Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...monosexual way of life were counter to human nature, men wouldn't have spent so much of the past millennium dodging women by enlisting in armies, monasteries and all-male guilds and professions. Up until the past half-century, women only fantasized about their version of the same: a utopia like the one described by 19th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, where women would lead placidly sexless lives and reproduce by parthenogenesis. But a real separation began to look feasible about 50 years ago. With the invention of TV dinners and drip-dry shirts, for the first time the average...
...some ways this project has turned out to be a remarkably successful bit of social engineering. The top universities still use heredity as a factor in admissions, but on the whole they have shifted from the raccoon-coat, football-weekend paradigm of the old days, in which the premier human attribute was a hard-to-define quality called "character," to a different value system, in which being smart is first on the list of virtues and a humble background is a badge of honor...
This could be the century when the sexes go their separate ways. Sure, we've hung in there together for about a thousand millenniums so far--through hunting-gathering, agriculture and heavy industry--but what choice did we have? For most of human existence, if you wanted to make a living, raise children or even have a roaring good time now and then, you had to get the cooperation of the other...
...about the future, and potentially more challenging to our species than Martian colonization or silicon brain implants, is that the partnership between the sexes is becoming entirely voluntary. We can decide to stick together--or we can finally say, "Sayonara, other sex!" For the first time in human history and prehistory combined, the choice will be ours...
...scholar of ancient history will discover these words penned by a gay writer named Fenton Johnson back in 1996: "The mystery of love and life and death is really grander and more glorious than human beings can grasp, much less legislate." He will put this sentence onto a bumper sticker. The message will spread. We will realize that the sexes can't live without each other, but neither can they be joined at the hip. We will grow...