What a Crock.

Quick freewrite. I've been thinking about this all day.

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Mass Hysteria

It happened like this:

Once upon a time, there was a planet, occupied by men and women. The men did manly things, like shooting guns and playing sports and earning money, which they brought home to their wives, who did womanly things like have babies and cook dinner and knit wooly socks. This system worked rather well for the men and not so well for the women.

So, gradually, women started joining a massive Cult of Ideas. No one knew who founded it, exactly, but women all over the world joined it with the belief that chores and wage-earning and everything that made up their lives should be shared equally between men and women. They went through great pains to keep this society secret from men, because the men were sure to try to nip this rebellion in the bud, seeing as the current status quo was just fine for them.

This Cult of Ideas crept into the lives of the women over many, many years, and it became less of a secular idea and more of a religious one. Its members started praying to a universal Goddess to help them change things and make it all even between men and women. (By this time, men had become even more stuffy and unwilling to change the way things are, because the way things are is the way things always have been, and who wants to break up that sort of history anyway?)

And so it came to pass, on this planet inhabited by men and women, that a wave of mass hysteria swept the planet, and the men of the planet panicked like nothing else. You see, for a very long time, “mass hysteria” was a purely mind-over-matter issue of panic and delusion. Men knew this, and they also knew that it was a woman thing, having its roots in the womb, center of all of those uncontrollable, dangerous emotions found in women. Men didn’t have hysteria.

But, possibly through alien experimentation, maybe through the power of the years of women’s prayers, men all over the world suddenly developed wombs of their own. The men panicked like there was no tomorrow. And the women laughed themselves sick before they did anything else, like try and help the men adjust to this abrupt anatomical phenomenon.

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This idea may sound completely cracked out, but it's not half as crazy as this show I was watching today, an anime in which a little boy lives in a jungle with his mom. And one day his mom inexplicably adopts a strange little girl who eats everything (like statues and people everything) and the stuff she eats gets sent to a different dimension...inside of her. And she can spit the stuff out again if she really wants. It's insane but insanely cute. Plus, it has the bonus of having one of my favorite voice actors in it.

Anway! Back to mass hysteria! I've always thought it was kind of a strange term. Sexist, yes, but also weird. And anyway, these days "mass" is always about cancer...or church. But mostly cancer.

My brains are going to explode out of my aching skull, and I'm still not free of yesterday's ailments. I should go to bed, maybe?

~Later