The Screens

The alarm on her personal screen sounded at 6:30 AM. Miriam Aviva reached for the screen, turned off the alarm, and checked the weather report. The screen told her to be happy, for today was a sunny day. She would not actually see the sun but she had been told it was going to be a beautiful day – so she was happy. Miriam rose from her bed and opened the curtains to her New York City apartment, looked out at the sweeping vista, took a deep breath filled with happiness and turned on the TV.

Several women appeared on the TV screen. They were angry. Very angry indeed. The world was not fair. Someone, somewhere had experienced a grave misfortune. Miriam had never met the woman that the women on the TV screen were talking about and commiserating with and over, but they told Miriam that she should be angry – so she was angry. The world teemed with over 7 billion strangers, but the particular stranger the TV women were talking about had been “disrespected”, and it was the task of these strangers on the TV screen to point out unfairness wherever they might find it to any of the 7 billion strangers willing to listen. Every woman watching this particular TV was angry, even furious. Miriam could feel the anger coming from all of the apartments of the other high rises facing hers. How dare he??!!

Miriam turned the volume to the TV down and opened the laptop on her combination dining and kitchen table to check her emails. She preferred the laptop screen to the personal screen that she carried around with her all day for this purpose. There in her in basket were several emails from friends that she had not seen in years. These emails told her to be sad, and to be careful while driving. It seems that another perfect stranger somewhere had suffered a terrible misfortune. Positive thoughts and healing energy were requested, so Miriam moved on from the anger of the TV screen to sending hopes and prayers and healing energy to the perfect stranger mentioned in the emails of the laptop screen. Then she stood from the table to go and get dressed for work.

Work, such as it was, was as an intern level position with one of the fashion houses. Though nearing 30, her career compensation was that of a college student’s. She loved being so close to the action in the fashion district and didn’t mind the poor pay. And why should she? Her trust fund provided for her needs. She was free to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world”, especially the sorrows of other young women.

Her closets were bursting with clothes, but nothing seemed to fit just right. I need to lose some weight, she said to herself as she had every morning since the 9^th grade, 15 years ago. Her personal screen had told her repeatedly that she was just perfect the way she was, that all she had to do was learn to love herself and all would be right with the world, but the mirror said otherwise. She was unable to reconcile these instructions. This caused her to be confused and frustrated. She felt the need to go shopping. Maybe she would go shopping during her lunch break.

She checked her personal screen for texts and voicemails. There were none.

Good. I hope to never hear from him again.  Since it had been nearly 3 years it would seem that this hope was likely to come to fruition. This told Miriam to be depressed. And when she was depressed and lonely she felt the urge to pleasure herself.  So she retrieved her laptop screen and surfed the sensual scenes of the web that would provide the necessary stimulation. The greatest city in the world! A city of 10 million people! And Miriam slept alone every night.

Who needs a husband and children? I LOVE my freedom!

Miriam turned off the TV screen, packed her laptop screen in her briefcase, fit the ear buds into her ears and the wire into her personal screen. With the flick of her thumb music from the personal screen filled her world. The music commanded Miriam to forget her loneliness, her struggle with her weight, and her dissatisfaction with her wardrobe and be happy, and so she was happy. Again.

On the trip down in the elevator there was a screen quietly extolling the benefits of living in New York City and in this building in particular. Neither Miriam nor any of the other occupants riding in the elevator heard that screen or spoke to each other. All were listening to the musical commands of their personal screens to be happy. All had slept alone last night. None of them had children. They lived in the greatest city in the world! At least that is what the screens told them. Thank goodness they were not living like those deplorables out in flyover land!

Miriam got off the elevator and almost made it to the street before realizing that she had not taken her medications, so she reversed her steps and headed back up to her apartment, her head filled with music and completely oblivious to the people around her as well as her surroundings. She looked down at her personal screen. On the top right was an image of sun and sunshine. It was a beautiful day, and the screen commanded her to be happy. She felt happy.

