Angels2200

I'd like to have rather more respect for peoples' intelligence than THAT. If these chowderheads invented a plague and were determined to release it on these unsuspecting colonies...and fully expected to be able to keep it from spreading to Earth, they're much, much, much stupider than I am.

Unless they'd also created an antidote, there was absolutely no way whatsoever that they could logically plan for every contigency and keep this plague from spreading. Simply im-freaking-possible.



Once again, you're imposing your own values and expectations on other people. There is another train of logic that could apply here, namely that maintaining a sperm bank on the colony--perhaps even a full-on cloning center--is one of the quickest ways to get the colony population to increase.
You seem to be regarding a sperm bank as some sort of luxury item, to be used when people have leisure time, as opposed to a utilitarian institution for the betterment of the colony...and then, as with these other points, imposing your preconceptions on the Angels2200 universe. These are assumptions on your part, and unwarranted.

I certainly don't have the Angels 2200 theorycrafting skills of you guys to participate in this thread but I do just want to jump in here RG. I think you might be jumping the gun here.

Assuming that you mean that the 'women folk' reference is sexist, It was the males who died and the women folk who had to deal with it. It could easily be phrased 'women who died and the men folk who had to deal with it".

Without hearing the tone and emphasis of ISWolf's voice, how can you know? I certainly wouldn't say that the rest of his arguments puts forth a sexist opinion. Folk is just a informal word to describe a number of people.

I am all for equal women's right and eliminating sexist attitudes etc etc but I don't think that a verbal beating and dressing down for a pretty minor and likely unintentional slur helps the situation, and in fact makes the situation worse.

So is this it then?

I know the bottom says "to be concluded" but he also said he was only posting two more and then he was done. Since this is the 2nd one are we just left hanging?

That's not what he said, nor is it what I'm objecting to. He said that the women folk "will be too busy"...not "had to deal", but rather, "be too busy...trying to survive.". Not "coping with a sudden drop in population", not "shoring up the weak points that a loss of personnel had suddenly created," not "reorganizing themselves to effectively cope"...no, the women were suddenly in mortal peril with all the men gone and had to try to survive.
The implication is pretty plain: that the men had all the know-how and did all the work, and without 'em, the females were all helpless and damsely, having to scramble just to keep from dying without the men around.

I acknowledged that this may well have been a careless turn of phrase, but it's a rather insulting one, possibly Freudian. Just sayin'...



I don't see this implication as minor. Minor would be implying that women are bitchy or something; this implies women need men's help just to keep from dying, and without the men it's suddenly a life-or-death skin-of-your-teeth struggle against the elements. That's hardly minor.



I didn't wanna be the first to say it...we were told there'd be news "tomorrow"...which was four days ago. Just sayin'...

I agree that you're jumping the gun. If the women had all died, out there would undoubtedly be a huge panic and a struggle to survive and shore up the infrastructure from all the missing labour. It all just depends on the type of work. What men do just appears to be more important, when rather, it just sticks out.

That said, men would have trouble not dying out. We can't impregnate ourselves.

Let me put it this way.

Women would have trouble trying to survive. Men would have a desperately difficult time trying to keep up the population. I don't think they have cloning in the comic. Women in this case actually have the advantage.

WHAT?!? WHERE IS THIS NEWS?!?!

I have yet to see anything in the Angels2200 universe to indicate that men and women don't do exactly the same jobs, and that survival wouldn't be equally difficult for both parties if the other just disappeared or died off.



Either both would or neither would, that's my point; the men suddenly all dying off wouldn't suddenly make the women-folk all helpless, which is what was implied from the phrasing of the original statement.

In the history of mankind, and in the current world, men and women always performed different tasks for society. It's all a matter of personal taste.

Generally, men have done most of the "heavy lifting", i.e. factory work and construction. Women are doing more of these jobs nowadays, but from what I've seen and based on my interpretation of history, women will continue to mostly prefer intellectual jobs while men sway toward physical work. This isn't me being sexist; male and female bodies are just built differently.


I didn't mean to imply that men dying off would make women helpless. Both genders would have advantages and disadvantages in the case of one side dying off. Men currently control most jobs, including infrastructure, but from my point of view, women run and organize things from the background, preventing chaos. It would just affect the survivors differently.

