Birth control is a woman’s problem. Which made sense at first: they bear the bulk of the reproductive burden. But we’ve set that in stone, and now insist we must control women’s bodies, in the name of reproduction.
In the new Apple TV+ show “Silo,” humanity, or a remnant of it, lives in a vast underground, relegated there by what seems to be an ecological disaster. But the story begins with the focus on a couple trying to get pregnant, because the society they live in has allowed them to.
Now, in a contained environment where resources must be balanced, population control makes sense. But the control is on women. Every woman, we assume from one, has implanted birth control (more deeply implanted than an IUD; something invasive and science fictional). This controls the population. But it begs the question: why women?
In this fictional society women don’t bear the burden of family planning. Birth control could be imposed on men as well, and physically probably easier. Sex leading to pregnancy has to be controlled. Why not control the men? We don’t impose it on men IRL for many complex reasons we seldom examine. But the premise of this fictional world makes us examine them.
Why the women only? Why does that seem “natural”? The couple in this story is biracial. The husband is black, the woman is white. The husband is the sheriff, a respected member of the community. A woman is the leader of the society. The men carry the emotional burden once carried by the women. Watch old TV shows (like 60 years old; TV still isn’t “old”), and the women are emotional, while men carry the responsibility for society. The women defer responsibility and authority to the men; and that was “natural.” In this story the sheriff is more traditionally “female.” He carries as much, if not more, of the emotional burden of their effort to have a child. His wife is the one who carries the responsibility for learning the truth about the silo. She carries so much responsibility he finally follows her example. This is how we have changed. This is egalitarian in all the right ways, the ways we want society to be. But birth control is the women’s burden. Why?
Because we haven’t examined that yet. Because racial equality is normal, and gender equality is normal, but women bear the burden of reproduction. And we accept that, as we accept the right to ban abortions, for one reason, for any reason. It’s up to us to determine their ability to bear children.
Why?
I’m not unaware of the irony here. The premise of “Silo” is that there is a truth that the entire society is hell-bent on denying. And the people who don’t accept it are sent out of the silo, to perish in the toxic world. Even trying to question that state of affairs is illegal. It is unthinkable. Wondering why we put the burden of reproduction on women is not as threatening to society as questioning why the silo exists, of course. But as Orwell said, sometimes the hardest thing to see is what’s right in front of your nose.
This is completely off topic but I have to end with it because…well, I’ll explain in a minute.
Personally, when I hear about a show called Silo, I get real jazzed. I’m a city kid mostly, and silos? They might as well be Stonehenge. Entire buildings just for grain or missiles, depending on the local economy? Wild stuff. Get this, though: In Apple TV Plus’ Silo, people live in one. Why? Well, that’s sorta the mystery. The trouble is, Silo goes about solving it one way, before kind of changing its mind and doing it another way.
It’s just personally funny because I live in the fourth largest city in the country, and not a mile from where I’m sitting there still stand old grain silos, the last memorial that all this was farmland 100 years ago, and a train line ran by it. And I knew people who remembered when this was farmland. 100 years ago is really not as long ago as we think. And “city” is not the same thing everywhere, for everyone.
Anyway…
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