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Fascinating. A gender rift among the prepper online communities, because men evidently didn't believe women's particular issues such as birth, birth control,  etc. should be including in prepper preparation for the end of it all.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/reddit-preppers-sub-women-splitting-off-twoxpreppers.html

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.... Inevitably, posters started to make direct comparisons with how prepping was generally discussed on the other, larger board. “It gets a bit boring when it’s all about mres, guns and building a fortress. I’m about making from scratch, making do with less, and building community,” one user said. “I will never, ever, shoot my neighbor for stealing a cabbage. I’ll invite them over for cabbage soup and show them how to dig/mulch/weed next months cabbage. And I’ll do that today, before it gets to the stage that my neighbors need to steal my cabbage.” It’s a fair distinction: On r/preppers, you’re more likely to find members warning one another never to show their stash of supplies and weapons to neighbors or acquaintances for fear of becoming targets. In response to an article about what Ukrainians took with them while fleeing, some r/preppers found fault with those who carried “nonessential” items. The discussions on r/TwoXPreppers drift, however, toward a conception of “survival” that includes community and entertainment and pleasure. Even when it comes to shared interests like stockpiling food, the focus is less on brute calories (or Spam and cans of beans) than on how to maintain the ability to eat meals that you’d actually want to eat. Another topic of comparison was child care, which one poster said “seems to be totally dismissed in most prepping conversations,” even though one lesson of the pandemic should be otherwise.


Looked at from this emerging angle, where people discuss which children’s books to pack in a bug-out bag or which movies to store in a portable device, “prepping” starts to drift awfully close to “living.” The users are aware of this, and skeptical of some of the bright lines the mostly male preppers draw between “normal” life and the emergencies they’re readying themselves for. It’s a fascinating question: Is the objective of prepping to create some kind of continuity with life as it is ordinarily lived, or to adjust (violently, if necessary) to a jagged new reality characterized via pared-down survival measures? One poster suggested that many of what the main forum considered SHTF scenarios weren’t too far off from what people who have lived in poverty have grown up experiencing. Whereas the one group tends to treat the conditions one preps for as exceptional, the other prepares for “Tuesday, not doomsday.” “For many men, prepping is a fantasy of stepping up to occupy a role which has been all but erased from the modern world,” a different poster observed. “For women, on the other hand, prepping is a fantasy of not being badly inconvenienced by disasters as we continue in the roles that we’re already occupying.”

Some examples of this expanded definition are more extreme than others. One person suggested that all sorts of things women routinely do, from clipping coupons to buying kids shoes in bigger sizes, count as prepping. So, for that matter, do meals with friends: “Social skills are called skills for a reason, and they’re vital to navigating hostile situations and people. Every time you organise a boozy brunch, you’re upping your chances of survival.” ....

 

 

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54 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Fascinating. A gender rift among the prepper online communities, because men evidently didn't believe women's particular issues such as birth, birth control,  etc. should be including in prepper preparation for the end of it all.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/reddit-preppers-sub-women-splitting-off-twoxpreppers.html

The typical prepper will find that A.) a diet comprised entirely of meat is going to cause some serious intestinal distress, and B.) life will become a race between running out of gunpowder and running out of wildlife once you have killed and eaten all the mammals in your chosen prep area.  Preppers have some remarkable, narrowly-focused ideas on what constitutes survival.

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No problem.  They can just roll in with their guns and gut the women's gardens and chickens, and then enslave to do it all over again.  Isn't that the prepper's real Dream after all.

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From Margaret Atwood's address upon the occasion of receiving the the sixth annual Christopher Hitchens Prize. 

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" .... The other person who would doubtless be amazed on this occasion would be Christopher Hitchens himself, not only by the fact that there is a prize in his name (he would be the first to make some bad-taste quip about that; “Hitch kitsch” springs to mind) but also that I, in particular, have been awarded it. “What, her?” he might well have exclaimed. I suspect him of having taken a dim view of me, mouthy colonial female from the uncool sticks that I was, or am. “Stay in your lane, Margaret,” I am sometimes told, to which I can only reply, “What is my lane?” Taking the positive view: Perhaps these reprimands from others are not reprimands at all, but well-meant warnings. They see me wandering fecklessly out into traffic, oblivious to the danger, and want to help me avoid being squashed. They must have been muttering secret incantations, too; many attempts have been made, but I remain unsquashed.

I was never told to stay in my lane by Christopher Hitchens, I hasten to add. He, too, did not know what his lane was, and wouldn’t have stayed in it if he did. We had at least that in common: a failure to recognize lanes. It goes with a disrespect for the fences around the corrals where the sacred cows are kept, though they keep changing the cows, I notice. Hitch would have noticed that too.

On one memorable occasion, I shared a stage with Christopher Hitchens. It was in a tent at the U.K. literary festival known as Hay-on-Wye. As the canvas walls flapped in the obligatory pelting rainstorm, and as smoke from Hitch’s conveyor belt of cigarettes swirled around me, I did my best to stand my ground, whatever it was. Meanwhile, Hitch did a kind of verbal sword dance around me. I can’t remember what we were supposed to be debating—I hope it was not The Moral and Social Obligations of the Modern Fiction Writer, or Is There Such a Thing as a Woman’s Novel—but I do recall the skill with which he debated it. I refrained from saying, “Christopher Hitchens goes hoppity, hoppity, hoppity, hop,” although he did, in a manner of speaking, narrowing his eyes through the blue fumes he’d exhaled as he took wicked aim at the rhetorical targets he himself had just erected. It was bracing. It was a workout. And, dare I say, it was a draw. Or as close as you could ever come to a draw, with Hitchens.

At least he didn’t accuse me of hurting his feelings, nor did I accuse him of hurting mine. Having feelings was not a thing back then. We would not have admitted to owning such marshmallow-like appendages, and if we did have any feelings, we’d have considered them irrelevant as arguments. Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. If they were, men who murder their wives because they’re feeling cranky that day would never get convicted. ....

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/04/margaret-atwood-hitchens-prize-speech/629443/

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