That and men can't get pregnant. This was my main point.

I must dispute the word "always"; I must also point out that while you have a point about history, you do not about the current world. For decades now, there has been a push for equality, and both of the major sexes have been performing the same tasks and professions for quite some time now.



But NOT capability, that's the point.



You don't see the contradiction here, do you? You start by talking about preferences, then go on to talk about how bodies are built...as if how one's body is built will automatically drive one's preferences. That most emphatically IS sexist...especially since it's not the least bit true.
One's physical body-type will not drive one's preferences; one's abilities, maybe, but I've known women in the military or construction and I've known men who raise children and make homes.

Given that the implication I was objecting to in the first place was that without the men, women wouldn't have the capability to keep an extra-solar colony running without a tremendous struggle--so much so that they couldn't also maintain a competitive military--you're really only digging yourself deeper, here.




I was prepared to accept a retraction before, but given your clarifications, I'm not so sure that this wasn't your intention, if only unconsciously so.

RG and ZP: Your discussion has been fine so far, but just to be sure, try your best to maintain a respectful and non-accusatory tone in your posts. It's been my own personal experience that discussions on both racism and sexism run a high risk of mixing factual generalities, non-factual steroetypes, and fickle personal opinions in a way that confuses them and can turn people away from the conversation. This is a shame since we all hold both conscious and unconscious steroetypes of one another, and discovering them can lead to personal growth.

I think we can all agree that whether men or women, losing half of humanity's population would be devastating to all of society. So much of our culture as a species is based on the interplay and complementary nature of the genders, that at least for a generation there would be a fundamental shift in the human psyche due to the disaster.

That said, as medical science as shown us over the years, there are many inescapable physiological and psychological differences between the genders. However, just as the person you are is determined by both "nature" and "nurture", I would also guess that your individual responses are only colored, not determined, by your gender. And why should we be threatened or ashamed by that? Gender is a genetically-determined trait, just like many other aspects you are born with, and it remains fully unique to you how you use the hand you are dealt with, with no hand fundamentally superior to another.

With all that in mind, I would predict that the response to the Plaugue, while fundamentally similar, would be flavored differently depending on whether it had wiped out the men or the women. That's one of the aspects I love about the comic. We get to explore the possible physical, psychological, and social consequences of one gender re-learning how to live without the other. The other extreme would be an equally fascinating topic as well, in my opinion.

I'm going to stop arguing now. Not because I can't counter the arguments, but because I can't put the words down well enough to make them appear different from your current interpretation.

Though their challenges may be different in certain specific areas, neither women nor men would truly have a greater struggle surviving--reproduction issues aside--if the other disappeared; if you're willing to state that, then I think we can safely move on.
It was your implication that without the men, women would basically be on the brink of utter doom--thus implying that women require men for mere survival--that set me off; clear THAT up, and we're all good.

That first sentence is what I generally meant.

And I actually meant the reverse of what you state in the second sentence; men would have a harder time surviving than women in the long run.

Yes, well, it was the short-term implications that had gotten my hackles up; we more or less agree on the long-term stuff. Though if you read Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold, you might have a slightly different take on it. Just sayin'.

Well, uh, if i ever see a public library again, I might look into that, though I'm much more interested in Sci-Fi/Fantasy.

Ethan of Athos IS science fiction, silly! It's part of the Vorkosigan Saga, which really kicks ass, kind of a side-story to the main plot, but still worth reading.

It's about this guy, Ethan (imagine that!) from the planet (wait for it!) Athos, which is populated solely by males. They use what's known as uterine replicators--basically cloned female bits which are then cyberized and put into service to gestate new young--to keep their population up...but their uterine replicators are beginning to fail after some two hundred years or so. So Ethan is sent out into the wormhole nexus after the shipment of ovarian cultures they'd ordered didn't arrive on the last courier ship, partly to investigate whatinhell happened to the shipment, but also to acquire new cultures in person if he can't locate the old ones.
...and he ends up getting caught in political intrigue in a unverse where he encounters women for the first time.

It's a very interesting and fun book, though the rest of the series is even better...