes, Dot? Now I’ve officially lost respect for you! Specifically over bathrobe shaming!“““““““
Z
I know you’re probably joking but it honestly irritated the hell out of me. Yes the doctor is a place you should 100% feel safe showing up in a bathrobe while farting.
Lan
[me as a doctor]: “Do not even THINK of speaking to me unless you are wearing a corset and SEVERAL petticoats. I’ll not tolerate common guttersnipes in my office.”
TemplarKnight
In fact, according to one tiktok I saw this very night, that is actually a prescribed treatment.
Not sure for what exactly, but apparently the young girl’s stomach was distended/bloated and they prescribed “fart walks.”
Shadowsnail
“Fart walks” is a great name for a garage band.
The Wellerman
???
This is gonna go like that one SpongeBob episode where he got the suds, isn’t it?
Sure hope Joyce gets better though!!!! ?
*plays “Sugar Plum Fairy 59” by Pytor Illyich Tchaikovsky on hacked muzak*
Doctor_Who
Re: that episode – I don’t even want to consider how Jennifer might employ corks in this situation.
Z
If by “corks” you mean “menstrual cup”…
alongcameaspider
But then Dorothy won’t be able to take credit for helping Joyce with this Jennifer, and isn’t that what’s really important
Seriously Dorothy was literally just making excuses for why she hasn’t tried to help Joyce, it feels really shitty for her to then swoop in once it’s clear there won’t be a huge freakout
Riley
I was thinking the same thing, I’m honestly with Jennifer on this one, calling her Maternal Vulture feels right on the money here
alongcameaspider
Honestly starting to suspect she helped Joyce with her vision issues to feel good about herself rather then out of any real concern for Joyce
Jamie
I feel like you’ll be surprised at how often that’s the case.
TrueVCU
Eh, it’s not shitty but I don’t think we’ve seen anything to make us think Dorothy is quite THAT cynical about her personal relationships
TrueVCU
Sorry meant to say it’s not NOT shitty, IE everyone calling out Dorothy for swooping in after avoiding the issue because Billie opened the door to actually pursuing a solution is correct.
Rabbit
I mean, isn’t that what she did with the RA position? I mean ROZ wasn’t a great alternative, but…
Ed Callahan
One of Dorothy’s objectives in becoming RA was to keep Becky a secret. A new person would not be as distracted by depression/misery/guilt as Ruth was and would notice the loud redhead that was not Carla.
Jon
Yeah, screw Dorothy for *checks notes* realizing Jennifer was right, changing her stance, and trying to help. The absolute gall.
Agemegos
And keeping Joyce’s confidential information on file in case of emergencies.
Nathan
I do think the fact that she is speaking about Joyce in the third person is significant here. For emergencies it’s great to have her info. But Joyce is RIGHT THERE and she’s offering TO JENNIFER to do it. That’s weird.
Agemegos
Perhaps it is to indicate how she conceptualises what she is doing. In her unconsidered view Jennifer and not Joyce is the person with agency, and she is steeping in to assist with (and perhaps put her own stamp on) an undertaking of Jennifer’s.
Agemegos
For “steeping” read “stepping”.
Pylgrim
Don’t knock it. Think of ALL the people who /do harm/ to others in order to feel good about themselves. True altruists are few and far between, so I’ll gladly take every self-serving helper I can find.
Azhrei Vep
I mean, really, aren’t all helpers self-serving? I don’t know of anybody who hates helping people but does it anyway. They just won’t bother. I would know, it’s why I don’t bother helping people.
So what if someone’s doing it to make themselves feel good, or look good, so long as they’re doing it.
Agemegos
Just so. Any motivation can be analysed as “… in order to self-affirm”, and this makes not difference at all.
Needfuldoer
Little of column A, little of column B.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
Really tempting to say that it is good practice for a career in politics…
Sirksome
Honestly it’s nice to see some more character flaws in Dorothy. She doesn’t always have the moral high ground in every situation and can be selfish as well. Dorothy has a lot of expectation of perfection around her even in comic she gets criticized for trying to be too perfect and has been called boring because of it. This is rather humanizing for her.
bemisawa
Yeah. It’s also kinda cool to see her attempts to be perfect as a character flaw and even as self-centered, to an extent. I know in my experience, trying to be perfect and make everyone happy led to occasionally causing more harm than “allowing” (accepting, really) myself to be “not perfect” would’ve.
Justnobodyfqwl
Yeah, I feel like this comment section has this weird hang up where they get really personally offended by every action every character takes like they know them IRL and aren’t like… fictional characters who can and should have interesting flaws that move a story along. So many people read everything every character does in the worst possible faith when to me my reaction is a lot closer to yours- “oh it’s kinda cool that we’re seeing the limits of Dorothy’s perfectionist friend manager runs role and the ways that her own stress can cloud her judgement, especially when Joyce is clearly relating to and understanding the equally depressed and angry Billie more”