Even the Queen

In response to this story, I wanted to discuss the idea of the patriarchy and the idea of banding together to eliminate it. This story tells of a world in which menstruation is eliminated, and great strides are made in equality, a world that sounds like a personal haven to me. While this sounds perfect in my eyes, a group still exists that aims to free women from this new form of oppression. The story offers up the interesting position that while oppression may not exist in certain aspects, some people may still look for ways to fight it. The Cyclists in this story made a point to fabricate a reason for a scientific advance that women fought for a form of oppression, when actual women from a time before the shunt don’t see it this way at all. In this particular story, the origin of the cyclists is not revealed and as such we have no way of knowing if it began as an authentic women’s movement or not. While I find the position of the cyclists to be completely against what I would believe in that scenario, I feel that as long as an action is seen as wrong or rebellious in our society, people will continue to do it just to make a point. In terms of this specific issue, there are already some people who believe certain things about menstruation that align very closely with the cyclists’ ideas. While I agree that menstruation should be seen as less of an unmentionable thing, I still genuinely believe that it is a horrible bane to my existence and would pay large sums of money to never deal with it again, and as a woman I get to believe that. What I feel this story boils down to in terms of smashing the patriarchy and going against the norm is that the women’s movement is primarily about the right to choose, but is also about the right of a woman to have the ability to make an educated uninfluenced decision. The cyclists paint a pretty picture but don’t expose the whole truth in order to gain support, making them the real deceivers in the end.