Book Review: Fair New World
By Wilbur Wormwood
Fair New World
, 1994, Lou Tafler, Backlash Books (a Canadian firm unrelated to The Backlash), currently out of print
1995 Seattle, WA - Imagine George Orwell writing 1984 in 1994, and you have the general idea behind Fair New World. Since Communism has collapsed everywhere except the Democratic party in the U.S., the only thing worth making fun of is sex roles, and this book does that with a vengeance.
The story involves a world composed of 3 nations. Melior, devoted to fairness at all costs, Feminania, devoted to female empowerment at any cost to men, and Bruteland, devoted to lowering the cost of getting laid, at the expense of all other considerations. You might describe these as the ideal worlds of Warren Farrell, Andrea Dworkin, and G. Gordon Liddy: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
The first portion is devoted to a portrayal of life in Feminania, where the Feminnny Party has used very cunning linguistics to eliminate all references to the male gender in the language. This had the effect of making these chapters hard to read; readaughters in place of reasons is one example that comes to mind. In Feminania, male nature is totally suppressed, the citizens live in state enforced denial of differences between the sexes. (What's been going on in real life anyway...)
Bruteland, on the other hand, is a place where the major difference between men and women is that men are considered to be sentient (albeit stupid) beings, and women aren't. Some unkind souls might think that this world view would find sympathy with a writer for The Backlash!, but I really find it just as awful as the previous option. You see, I have 7 sisters, most of whom I respect a great deal, and who can shoot a .45 better than I can...
Melior, the third country, is a place run by people who have taken lots of sensitivity training. If some of the Mythopathetic types got into politics, this is what you'd end up with. Everyone seems to be into one or another kind of Tao, (this may change, after all, that was Zen, this is Tao).
One of the best points of this book is to point out the hypocrisy of men and women thinking that they can live without each other. Bruteland buys female sex slaves from Feminania, while Feminania secretly buys most of its industrial products from Bruteland. As Warren Farrell points out, this kind of trade has been going on for centuries. Fair New World simply makes fun of the human condition, and maybe Melior points the way to a more humane (and boring) future.
