I've been feeling a bit nostalgic for mid-10s podcasts these days, so I'm dredging back up all the old audio dramas and miscellaneous that I used to listen to circa 2011-2017. Of minor note among those has been Moonlight Audio Theatre. I don't think I realized back when I was initially listening to it, since I subscribed to it while I was also subscribing to a bunch of "Old Time Radio" feeds, but it's basically a grab bag of different audio dramas taken from other feeds. It's kind of like a sampler feed, essentially. One feed, little tastes of myriad others. And one of the earliest episodes, which I know I must have listened to back in, I dunno, 2015 or 2016 was The Outpost. It's even made at least one of their lists of top episodes... though I promise that's because it's one of the first in the feed, not because it's any good. Because holy shit, this story sucks.
Julie Hoverson's "The Outpost" is a conservative antifeminist science fiction story about four women from a high tech matriarchy accidentally crashlanding in a remote location and ultimately becoming stranded with men who sell them to each other like trading cards. (The "love interest" explicitly states that he kept the protagonist for himself rather than selling her because she was the prettiest and he "hoped...", with exactly the implications you think.) Then, after being sold 1:1 to various space-country bumpkins, the women are held hostage by "good" men determined to pretend that they can't fathom why the women are scared of them (while actively holding them hostage, including refusing to allow them phone access)—and then slowly all the women "fall in love" with their captors, swearing off their high-tech lives and realizing that their careers were meaningless now that they understand the "importance" of having a man in their life, working as a housewife on a farmstead or whatever instead of having a career, having penis-in-vagina sex, physically bearing children, and personally raising children in nuclear families (as opposed to the matriarchy's communal childrearing)—all of which were explicitly horrific to them prior to their being stranded, sold, and literally living in fear for their lives.
This is all presented as a good thing, with the POV woman's ultimate decision to devote her labor to the man's needs and forgo returning to her actual life, being presented as a romantic triumph.
Honestly, this was sick stuff even in 2015 or whatever, but it didn't make an impression on me at the time. Okay, weird antifeminist nonsense, but that's not a big deal. Some people are weirdos, oh well.
Now, though, after ten years of rapidly rising "get back in the kitchen" sentiments, anti-abortion laws, and a faction within the government that explicitly aims to revoke women's suffrage? This shit has become genuinely skin-crawling. And that it's a female author happily spreading this heteropatriarchy propaganda? Nasty, nasty work.
Here's hoping my next listen will be better...
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