Fighting for Gender Equality in the Afterlife
By Zara Stone
NOV 22 2016
Legally, Cairn Idun’s husband died in Colorado in January 1992. But to her, his passing is a temporary state, lasting until technology advances enough to revive him. The day he left this world — for now — she watched as his body was placed in an ice bath to preserve his brain and traveled with his casket to the operating room where his blood was replaced with a glycerol solution. He now resides inside a nitrogen-filled steel thermos at Alcor, a cryonics facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. His was the first death that ever shook her. “The man who turned me on has temporarily been turned off,” she wrote in a blog post.
A few months later, she changed her name from Mary Margaret Glennie to Cairn Idun, her new first name signifying “something you can follow so you don’t get lost — and people can follow you forward.” She borrowed her last name from the Norse goddess of rejuvenation, Idun.
Idun’s version of eternal, or at least extended, life is cryonics, an increasingly popular movement being taken up by techno-futurists who believe that future tech can reanimate their cooled bodies. (Think Han Solo.) Today, 21st-century optimists who believe in new forms of resurrection see many ways to the Fountain of Youth, from corporeal returns to postmortem reawakenings, courtesy artificial intelligence. Though scientists are far from reaching any consensus on whether this might work, some of the biggest technological thought leaders of the age, from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel to predictions prophet Ray Kurzweil, have helped bring it to the forefront of public discourse.
Cryonicists are predominantly male, constituting 85 percent of the estimated 3,000 people who have cryonic memberships. Idun figures the divide is less about interest than exposure. The wage gap doesn’t help — an average cryonics package, which is usually paid via life insurance–esque annual payments, costs between $30,000 and $200,000. “The cryonics industry has adopted a strategy that implicitly targets atheist millionaires and alienates women,” wrote social psychologist David Stodolsky in the April 2016 Cogent Social Sciences journal.
http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/fighting-for-gender-equality-in-the-afterlife/73801
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