Miriam entered her apartment and headed for the medicine cabinet where her personality pills were stationed. All of her friends took personality pills. Each confessed this to the others in private over mimosas on Thursday night outings after work. Each swore their friends to secrecy. These were the worst kept secrets, ever. Miriam popped her pill into her mouth, drank a bit of water, and checked the mirror to see if she had smudged her makeup. She had not.

Back down the elevator and out onto the street, alone in her world of music Miriam walked the 8 blocks to the Fashion District. There she entered her building and rode up the elevator to the floor of her office having not said a single word to anyone from her apartment to her desk. She opened up her laptop screen, plugged in her power cable, and began to “work”. Four hours later she broke for lunch and came back to her desk, her personal screen and ear buds her only companion. They told her to be happy, as did her medications. So she was happy.

After work Miriam and her personal screen went to her health club. She walked on a machine that imitated the motions of climbing stairs for a half an hour, checking with the stair machine screen that kept track of her heart rate, never taking the ear buds from her ears. She left the health club and its stair stepping machine and headed back to her apartment and took the elevator. It never occurred to her that she could have taken the 40 flights of stairs up to her apartment. After all there was no screen in the stairwell to keep track of her heart rate!

Miriam showered, took another personality pill, turned on the TV screen, and plopped herself down on the couch for the evening. After the TV screen viewing marathon, she checked her personal screen for texts and emails. There were none.

Good, she said to herself and headed off to get ready for bed.

Miriam took in the stunning views from her 40^th floor apartment. How lucky am I! I live in the greatest city in the world! She then hopped into bed alone, set her alarm for the following morning and checked the weather report on her personal screen. The screen said it was going to rain tomorrow and that she should be sad. So Miriam was sad.

The End.

Who Owns Your Life?

Professor Stuart L’Chiam, M.D., J.D., PhD., & M.T.S.D.* walked calmly to the podium. The venue at which he was giving his talk – he hated the word speech and never read from a prepared text, preferring index cards inscribed with the ideas he hoped to cover – was the World Women’s Day gathering in Boston, Massachusetts. He scanned the audience of 5,000 hostile Feminists and smiled.

            “Good Morning!” Professor L’Chiam began. Not a sound came from the throng. “I shall begin my talk with a question, to be followed by a series of questions,” he said in a jovial tone.

            “Do women have the right to say “no” to sex?”
            The hall erupted.  It appeared with that one line, the professor would empty out the venue and be left talking to the custodians, but it only seemed that way as 500 or so women ran for the exits screaming and gnashing their teeth and gesticulating wildly with their hands, their middle finger raised at him in the universal sign of debasement and rage.

            After the enraged shouts died down Professor L’Chiam continued, “Of course women have the right to say “no” to sex! That was a silly question and I asked it so that I might get the silly response I have come to expect from the type of people that attend a “Women’s Day” gathering, as well as to remove the more insidious lunatics and goofballs among you. Now that they are gone, let us continue! 

            “So, of course women have the right to say no to sex! The explanation given by Feminists as to WHY women have that right is profoundly and deeply flawed. Ask any Feminist if she can refuse sex, or dismember a life growing within her, and the response will invariably be that it is “my body, my choice”. And that is a very, very unfortunate choice of words, for the rights that you possess are not limited to your body. The rights that you have are yours because you own your life! There is an important fundamental difference between ‘my body, my choice’ and ‘my life, my choice’, though thus far Feminists seem to be incapable of grasping the difference, or what deluded essay the phrase was coined in. I hope to lend them a hand intellectually”.

            The crowd had been quiet but was now starting to buzz.

            “What else do women have the right to say no, or yes, to?”

            The room went quiet again.

            “Do you have the right to eat what you wish?”

            Professor L’Chiam took a pregnant pause to let the audience fret over their individual weight. It didn’t take long. One woman stood up in the crowd and shrieked at the professor, “I do not exist to have my body judged by creeps like you!”

