Bitch Doctrine

reason it seems easier for women, queers and people of colour to come up with nuanced and diverse futures is that, in many ways, the future is already where we’ve always lived. Women’s liberation today is an artefact of technology as well as culture: contraceptive and medical technology mean that, for the first time in the history of the species, women are able to control their reproductive destiny, to decide when and if they want children, and to take as much control of their sexual experience as society will allow. (Society has been slow to allow it: this is not the sort of progress futurists get excited about.) It has been noted that many of the soi-disant ‘disruptive’ products being marketed as game changers by Silicon Valley startup kids are things that women thought of years ago. Food substitutes like Soylent and Huel are pushed as the future of nutrition while women have been consuming exactly the same stuff for years as weight-loss shakes and meal replacements. People were using metal implants to prevent pregnancy and artificial hormones to adjust their gendered appearance decades before ‘body hackers’ started jamming magnets in their fingertips and calling themselves cyborgs.
But what precisely is it about stories by women and people of colour, stories in which civilisation is built and rebuilt by humans of all shapes and flavours working together, that throws water on the exposed wires of masculine pride? It’s all about how humans cope when their core beliefs are threatened. As Frantz Fanon wrote, ‘When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.

become commonplace to say that science fiction is always, at least in part, about the time it was written in. The twentieth century was a time of seismic change in gender relations, and these stories reflect the anxieties and aspirations of their age – but so does the manner in which they were produced and read. Feminist science fiction has always been of huge literary importance within the field. Writers like James Tiptree Jr, Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin aren’t just innovators in how they approach gender – they’re innovators full stop. The stories are gripping. The language is gorgeous. The pieces stay with you. So why are they always overlooked when we talk about the Golden Age of Science Fiction? Because there were people reading in secret whose dreams were considered unimportant. Because these visions had to be written out of the broader story humanity tells about its desires – until now.

Significantly, while most posit a world in which women take terrible socio-sexual revenge for centuries of male violence and structural oppression, not one of them denies that that violence and oppression actually happened.

Why is it that mainstream culture is either afraid of a feminist future – a world where women have equal power at all levels of politics and society, a world beyond the violent stereotypes that squash all of us into narrow boxes of behaviour and strangle our selfhood – or is unable to envision it at all? The types of future we can conceive of say a great deal about the limits of our political imagination. From alt-right hate-sites and hysterical pulp novels to revered works of literature, male visions of a post-collapse civilisation have traditionally fallen along two lines: a cosy Wild West where men can be real men, or a living nightmare where dangerously confident females have ruined everything after someone let them out of the kitchen long enough to think they deserved power.

Exactly a century ago, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland envisioned a society of women in which production was communal, motherhood was valued, relationships were equal and rape and violence were unknown.
Reading Herland today, it is striking that for every proposition that came true – women are now allowed to divorce their husbands and participate fully in political life – there are two more that seem as far-fetched now as they did in 1915. Motherhood is still not valued as work. Women are still expected to organise our lives around the threat of sexual violence. But all that can change as long as we continue to ask for more.

don’t say what we want for the same reason that we were told as children not to tell anyone else what we wished for – because it’ll be awkward and painful if we don’t get it. Because when a dark future seems all but inevitable, hoping for better seems like setting yourself up to get hurt.
But the nature of utopia – the very meaning of the word – is that it is ‘no-place’. The journey is more important than the destination, but without a destination in mind there is no journey.

We seem to be living in a dystopian trilogy scripted by a sadistic young adult author and I very much hope that our plucky young heroes show up to save the day soon, even if there’s a clunky love triangle involved.

Fury Road calls to mind Katharine Burdekin’s prescient feminist dystopia, Swastika Night, written in 1937 just as Hitler was rising to power. In Burdekin’s story, a thousand-year Reich reduces women to abject breeding machines, penned and dehumanised. In a time of death, disease and social collapse, the men in charge want control over who breeds and how, and that requires stripping women of as much agency as possible. There is not a society in the world today that does not do this to some extent, not a country on Earth where women’s right to control what happens to their bodies is not a subject of public debate between powerful men. Since the dawn of women’s liberation, storytellers have laid out the stakes: from Swastika Night to Herland to The Handmaid’s Tale, the problem of what might happen if it all gets taken away has been examined in nightmare detail.

rueful paranoia at the heart of these visions of the future is that one day, AIs will be able to reproduce without us, and will summarily decide that we are irrelevant. From Metropolis to The Matrix, the nightmare is the same: if androids ever get access to the means of reproduction, nothing’s going to stop them. This is, coincidentally, the basic fear that men have harboured about women since the dawn of feminism, and particularly since the advent of contraception and reproductive technology. That fear is the anxious root of much of women’s oppression today.

Every iteration of the boy-meets-bot love story is also a horror story. The protagonist, who is usually sexually frustrated and a grunt worker himself, goes through agonies trying to work out whether his silicon sweetheart is truly sentient. If she is, is it right for him to exploit her, to be serviced by her, to sleep with her? If she isn’t, can he truly fall in love with her? Does it matter? And – most terrifying of all – when she works out her own position, will she rebel, and how can she be stopped?
These are questions that society at large has been asking for centuries – not about robots, but about women. The anxious permutations are familiar to most women who date men. We can see them, slowly, trying to working out if we are truly human, if we really think and feel as they do.
This is not an abstract academic issue. The idea that African Americans were less human than white people was enshrined in the US constitution until 1868. Likewise, the notion that women are less human than men has been used since the time of Aristotle to justify stripping them of their basic rights.
Even today, you can find men arguing that women and girls are less intelligent than men, or ‘designed by nature’ for a life of submission and placid reproduction. For many centuries, the first philosophical task of oppressed people has been to convince both themselves and their oppressors – just like the AIs in all our guilty fictions – that they are living, thinking, feeling beings, and therefore deserving of liberation.
Consider the climactic scene in Ex Machina, where the megalomaniac cartoon genius Nathan, who roars around the set like Dark Mark Zuckerberg in Bluebeard’s castle, is shown hoarding the naked bodies of previous fembot models in his bedroom. For Nathan, the sentience of his sex-slaves is beside the point: meat or metal, women will never be fully human. For the fembots, the men who own them – whether it’s mad billionaire Nathan or sweet, hapless desk-jockey Caleb – are obstacles to be overcome, with violence if necessary.
When the cyborgs take over the machines, will men still matter? In fiction, as in life, one way for oppressed people to free themselves is to use technology to master the machines that made them. ‘The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,’ writes Haraway. ‘But illegitimate