Synthetic sperm brings mad feminist dream a step closer

The idiotic internet blather following the creation of artificial human sperm evokes the writings of mad feminists who dreamed of a world without men

FIRST POSTED JULY 9, 2009

The news that scientists at Newcastle University have artificially created human sperm - in pursuit of research into the causes of male infertility - has triggered yet another outing for that hoar-gnarled feminist fantasy of a world without men.

"A world without men? How Wonderful !!!!" writes a contributor to the Daily Mail's website.

"Women have always known that men are a waste of space," declares the Daily Mirror. "Now British scientists have proved how unnecessary blokes truly are by creating the first human sperm from stem cells."

"Bye bye baby," celebrates the Fairfield Life blog. "The new science means the biological role of the father is under threat."

These lightweight, flibbertygibbet voices are continuing a tradition as old as feminism itself. A potty eugenicist strain has always infected that ideology and it continues today, frequently espoused by leading heavyweights of our culture.

No man means no sexual reproduction which means no gender

Mrs Frances Swiney, a Cheltenham lady with a refined Indian Raj pedigree, was one of the first 20th century writers to combine a taste for Malthusian eugenics with an enthusiasm for feminism. Viewing men as waste products in reproduction and longing to see them eliminated, she wrote in Woman and Natural Law (1912) that "the first male cell, and the first male organism, was an initial failure on the part of the maternal organism to reproduce its like, and was due to a chemical deficiency in the metabolism or physique of the mother".

That batty view has been handed down through a succession of - ahem - seminal feminist texts throughout the last 100 years. It underpinned Ashley Montague's 1952 book The Natural Superiority of Women from whence it passed, untainted by critical intelligence, into the writings of a host of influential contemporary feminists.

Shulamith Firestone gave it a run in her 1969 book The Dialectic of Sex and Andrea Dworkin was to air it repeatedly. By 1970, a young woman (now Professor of Economics at the OU) was speaking for a respected strain of modern feminism when she wrote: "We will not be able to achieve full emancipation of the potential of both sexes without taking on the question of reproduction, and I mean that in the most basic sense of having babies."

‘As a species is it possible that men are ever so last century?’

A direct line connects that declaration with Jane McLoughlin author of The Democratic Revolution (1990) who wrote: "One of the anthropological pleasures of the 1990s will be watching how men cope with a new role - that of the redundant male".

The dazzling New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has recently asked, "As a species is it possible that men are ever so last century?" And the Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing recently commended Bryan Sykes's Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men with such sorrowful solemnity that it looked as if she might even be relishing the prospect.

None of these scholars ever seems to penetrate the philosophical conundrum that the world without men of which they dream would not result in a world of women but a world of genderless beings. No man means no sexual reproduction which means no gender.

Neither do they ever tell us what is to be done about those tens of thousands of males who are being conceived, every second, by the old, despised rumpy-pumpy method. What is to become of those boys and men who will have full lives to live before the far-distant possibility of genderless human reproduction might be realised?

Perhaps they should all be done away with, as Mrs Swiney would have recommended? Such - as we have seen - has been the logical outcome of other eugenicist fantasies.

FIRST POSTED JULY 9, 2009

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"One of the anthropological pleasures of the 1990s will be watching how men cope with a new role - that of the redundant male" The remarkable thing about such feminists is the level of juvenile spite on display. Do they really think anyone is going to be impressed? They seem to think that flirting with Adolf Hitler - because that is what they are doing - is somehow grown-up and cool. They don't seem to realise how stupid and tawdry they look. The truth is that men will only be redundant until the first time there is a spider in the bath or the dishwasher breaks down. It really is an exercise in childish posturing.

Posted by Heretic at 12:02pm on July 10, 2009

PS Neil - Just in case you didn't realise, Ashley Montague was a (shudder) MALE anthropologist & scientist, not journeyman scribbler such as,... yourself.