            “Ah, thank you for that, madam. Not the insult, mind you. That was highly improper. Of course you own your life and your emotions, but your right to your emotions ends where my emotional wellbeing begins. No, I thank you for pointing out that you own your life and with that comes the right to eat, or not eat, what you wish and that the use of force, of any kind and by any means, to govern your diet is improper and immoral. That would include government determining soda size at the local fast food restaurant, but let’s not get off track. We were doing so well.

            “Do men have the right to say ‘no’ ”?

            “ ‘No’ ” to what you slimy asshole?” exploded another member of the crowd. “We don’t have an appendage that we wish to penetrate and dominate you with!”

            “Oh, very well… I shall restate. Do men own their lives, as women do? Or is it only women that own their lives?”

            The hall went silent. Professor L’Chiam let the silence sink in. He looked around the room for several minutes, signaling to each woman that met his eyes to answer the question. Not one of the women in the audience responded to his prodding.

            “Well, since no one here is willing to state the obvious, I shall. Yes, men do own their lives. Now that I have made the critical assertion, are there any in attendance that wish to challenge that?”

            The hall went silent.

            “Well then, it seems that we have established that all human beings own their lives, and by extension they own their bodies. Your body does not own your life. Your life owns your body! But what does it mean to own your life? Do you own the air needed to sustain life? Or can some outside force, say the State, insist that this resource must be paid for – or else?”

            The silence in the hall was deafening. Professor L’Chiam was well known for stripping the bark off of silly and ill-considered belief systems, so the best cause of action was to say nothing for with him everything you said would certainly be used against your position.

            “No one has an opinion on this? Well, then it is good that I have an opinion. For the sake of brevity I shall try to keep it simple. Every single person in this room is consuming oxygen through the air. You are not taxed for the air. Presumably, because we all need the air we breathe to live.

            “What about food? Isn’t food the equivalent of air?”

            More silence. The women in this hall came together to encourage each other’s grievances against men, not to discuss food and air.

            “Since we seem to agree that each and every human being owns his or her life and that right is absolute, and that life is sacrosanct, it then follows that each and every person owns the results or production of his or her life. You know, the idea of private property? After all, if one does NOT own the production, efforts, and results of our lives how can we possibly believe that we own our own life? If we do not have the right to our work then we do not own our lives. If we do not own our lives then we do not have rights – including the right to say “No” to anything. The ownership of our own life is an absolute. Either you have it or you do not have it. Does anyone here wish to dispute this assertion?”

            “Can you get to the point, professor?” said one of the event’s organizers, as the crowd was clearly not appreciating having their feet tacked to the base of their positions.

            “Oh, yes, yes. I am getting there. We seem to have agreed that we, humanity, must have air to breathe, food to eat, and that we own our lives. Breathing the air, the consumption of which we have not made any effort to pay for, is not subject to confiscation by others. We have the right to our next breath without interference. And yet we do not have the right to our next meal. We know this because if you were to work at growing food our society would countenance the seizing - by force - of a certain portion of that food as “taxes”.

            “What the hell are you talking about?”

            “Oh, I think I have been more than clear. Every person here is breathing away and freely consuming the oxygen in this room without interference from other individuals or groups of individuals, such as governments. And this is so even though the air is not something that is a result of the efforts of the life you own. Yet everyone here, well, except me, is quite comfortable with the theft of the production of the lives of people that we have already determined own their individual life, and that society may employ force agents to seize the production of our lives, such as food that people have grown, food that people need to live just as much as the air they breathe, that the people have produced with the life that they own.”

            “What??!! What about hungry people?”

            “Are hungry people more deserving of food that they did not produce than are aroused men of sex they did not negotiate for?”

            “Are you comparing the right to food with the right to have sex, professor?”

            “Sharp as a tack! Yes. I am suggesting that other lives, lives that do not own your life, have no more right to the food you grew in your garden or the furniture you built in your workshop or the music you composed in your home than they have to your body - because you own your life, and this ownership of life is an absolute.”

            “Now let’s move on to the human male erection,” Professor L’Chiam tried to sneak in for effect while the crowd roared its disapproval. The more emotional and unstable of the audience, and there were many, were streaming for the exits.

