An experiment gone terribly wrong
A local man, who has asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns, contacted The Contrarion to admit that he inadvertently created the patriarchy. As part of a team of researchers seeking to understand the space-time continuum, the man learned that although matter could not time travel, ideas could.
“In order to test the hypothesis that ideas could be sent into the past,” the man said, “I suggested the most extreme difference to society, the most ridiculous notion I could think of: a patriarchal society. We would be able to see if this idea, sent back to the beginning of humankind, had any impact on the present. Once we collected our data and noted the differences, we planned to return things to the way they were. No harm done, we thought.”
In fact, irreparable harm was done. The systemic oppression of women over millennia led to the technology that allowed for ideas to be sent back in time to cease existing.
“We thought it would be humorous to decide that men were more powerful in society than women just because, at a certain point in time, most men were stronger physically,” he said. “In my world, men and women were equal in every way. I mean, giving birth and bleeding for a week once a month takes strength, so it never really occurred to us that men were strong and women weren’t.” When asked whose last name is taken at the time of marriage, if both are equal, he furrowed his brow and shook his head slowly, as if to say, ‘who gives a fuck?’ “I’m the only one who remembers the world as it was,” he said. “I can’t undo what I’ve done. The women who were fundamental in developing the technology, in the best case scenario, didn’t pursue engineering, and in the worst case scenario, were never born.”
When asked about what happened to the other men on his team, he explained that their mothers, grandmothers, and so on didn’t make it, many of them due to the abortion of female fetuses or the lack of access to education that would allow them to better their lives. He added that it was a statistical anomaly that anyone made it and that he was unsure why he was still able to recall what had happened. Perhaps it’s the universe’s way of punishing him for the stupidest prank in the history of the world, he lamented. “It’s devastating to think that, in all of history, this is the closest to the equality of my world that your world has ever reached, yet the President of the United States was elected after bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. I can’t fathom how it is still being discussed whether women can drive in some parts of the world. Please apologize to all the women out there for me. I’m sorry for victim-blaming, the fact that there are victims at all, breastfeeding-shaming, the wage gap, and all the things you do because some man decided that’s what women should be like — especially Brazilian waxes!” he said as horror filled his eyes.
He explained that he got a Brazilian wax in order to better understand just what he had done and is still unable to sit comfortably.
“There’s more to be sorry for, I know there’s more, but I can’t — I’m just sorry for all of it,” he said while sobbing on my shoulder.
Photo by Alora Griffiths/The Ontarion