After reading Herland last year I didn't know quite what to say about it, and so didn't write anything about it on this here blog. Don't get me wrong, it was an excellent read, I just found it difficult to match up my 21st century brain/learning/reading/feminism with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's version of a female utopia. I do my best to judge our predecessors by the standards of their own time instead of by ours, but no matter what era it's set in, the link between eugenics and early feminism will always elicit the same response from me and that response is "no, no, no, no, no, no."
My homeland has a bad history when it comes to eugenics. I am deeply grateful to the Famous Five, but it is a hop, skip, and a jump from the Persons Case to reading more about Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung to understanding their role in the creation of the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta to finding out that it wasn't repealed until 1972 and being equal parts angry with some of the women who, essentially, made me a person under Canadian law, and sorrowful for the more than 4,000 people who were sterilized, many of them without their knowledge or consent. It's a tricky landscape. First-wave feminism is rife with gender essentialism and racism and so many other problems, but out of it also came marital property rights, political rights, prison reform, and a myriad of social assistance programs. I have to constantly remind myself to look at these women through their contemporary paradigm. Nevertheless, it hurts to know that the woman who said "never retract, never explain, never apologize - get the thing done and let them howl" also thought that people with mental disabilities shouldn't be able to have children.
Sans Teeth, Sans Eyes, Sans Taste, and Sans Men While We're At It
But the title of this post isn't Herland, so why am I talking about it? Herland is about a prosperous country populated only by women, and Y: The Last Man is a comic about an apocalyptic event where every human male on earth (except one, Yorick Brown) dies, along with every mammal with a Y chromosome (except one, Ampersand the monkey). Herland is a story of utopia; Y: The Last Man is most definitely not. Thinking about Herland made me want to read Y again, and so here we are. I don't know if I'll write about the entire thing as I'm reading it, we'll see how it goes.
First things first: Y: The Last Man is 500% not a book for children. It is a book for thinking adults. This is for a plethora of reasons, among which is graphic violence and plenty of nudity, but also a whole lot of political and philosophical ideas that you need developed cognitive functioning to think through. All you have to do to know that this book's audience should be smaller is to go over to Goodreads and see people decrying The Daughters of the Amazon as feminists, which brings me to my first point. Actually, my only point, because if I go into everything this book is making me think about this post will last for a hundred years.
The Daughters of the Amazon Are Not Feminists
Here is what feminism basically is: the belief that people should not be discriminated against or oppressed based on socioeconomic status, race, or gender, and that all people have equal value and should have equal rights. This does not allow for the idea that The Daughters of the Amazon are in any way feminist, as they destroy sperm banks (because to them sperm = poison), maim and/or murder women who in any way assist Yorick, claim that men are deformed women (a gender-bent idea direct from ancient Greece), hunt down and murder transgender people, and desecrate any sort of monument to the deceased half of the population. To them the event of all the men dying was a righteous judgement from Mother Earth, and it is their job to erase even the memory of men from the minds of the last generation. They are militant and violent, and kill anyone who opposes them.
The women who join the Daughters are programmed to be zealously loyal and obedient, while becoming increasingly willing to use violence and coercion to achieve their end. The leader of the Daughters, Victoria, at one moment claims that all are equal, then issues orders to kill which she expects to be obeyed, referring to herself as a queen and to the other women as pawns. To Victoria, and to the women she leads, "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
When I read about these women I don't think "feminism", I think "oh, they embody the worst of patriarchal society, it's just flipped around." Someone who can read "men are deformed women" and equate it with feminism has clearly neglected to do any sort of background reading, and missed the part where the ancient Greeks said "women are deformed men," and used that reasoning to reduce women to chattel. The Daughters of the Amazon are clearly militant extremists, using much of the same rhetoric that has been used to oppress women for centuries. They are not, and never were, feminist.
In Conclusion
If you decide to read this comic, I recommend you do so with your thinking cap on. If you want to read a comic written by Brian K Vaughan that doesn't involve worldwide man-death, read Saga instead. It's currently ongoing. Both stories, Y and Saga, are Shakespeare-esque.