           

           

To be continued…

An Unauthorized Erection

An Unauthorized Erection

Herb and Maude sat in front of the Government issued “internet screen.” Well, everybody still used the term “internet” even though there were no longer independent and unauthorized servers. The Free Femdom party had dismantled that system more than a generation ago. People had long forgotten the pastime of surfing the web and using social media. No one would dare to mention the words “social media” as it was that medium that gave the Fems, as The Party was now known, unprecedented efficiency in destroying the other political parties as well as any nascent upstarts.

Things had settled down in the United States. Everyone still called the country that, the United States, even though the Fems had eliminated all state governments immediately after coming to power, except for Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, the rebel states that had successfully seceded.

Herb caught his biometric bracelet on the recliner and dropped the remote control to the floor. While they had no choice about what channel they were going to watch, they still had control over the volume to some extent. While they could not turn the “internet screen” off – it was always on like some modern hearth around which people could gather - they could turn it down enough so that they would not have to yell. Herb groaned under the weight of his enormous bulk barely able to retrieve the remote but eventually doing so, his body exhausted from the effort. If people were overweight in the early part of the 21st century, they were nothing short of whoppers in the middle of the century. The Fems had encouraged people to eat and drink as much as they wished to end what was then known as “fat shaming.” The Founding Fems were all huge women and wanted everyone to know the joys that their ponderous bulk provided - so food production, such as it was, became a government command and control industry.

After catching his breath for 30 minutes from the strain of retrieving the remote Herb felt himself drifting off when an explosion rocked the front door, and four impossibly large and armed young women stampeded through the front door of their modest small house with their guns trained on Herb.

“Get on the floor, now!” shouted one intruder.

“Show me your hands, now!!” shrieked another.

Herb did his best to arise from the recliner enough to be able to lie on the floor as commanded, but he didn’t have the stamina. After all, he had just retrieved the remote from the floor! What did these women expect?

Two of the massive intruders were now upon him, one on each side. Together they counted, “1, 2, 3!” and each pulled on Herb’s upper arm to get him out of the chair. With some effort, they had Herb up, and before they could throw him to the floor, their commander barked an order to them.

            “Cuff him and leave him standing. How the hell are we going to get him up off the floor if we can’t get him out of a chair?”

Herb was still witless and in shock. Maude had collected herself and asked, from the comfort of her recliner, “What is going on? Why are you arresting my husband?!”

“Your husband is under arrest for violation of the Federal Penal Code. He has just had an unlawful and unauthorized erection!”

“What the hell are you talking about!” said Maude, near hysteria. An unauthorized erection was a capital offense. “We were each sitting in our recliners and watching the screen! He’s almost 30 years old! He hasn’t had an erection in years, and that’s if he ever had one!!!”

“Biometrics don’t lie ma’am. Increased blood flow to his penis was detected. Has he been taking his medication?”

“Of course, he has! Look at him! Does he look like he has any testosterone in his body? Examine his testicles! I am sure they are no bigger than almonds!”

“We are taking him into custody. Trained professionals will examine him.”

And with that, the four massive police officers helped poor Herb waddle the 30 steps to the police van. The police, like everybody else, no longer used cars. No one could get in or out of a car anymore.

Their family attorney, Gloria, had just met with the chief of police and now sat down next to Mauve at the police station. She came more as a friend than their attorney. Herb would need the services of an experienced criminal attorney. His very life hung in the balance.

“Maude. This is very serious," said Gloria as she reached for the donuts and Twinkies that were available in all public buildings. "Is there anything here that I should know?”

“What?” Maude said incredulously, as she too, helped herself to a donut. “Of course not! We were just sitting down to watch the screen. Herb had dropped the remote and had to retrieve it from the floor. The exertion of it all must have set off his bracelet.” Maude was referring to the wrist monitor that every citizen wore 24 hours a day. The government collected all of the data that the human body produced – breath, heart, blood pressure, hormone, sweat, secretions, and excretions. The government even monitored the amount of gas each citizen passed each day and analyzed the content.

