Moral Drift — A Universe from the Mind of Garner Fisk

Moral Drift's world is close to ours, but with larger ice caps and lower seas. In our world, Doggerland is an extensive shallow bank (Dogger Bank) under the North Sea. In Moral Drift's world, it is still dry land - Dogaland, or Dogger Island - hosting a quasi-British people. ______ Dogaland is advanced technologically, backward politically. Only men and a few monied women can vote. The men feel entitled; the women are kept structurally out of the power loop. DR (Democratic Reform) emerge from obscurity as a beacon of hope: a progressive party which will try to get votes for all women. They squeak into power on a broadly anti-corruption ticket. But they have severely under-estimated the opposition's penchant for political dirty tricks: LC know their route back to power depends on voters remaining mostly male. Meanwhile, Democratic Reform are finding embedded corruption a tough nut to crack. Where they gain more traction is in clamping down on available smut - on the long-assumed male-gaze privilege. ______ Before the DR government, Dogaland's national parliament had never legislated to control erotica, considering such a grubby subject well beneath its pay grade. Such regulation had been seconded to local authorities - some of which took it seriously, some of which used it to make a few bob. In down-market coastal resorts, pier-end moving picture peep shows had made licensing pennies for needy town coffers. Their old-time Music Halls had featured chorus line girls who wore few, then fewer clothes and performed more risqué dances. In the comedy breaks, they might become the butt of sexist jokes and ridiculing sketches: saucy seaside postcards made real. And as the time for Music Halls slowly passed into history, the last of their dancers stripped to no clothes at all. Technology, meanwhile - TV at first - stepped into the gap of easy entertainment, continuing where music halls had left off. A recent incarnation is The Billy Hall Show. ______ As the DR parliament's clamp-downs on male privilege start coming to fruition all at once, LC (the Liberal Conservative opposition) begin to mock DR as tut-tutting "can't-do-thats." When their attacks gain traction in a right-wing press, LC's backroom boys adopt the inverse goal, promising to reverse DR's anti-male-gaze policies by deregulating female-erotic material: a reset, supposedly, back to how things had been, but in reality sweeping even the assumed former limitations aside. And with an all-male electorate stung by DR's clamp-downs, LC are voted back to power in a landslide. Both TV and advertising, as Moral Drift begins, are being unfettered - which releases an avalanche of smut onto the airwaves. ______ In another attempt to castrate the patriarchy, Democratic Reform have tried to ban all school-based corporal punishments. These, before DR, had generally been assumed to be standard school practice, for both sexes. But as DR struggle to cling to their majority, LC mug and co-opt a DR gamble: failing to get corporal punishment banned entirely, they attempt to set up powers to visually record punishments in notorious schools - some maverick independents and the worst of the state schools - intending these to be viewed just by specialised committees, whose judgments, they assume, should lead to the already hemmed-in school CP being recommended for an outright ban. In the second chamber, their attempts get amended by LC, who try to force DR to put cameras into every school - notionally to provide a proper balance for any future judgment, but in truth to make the law unworkably expensive. DR, choking on the cost and seeing the dream of a long-hoped for win dying, accept an LC compromise to put cameras just in girls schools, with a plan for the worst to be wired up first. This proposal passes into law in the lower chamber with the help of some LC aisle-crossers, not long before DR lose their grip on power, when they fail to win a confidence vote. ______ LC, back in government, quickly scupper the plan for committee-only oversight, while allowing - as legislated, and with money already ring-fenced - cameras to begin to be installed, in the pre-planned order, just in girls schools. The new visual records are then placed on a database intended, say LC, to be viewed and judged by stakeholders only. But as the public purse is paying for the cameras, stakeholders is covertly defined as voters - as in, all of Dogaland's men. ______ Rubbing salt into the wound in another act of spite, LC vote DR's already-passed CP-limiting laws entirely off the statute books. But as with the changes to rules around erotica, rather than return things to a pre-existing state, this instead leaves a rule-free void around CP. LC also now set up powers to let state schools become independent of local authorities. Teachers, LC argue, are in the front line, so it's teachers who must know the best techniques to control more difficult pupils - with a little added oversight from politically-affiliated governors, whose job it will be to make up rules for their schools. ______ As Moral Drift begins, the Liberal Conservatives, under Home Secretary Sardo Joinard, are aggressively fulfilling all their pro-male-gaze manifesto promises, with little thought or care for the growing costs to Dogaland's younger and / or better-looking females.