We are living through the golden years of apocalyptic storytelling , and nothing is resistant from dystopia fever – even sex . In fact , the sexapocalypse has been with us since at least the twenty-four hours of Hieronymous Bosch , a fifteenth 100 Dutch painter famous for show the end of days in vast canvasses packed with tiny figures enjoy flakey sexual scenarios . More recently , novels like The Handmaids Tale and comic Y the Last Man advise that frightening gender scenarios will play a major role in our dark future .
But is the sexapocalypse really something to dread ? Or could it actually usher in a new earned run average without the old sexual hangups and subjugation that many of us struggle with today ? We involve a group of courageous scientist and skill fable writers what they think the coming sexapocalypse will convey .
A sexapocalypse can be many thing , from a scenario where one gender is wiped out or humans can no longer multiply , to stories about dystopian sexual hedonism ( think Logan ’s Run or Brave New World ) . Or it could be some event that completely transform everything we believe about what it means to be virile and female . No matter what , the sexapocalypse is trusted to show in a strange unexampled macrocosm where sexual urge is changed incessantly .
In the former 1980s , cyber-terrorist author Rudy Ruckerpublished a bizarre novel about math and alien encroachment called The Sex Sphere . In it , humanity is nearly destroyed when the planet is encroach upon by aliens who are made of nothing but sex variety meat , and on the face of it exist alone to latch onto human beings and have constant sex with us . finally there ’s a showdown with a giant vagina dentata , and everything returns to normal . So naturally , I turn to Rucker for a sense of what a sexapocalypse might look like . animate by Bosch ’s work , which he pronounce “ did n’t look like much sport , ” he wrote this hallucinatory verbal description :
A simple idea is that any part of your physical structure can burgeon forth a penis or unfold up into a vagina . “ We just shake hands . ” Telepathy could be a kind of sexual matter , too—-after all , a bad part of sex is receive into a deep feeling of synch with your collaborator . The synch view is one reason why euphony can seem so sexual . So on sexapocalypse Clarence Shepard Day Jr. the Big Beat starts up and everyone ’s rock it . We melt into urarthritis of sperm and roly - poly egg . We worm into the ground . Ma Earth swell up up like a milkweed seedpod . She splits open and our lead - children impetus to the star topology . Here we come !
So this sexapocalypse , which does n’t sound too unfit , offers us Earth and the stars or else of spirituality and Heaven .
Sci Curious , the nom de plumeof a neuroscientist who meditate physiology , facetiously suggest something similar to Rucker ’s vision . “ I think it would involve giant genitalia waving everywhere , ” she say . But then , on a more serious Federal Reserve note , she speculated about a earth where a individual ’s sexuality could have nothing to do with what they do sexually :
I reckon a sociological sexapolcalypse that involves the complete dissociation between biological sexual activity and gender . It would change the concept of biologic sex for many people , as well as what intimate intercourse means , in very fundamental way . So much of modern society is based on Assumption of Mary about sex that to take away its data link with biologic sexual practice would completely falsify how fellowship functions .
In heart and soul , a sexapocalypse could show in a world where nobody makes presumptuousness about you — or what you like to do in layer — based on your crotch .
Many of the masses I talk to about sexapocalypse saw a distinctly political side to the theme . David Williams , author ofnear - hereafter technothriller The Mirrored Heavens , summed this up succinctly :
Sexapocalypse is what Red State America thinks will happen when jovial marriage gets legalized , contraception and sex male erecticle dysfunction are in every school , women can do what they want with their bodies , anything consensual is nobody else ’s business , the invisible sky fairy gets seriously vexed , and we finally direct past all these issues - that - shouldn’t - be - issues and get on with the business of make the future real .
Tor Books editor Liz Gorinskyoffered a in truth blue sexapocalyptic vision that plays on some of the same politics that Williams alludes to .
Gorinsky speculated in email :
Like all the best human - borne apocalypses , the sexapocalypse stands the best chance of crossing the peak of no issue if it becomes a battleground for an extant acculturation warfare . As some of today ’s more vernacular STIs become sincerely omnipresent , pro - abstinence force will arrive at traction in mainstream ( non - religious ) civilization . As they become ever more captive on reform the sexually combat-ready , they will eventually resort to tactics such as commit sleeper agents into gender doll mill lineage to exchange their genital technology with obscure ballistic or castrative weaponry , or flooding self - update app front - end for smartphone - steer teledildonics with viruses that cause irregular irruption of internal bruising — or risky . Once the first moving ridge of sabotage comes to light , the partners and loved I of the afflicted will assay retaliation in kind : armed massacres of snuggle parties , promise anchor ring with remotely deploy pinprick bearing contagious biological payloads , and the corresponding . The opening for escalation in this scenario is ego - manifest , but what will unfeignedly be surprising is the part of the global universe that will care enough to take mercenary action against one side or the other within a yr of onset .
Now there is a scenario I ’d like to see explore in a scientific discipline fable novel .
Sexapocalypse politics go beyond conservative vs. bountiful brush , however . University of Illinois anthropologist Kathryn Clancy , who read medicine and sexuality , told me that her “ sexapocalypse to lionise ” will descend when gender diagonal is drain out of medical study . She imagines a world where :
Gender prejudice no longer influences pharmaceutic priorities or federal funding , and when we accept a wider version of normal variation in human shape and function . Issues like why inglorious women have higher deathrate rates for tit Crab , or why postpartum hemorrhage seems to strike so indiscriminately yet is so deadly , or the black box of transgender procreative wellness , all would be resolved before curative for erectile dysfunction or baldness . Finally , we would do away with all the underfunded , misunderstood syndrome – polycystic ovarian syndrome , chronic fatigue syndrome and premenstrual syndrome , to name just a few – and start to key out the descent of these clusters of symptom .
In some fashion , Clancy ’s goals for the post - sexapocalyptic world are quite humble . She simply desire diseases and syndromes that affect women to be give as much tending and backing as those that touch on man . Maybe once Sci Curious get rid of the connection between grammatical gender and sex , we ’ll be closer to that end .
Mara Hvistendahl , source of Unnatural Selection : opt Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men , reason that “ the sexapocalypse is already here . ” She suppose :
Across East , South , and Central Asia and in parts of Eastern Europe , females are rapidly becoming a minority . Thanks to sex selective abortion , countries like China , Armenia , Vietnam , India , and Albania now seeover 11 boy bear for every 10 girls . In some Asiatic cities the gender ratio at birth is as high as three to two . As one previous Isle of Man I met in a palmy Chinese Ithiel Town put it : “ Everyone has boys now . ”
Sexapocalypse is not good for woman . As females become the scarcer sex , furiousness , social instability , andcrime ear . “ supernumerary ” men from sex selection red-hot spots resort to buy wives from poor countries . And a change in the symmetry between the gender alters the nature of that other character of sex as well .
For those in the sex craft , sexapocalypse is great for byplay . ( Chinese sex worker Hooligan Sparrow hassuggested as much on her blog . ) For gay man - especially those in the loo who confront pressure from their families to marry – the grammatical gender dissymmetry is probably a good thing . But for heterosexual men who take for allow the existence of a potential checkmate , it ’s too belatedly .
From Hvistendahl ’s perspective , we ’ve already created a scientific discipline fictional sexapocalypse , using unexampled technologies that permit parents to weed out undesirable daughters before they ’re acquit .
The sexapocalypse could mean liberation or devastation , depending on how you look at it . Either mode , we ’ll never be able to think of man and women the same agency again .
anthropologyFuturismNeuroscienceScience
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