Women in recent decades have clamored to get into social spaces traditionally dominated by men and associated with male power and privilege, because these women want to raise their own status to male levels. For example, women want to get on Facebook’s board of directors. By contrast, notice women’s lack of interest in becoming guards in men’s prisons.
Cryonics has a reputation (wrongly) as a rich white man’s social space, so why haven’t women wanted to colonize the cryonics community for status reasons? (For that matter, why haven’t we heard calls for more “diversity” and “vibrancy” in the cryonics movement from minorities’ spokespeople?) Instead cryonics acts like “female Kryptonite” much of the time.
You can go to Mike Darwin’s and the de Wolfs’ essay about cryonics hostile-wives to get about as much insight into the problem as I’ve read, but I don’t see any obvious way to turn this around so that the cryonics movement becomes more women-friendly. I’ve wondered if we can find a good model by studying new American religious movements in the 19th Century which attracted many women as early adopters, like Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism and Christian Science. Women even played roles in founding Adventism and Christian Science (Ellen White and Mary Baker Eddy, respectively), which makes their examples even more interesting because Western culture has traditionally not accepted women as religious authority figures.
The cryonics idea also has a fiction problem: Three novels I know of which portray cryonics or suspended animation positively all show a man who takes advantage of an underage girl as part of his plan for self-fulfillment, while disregarding the possibility that the girl upon reaching her majority might have other plans for her life. Will McIntosh’s story “Bridesicle” in Asimov’s magazine a few years ago shows an even more repulsive exploitation of women involving cryonics.
In other words, the cryonics movement would probably benefit by disavowing those kinds of stories and replacing them with ones which treat the womenfolk better.
Women in recent decades have clamored to get into social spaces traditionally dominated by men and associated with male power and privilege, because these women want to raise their own status to male levels. For example, women want to get on Facebook’s board of directors. By contrast, notice women’s lack of interest in becoming guards in men’s prisons.
Cryonics has a reputation (wrongly) as a rich white man’s social space, so why haven’t women wanted to colonize the cryonics community for status reasons? (For that matter, why haven’t we heard calls for more “diversity” and “vibrancy” in the cryonics movement from minorities’ spokespeople?) Instead cryonics acts like “female Kryptonite” much of the time.
You can go to Mike Darwin’s and the de Wolfs’ essay about cryonics hostile-wives to get about as much insight into the problem as I’ve read, but I don’t see any obvious way to turn this around so that the cryonics movement becomes more women-friendly. I’ve wondered if we can find a good model by studying new American religious movements in the 19th Century which attracted many women as early adopters, like Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism and Christian Science. Women even played roles in founding Adventism and Christian Science (Ellen White and Mary Baker Eddy, respectively), which makes their examples even more interesting because Western culture has traditionally not accepted women as religious authority figures.
The cryonics idea also has a fiction problem: Three novels I know of which portray cryonics or suspended animation positively all show a man who takes advantage of an underage girl as part of his plan for self-fulfillment, while disregarding the possibility that the girl upon reaching her majority might have other plans for her life. Will McIntosh’s story “Bridesicle” in Asimov’s magazine a few years ago shows an even more repulsive exploitation of women involving cryonics.
In other words, the cryonics movement would probably benefit by disavowing those kinds of stories and replacing them with ones which treat the womenfolk better.