“Well, I saw the data set that Herb’s bracelet sent in. There is no question about it. Herb was experiencing increased blood flow to his penis and a rise in serum testosterone.” Gloria paused and took a deep breath. “You were in incredible danger. You could have been raped or sodomized!”

“What the hell are you talking about Gloria? You have known both of us our whole lives. Does Herb look capable of producing an erection to you? Does he look like he has any testosterone to worry about?!”

What little the two women knew about erections was from their sex education classes in grade and high school. They knew that during the era just before they were born men would regularly penetrate women with their penises and that invariably this would lead to significant injury for women, unplanned children, and death during childbirth. The government had taken on the job of cloning and breeding children and since “all sex is rape” male children were chemically neutered, and adult men were required to maintain the ingestion of chemicals that would render them safe for women. While considering all of this each of the women consumed another donut.

Gloria thought about it for a minute. No, Herb certainly had all of the presentations of micro phallic status—a penis that never developed and was too soft and small to do any damage. He had no muscle mass, he was the shape of a pear, and he did not have any facial hair. He looked just like any other woman or man.

“Does Herb have any pubic or body hair?”

“Very little. Essentially none. There is nothing masculine or manly about Herb. He is as safe as a woman to be with. He has never approached me for sex—not even a kiss. I don’t think he has ever touched me except perhaps when we bump into each other in the hallway. The hallway is kind of small.”

“Ok. Good. Well, that testimony will sure help. Can you imagine living in a world where men constantly got erections? Where the passion so aroused them that they would want to penetrate a woman’s orifices? How did womankind survive such animals?”

“I am telling you that Herb is not like that. He doesn’t do anything. He is not interested in anything. All Herb wants to do is eat and watch the screen. He is the perfect gentleman. He has no ambitions. No desire to accumulate and use financial and other material resources to manipulate me or anyone else into having sex; and no interest in having children. In fact, he has no resources or interests of any kind and is content with what the government gives him. He is a perfect example of a non-aggressive male. Trust me; I have looked for the signs. But I would bet my life that Herb has never masturbated.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Gloria. “Here, have another donut. Ya know, before the Fems took over we had a man, a sitting president, in the White House no less, that was masturbating.”

“Oh, my! How do you know this?”

“I heard it from a judge I used to clerk for. Not only was he masturbating, but he wasn’t thinking about his wife! She caught him using pornography!”

“You are kidding me!”

“No. I am not kidding you! This really happened! Can you imagine? You give yourself to a man, and he still does that? Disgusting.” Gloria shook her head.

“Wow, that’s hard even to believe.”

“Can you believe that we tolerated that kind of disrespect? Well, keep in mind that before the government took over cloning and breeding, the very existence of mankind depended on erections and penetration. We did what we could to manage that nightmare, but it all became just too much. Once the Fems came to power and it became obvious that men could not control themselves, that there were not enough resources to provide for everyone, they did what they had to do. We have not been troubled by erections since.”

“Oh, thank goodness for that,” said Maude as she nodded in agreement.

Gloria nodded back, and the motion of their nodding and their combined weight of nearly 800 lbs caused the bench they were sitting on to protest by squeaking loudly. They stopped nodding.

“Yes. We cannot tolerate men that do not respect us.”

“I completely agree.”

“And we cannot go back to having to take care of children while dealing with a man and his erections.”

“Perish the thought.”

“I mean, think about it. What is the difference between saying something sexually disrespectful about a woman and thinking something sexually disrespectful?”

“Not a thing!”

“What could be more disrespectful to women by a man than for him to fantasize about them and experience sexual gratification—even from his hand—from them without the woman’s permission???!!”

“I can’t imagine! Did that sort of thing go on?”

“Are you kidding! Our mothers had to deal with men that got erections several times a week!”

“Thank goodness for the Fems.”

“Oh yes, thank goodness. Now we are perfectly respected. And we can eat as much as we want without shame.”