Friday, September 07, 2007

Unfortunately, There Are No Flying Cars Here

I was having a discussion today (wouldn't call it an argument; that requires a certain measure of coherence) when the other person involved (in the middle of a long, uninteresting monologue) said something along the lines of "in every society in history, men and women have had different roles."

Allow me to introduce you to this marvelous new thing we're living in. I like to call it "the future." Unlike every other society in history, we have iPods!

What's that, you say? You don't believe technological advancement has anything to do with societal change? What do you think democracy is, then? An unfortunate reversion from humanity's natural state of rule by whoever had the luckiest grandparents?

Sure, maybe "in every society in history," men and women really did have meaningfully different societal roles. Anything's possible. Why, exactly, are you holding that up as some kind of ideal? This is America. We believe in progress.

Here in the marvelous world of the future, most major forms of economic activity don't depend on how hard you can stab things.

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