So here I was, slowly waking up, still very much in the zombified state I’m usually in for the 3 hours or so post-sleep, running through my usual bloggy news sources, when I came across this nice article on io9 regarding a ridiculously sexist story called Womanspace, published in Nature, of all places. So I read the story, and then I read it to my girlfriend, and we both laughed at the fact that, if it wasn’t for references to current technology, we would have guessed that it was a story from 1952 or so. But it isn’t. Nope, it’s a story about a couple of men who figure out that women do half their shopping in a parallel universe, and it was published (and presumably written) in 2011. Like io9, I’m not going to bother getting ripping into the awful gender stereotyping, because a ton of other sources have already done that better than I could, but io9 did bring up another valid criticism of the work, namely it’s pathetic excuse for a scientific process.
I would like to add another log of criticism to the fire, but first let’s run trough the ways this story is stupid (as an English literature student, none of my instructors would appreciate describing a work as “stupid” but this is my blog and I break academic boundaries, yo.)
- Men are brave scientists uncovering the world, women tell them to buy underpants. Understood. Not only that, but there is a biological divide between men and women so huge that women are able to access a parallel universe. This counts for all women, and all men Unless you’re still one of those aging men pathetically living in the past, or a heavily indoctrinated woman, or somehow transgender but still fixated on heteronormativity because you’re oblivious to the real world, it sounds pretty stupid.
- Science is when a couple of biologists (?) come up with a very non-biology related theory of parallel universes while shopping for panties, blog about it a bit, and then let the real scientists work it out. But we’re still the ones who found it. Okay, I guess. The real scientists are just the computers who work it all out for you? It’s the idea that matters, not the enormous amount of work required to find real data (not @replies), test it a billion times over, and reconcile it with our current understanding of the universe? Alrighty then.
- It’s poorly written. Look, okay, I’m not gonna go into it because I still am in that zombified state, and I understand that very short fiction has its limitations, and I still suck at writing myself (I’m about 10,000 words behind on my NaNoWriMo adventure to boot), but how the hell did this story get published. Seriously.
Here’s number 4, which I completely made up on my own. What do the women do with the objects they take back from this fluffy, pink, unicorn-and-roses-filled parallel universe. They pay for them. In our universe. Now, I’m not particularly anti-capitalist. I think it has it’s problems and gets abused, but I also hate hippies, so I’m somewhere in the middle. But how indoctrinated by the almighty [insert favorite currency here] do you have to be to write a story, a science-fiction story, where people are able to get an apparently unlimited supply of items whenever they please and somehow still always pay for it in our world? No mention of the economic imbalance such a thing would cause, women not paying for it (because their just Gatherers, right?), or any real effect whatsoever. Sure, the author tries to brush it off by saying that women may not be conscious of their “evolutionary advantage,” but then also comes up with the ridiculous notion that the barcode scanners in our world would recognize the items because quantum-herp-derp-deepak-chopra. Even so, this ability is only used while shopping. That’s what “gathering” has become in this world. Not just finding things, but shopping, paying, exchanging things.
To me (and, I’m willing to bet, to many others) science fiction is about the effects of change on the world. What would happen if we found a planet which was alive, and could mess with the human psyche? What would happen if it turned out that your entire world was fictional, and that the newspaper game you were always winning was just a way for the government to use you to find enemy targets to bomb? This is why something like Star Wars can barely be considered science-fiction. It doesn’t ask questions. This author too, doesn’t ask questions. What would happen if women had the ability to hop over to a parallel world? Holy crap, that’s incredible, what would they do? Oh, they’d go and buy shoes and cleaning products, things a man wouldn’t have a use for anyway? They’d buy them? Even though the parallel owner would never get the money anyway, unless somehow cashiers have the ability to return money back to the universe it belongs in? Status quo is good, says Ed Rybicki, don’t ever change anything, because I’m too old to cope with it.
Oh wait, there’s one thing that does change. Women are now finding better looking replacement men from the alt-verse. Because that’s all women ever want, right? Better looking men? Does it ever end with this guy? He’s old and wrinkly now, he may think he’s satirizing himself and other old, wrinkly, self-loathing men, so his defense will probably be something along the lines of “look, the men are incompetent in this story, and the women are capable of great things!” Yep. Great things. Like going shopping. Good job, Ed.
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