Survivalist Singles and climate change erotica

Related to my earlier post about prepper condos, The Guardian's Alice Bell riffs on "doomsday dating" services like Survivalist Singles and Amazon's curious book category Books › Fiction › Erotica › "Global Warming & Climate Change." Yes, both are real. From The Guardian:

The emergence of a discourse on doomsday dating – real or fictional – maybe says something quite depressing about 21st-century attitudes to the future. Romance is often about hope after all, though I appreciate some might argue this is a slightly heteronormative view (or at least the politics of childbirth is worth reflecting upon if digging deeper into this issue). If you want some optimism, there's that icon of postmodernist survivalism, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, on a date in one of the later series, is told by her boyfriend that knowing her leads to him puzzling over what the plural for apocalypse is.

Maybe scorched earths, like broken hearts, do heal. Or maybe not. Perhaps the plural for apocalypse is simply the conceit of commercial television wanting to run beyond the previous season's overly dramatic denouement. Perhaps living through disaster by proxy of science fiction has made us too blasé about it all. It's easy to giggle at doomsday dating, but arguably it's no laughing matter.

"Fancy a doomsday date? If things get really bad, it may be your best bet" (via The Daily Grail)

• [Brainspore]

  “Hey baby—is it hot in here, or is it just the result of global climate shifts caused by decades of carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere?”

  • [chellberty]

    “Hey baby-is that a gas mask under your duster or are you just happy to see any survivors?”

• [Christopher]

  I’m not sure that the idea of “doomsday dating” really “maybe says something quite depressing about 21st-century attitudes to the future”, although I think this is what Bell starts getting at: the idea that romance would still exist in a post-apocalyptic world is a sign of optimism about the future. It suggests a belief that, no matter how bad things get, love will still make life worth living.

  And yet that seems to me like the same blind optimism that seems to have given some people in the 1950′s the idea that life, even life as we know it, could in small ways be preserved after a nuclear war, with little or no thought given to the horrors of such a world, or the difficulty of surviving.

  • [Quiche de Resistance]

    Fuck that, I just wanna get ass after they drop the big one.

• [Oliver Crosby]

  I was reading Hannah Arendt’s stuff from just after WWII, and she says that young people could not look beyond 5 years because the anticipated some sort of doomsday. So I’m not sure if this is new, but I do agree that it probably has something to do with war and global epidemics. 

• [Ethan Taliesin Houser]

   We have met the zombies from the apocalypse and they are us.

• [bjacques]

  And this was dealt with brilliantly in 1980, in “Armageddon Outtahere” by Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides, in Anarchy Comics 4.

• [egriff5514]

  Anyone remember Harlan Ellison’s ‘a boy and his dog’?