The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Declared Surplus
She really wasn't sure what to make of it. Was it some sort of creepy joke? If it was, the revelation about her neighbours' sense of humour was unwelcome. It didn't seem to fit them, though. And why now, after nearly four years of quiet and blandly friendly coexistence? No, no, this couldn't be neighbour-angst. Then what was it?
Helen turned the slip of paper over again, willing it to look less, printed. As in, less mass-printed by an actual printing press. It was the right size to lay across the palm of her hand without extending past it, say five centimetres by ten. The paper seemed to be the same sort of slightly heavier stuff municipal notices are usually printed on, the official ones printed in colour, as opposed to the seasonal ones staff simply photocopy and cut up to stuff in mailboxes. The brief text, in an overused sans-serif font, had the crisp edges and corners themselves so suggestive of an official notice. The slip of paper was just as crisp and exactly edged. As if to compliment all this, the message on the slip of paper found lying on the doormat as she came home after work was itself crisp and to the point.
Declared Surplus
Probably it didn't mean anything. The trouble was, no matter how she tried, Helen couldn't explain it away. Nothing like this was used at her workplace – surplus furniture and the like generally got whisked away whenever the unfortunate chair, desk, or whatever's number came up in the asset tracking system. "Whisked away" as in one day it was there, the next it wasn't. The slip of paper didn't match the size of any pad of paper or business card Helen had ever seen there, however. She couldn't think of anyplace where anything similar had ever turned up. And if it was some kind of weird joke, what a lot of trouble to take over it!
"Okay, that's enough." Helen said firmly out loud, jumping a little as her voice echoed around the tiled entryway. "This must be somebody's weird little joke or it's a real notice that got stuck to my mail, and it has taken up too much of my time." It had only been a few minutes, but still. Firmly placing the slip into the recycling bin, Helen straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, and turned her attention to other things. Like dinner.
******
- supposedly "surplus women" only if defined as having to be married to some asshole
- somehow men are expected to heartily resent being "declared surplus" and women are not
- the "surplus women" can't be heard by men because their vocal modulators are taken
- to pay attention to them is to break the law, all men must ignore them
- no one can kill a "surplus woman" because that would concede her an existence
- the men can't hear women without vocal modulators because they wear devices in their ears that they receive at puberty
- women don't have these things in their ears anytime, they are not "perceivers"
- "do you feed the hidden?"
- creates a situation where certain women are treated literally as if they are ghosts, not merely invisible but incorporeal < ring of Gyges
- every effort is made to ignore what they are doing
- "surplus women" are a problem for men with "too many daughters" a burden "too many wives" a cause for jealousy
It all started with the surplus people.
Nobody looks at us, nobody sees us.
We're always a problem to them.
A problem they want solved forever.
It seems to be a widely held assumption among male and sometimes even female biologists that supposed "artificial wombs" will make women surplus because they are presumed useful or necessary only for reproduction.
But let's go on with this pseudo-logic:
* which women are considered surplus breeders today?
* brown women every time, poor white women and the disabled right behind
* if they aren't seen as useful for reproductive labour or wage labour or rape, then the push is to get rid of them, preferably in a non-messy and invisible way
* probably to do that, the main plan is to treat them as invisible, unhuman
* isolate them, assuming they're bound to die off without the "assistance" and "support" or "ownership" of men
* which allows cooptation of brown men
What would kibosh the urge these men have trained themselves into to colonize any place they perceive as "empty" of real people but with stuff they will want to steal?
* to get the individual women and as a group to remain invisible regardless of male stupidity and greed, need to invoke fear of contagion and radiation
* then women would be moved to concentration camps as way stations
* things don't work out the way that the male leaders expect, but their own set up keeps them from knowing since they don;t want to risk knowing anything that could break the invisibility and their sense of righteous comfort
* finally close by deleting the locations from the map
This could be structured as a "rapture" that leaves women behind. Women and girls are abandoned by men to die in whatever presumed cataclysm or prison in preparation for it.
Surplus, "amount of something in excess of requirements excess on out of date military clothing." "surplus" white or otherwise elite labelled men are unemployed must be out to work somehow "for the sake of society." "Surplus" women are women men decide they don't need.
So in the story context, there would be men determined that there should be no word for women that suggests they are independent, conscious, and rational human beings with rights. Go figure, that is what the current crop of extremists sis literally trying to achieve right now. These extremists literally want, and Marilyn Frye has noted, is universal phallic access to all women, and all children. They want birthing utterly dissociated from women as actual human beings, just referring to body parts that the can "rent" or otherwise use to procreate. Female children are to be discarded unless wanted for procreative purposes, as already noted.
So then, in capitalism or just plain patriarchy, this is a means of recreating females as disposable commodities, to be "conveniences." The first cull possibility then is just after conception, then just after birth, then after sexual use, then after reproductive use. But to get that to go along smoothly, technology provides sympathy blockers and suppressors. This contributes to men preying on each other more too, and indeed in real life we're seeing the sissy porn fiction that enables them to attack men they deem too "feminine" and imagine using them in place of women.
After that, what's left after gonzo porn? These guys are bound to be quite body dissociated to put it mildly. Then it seems to me that non-human and non-food animals, as Carol Adams has already written about. I suspect that sexual contact with a food animal would render it irretrievably contaminated, because sex and shame will be totally locked together. That would render male meat-eating could be rendered more literally porn that it is now.
Then how do women and girls know they are declared surplus, having managed to be lucky enough to be alive. Well, suddenly no men can hear their voices. They they love to run, they absolutely must to escape the gonzo porn men, and the creeps? No, not them – the pick up crews of men who are low status and are supposed to round up surplus women and girls to be taken away by the creeps. The "creeps" are supposed to just dump the surplus where they should die as expected, but they actually help them escape. The men really don't care as long as the "surplus" and the "used up" is gone and they don't feel bad about it.
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