STORY - New Man New Woman

Someone tweeted "Where are all the real men nowadays?"

This made me think a little. What was a real man, for a start? The same as a "New Man"? Or an "Old Man".

What about women? Is humanity sleepwalking into fatal passivity. I don't know. And I'm not qualified to speak. But I thought I'd write about it anyway.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 06.04.2012

New Man, New Woman

I had seen the posters in Athena of dark haired hunks cradling tiny babies in Athena, and spewed all over them with the best of them. Most girls I knew just cooed over them, revelling in what they considered to be a new masculinity.

The human race was going soft, I thought at the time as a fourteen year old boy, and still do. Only back then I was allowed to think it.

When the 2005 Gentrification of Humanity Act was passed with no opposition and the heavy sponsorship of many media outlets I knew it spelt the doom of our species. Only certain non-aggressive thought patterns were allowed; aggression was outlawed, aggressive thoughts were penalised.

Everyone had to be nice. No riots, no crime, no passion, no anger. Hence -no creativity, no impulsivity, no brilliance. In an inadvertent parody, all men were required by law to sleep at night inside these devices that resembled flowers, like neon blue and pink fuscias, in which subconscious brain activity was monitored every night, and suppressed with stern electronic measures if necessary. Up to and including virtualised lobotomy. Women had to put helmets over their head in which soft unambitious music was played for a regulation 8 hours every night.

Various folk tried to break the rules, to escape, to get away from the overwhelming, suffocating bland niceness that had blanketed the country. Some resisted by merely wistfully remembering days of rioting and social unrest in snatched moments of private brain time, others managed to set up diversionary areas of niceness in the brain as front for thoughts of evil.

To imagine ones darkside was risky, the minimum penalty being corrective treatment at a secure centre involving psycho-active hypnotics and powerful, disturbing aversion therapy. To realise the dark within, well, you were looking at full frontal lobe severance and the implantation of permanent regulatory electrodes; a walking death.

No-one of course was allowed to doe for their crimes. That would be too aggressive. They were just neutered.

Of course all sexual intercourse was redefined as rape, so only carefully regulated procreation of suitable couples was allowed. Possession of pornography was the only thing in society that attracted the death penalty, but this was so rarely applied because any kind of non nominal thinking was usually weeded out and cured long before this stage.

But when such executions did occur, they were public.

And so, humanity slumbered on to its own sleep, inoculated against innovating or saving itself, an apathetic sitting duck for any conceivable threat.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 06.04.2012