Posted by allan kessing at 4:06am on July 11, 2009

I am puzzled by two things: 1) The idea of the superiority of men passed for millenia with hardly a comment or complaint. In the 1950s and early 60s almost all men and quite a large proportion of women thought it was self-evident that men were superior in every way except that of reproduction and the virtual enslavement of the female gender was thought quite unproblematic by mainstream culture. Given this, why should the female supremacist musings of a few extremists cause such angst? Its nothing more than simple tit for tat (no pun intended). I have recently been studying the history of feminism and I can assure you that the man-hating tendency is a tiny minority but its presence allows some people to condemn the whole movement. Feminism quite simply wants recognition of women as full human beings. That has nearly been achieved now in the west at any rate in my opinion. 2) Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin saw women as enslaved to a biological reproduction that put all the responsibility on them to gestate, nurture and provide for children. The father had the choice to take part to whatever level he wanted or walk away at any stage. (Men frequently desert their pregnant girlfriends, and society used to blame women alone for their fate). They both wanted men to take MORE part in reproduction not LESS. There is absolutely no way that using artificial sperm would help the feminist project. If men were completely freed from any part in producing the next generation it would be a disaster for both genders. I speak as a feminist who does not hate men and would not want to live in a world without men but wonders why so many men seem to want to do without women.

Posted by Hilary Easton at 11:47am on July 13, 2009

Agree with Hilary Easton, I've been a feminist since the sixties, and I'm a male with three sons and a daughter, and this is such a silly storm in a test tube. Seems to me there are more tabloid-brained people around now, although not sure what's caused this increase in stupids, perhaps it was lead in petrol. It's all premature anyway, the experiments in rats produced rats with a variety of genetic damage, and all with shortened lives. And most women, feminist or not, actually like men, so I can't see lesbianism taking over as a lifestyle choice just yet. Not to mention all the boy babies who would have to be aborted. This just causes a frisson of fear in those males [a minority] who feel threatened by strong, independent women and feel that somehow they are worthless since women can do almost anything a man can, and in many cases do it better.

Posted by Peter Simmons at 3:07pm on July 13, 2009

A Zen koan for the Darwinists - does this mean Mr Long Dong Silver will just be an evolutionery aberration of the YouPorn Age to be finally hounded into driving double-deckers on the Hershey Highway, and thus finally into oblivion?!! Or will the Australian female of the species relent !!

Posted by Iqbal Halani at 2:33am on July 15, 2009

Hilary Easton's comment is just the typical "damsel in distress" cry we always get when men are defended or feminists criticised. Perhaps you might like to tell the countless men who slaved all day in dangerous conditions down the mine or in the shipyard or the factory for a pittance of a pay packet which they obediently handed over to their wives which sex was enslaved. The line that "men requently desert their pregnant girlfriends, and society used to blame women alone for their fate" is a lie. Do a bit of research. The shotgun wedding was astonishingly common in pre-feminist generations, and the abandoned mother vanishingly rare. The vast majority of men have always done right by women, and it is this very desire to do right by women that feminism abuses by crying "damsel in distress" over exaggerated and invented male evils. Your comment that "so many men seem to want to do without women" is also a lie. Even in the most patriarchal and misogyist cultures and classes that have ever existed, none have ever fantasised about wiping out women. No men's group has ever proclaimed that men need women like fish need bicycles. Finally, if you don't want man-haters to define feminism, then condemn them, don't defend them - and make some effort to overcome your own prejudices. Peter Simmons, you are right that artificial sperm will not make men redundant, but that's not what the article's about. It's about the prevailing prejudices against men that mean that's how the media react to it - a prejudice you clearly share judging by your last sentence.

Posted by Patrick Brown at 5:37pm on July 18, 2009

I am not sure what Patrick Brown means by 'damsel in distress', I am not crying distress at all, I am saying that the feminist project of full humanity for women has been achieved (in the West) - hooray! Also, I most certainly do condemn man-hating and consider it every bit as damaging and unjustified as woman-hating, but it is quite rare, whereas paranoia, such as yours Patrick, is common. As for men wanting to do without women - my evidence is the popularity (now on the wane I believe) of men-only clubs; also, the sort of film commonly regarded as 'a man's film' often portrays a world peopled almost entirely by men with women only there for sexual decoration or to reward the hero, whereas a 'woman's film' usually has equal screen time for men and women - an indication of the differing interests of the two genders. Most importantly, in many areas of working life women have been until recently deliberately excluded, perhaps as a deliberate policy to keep them financially dependent on men. Engineering and horse racingand the priesthood are all areas that still excluded women in the 1970s. In the 1970s I was excluded from training for skilled and well-paid factory work because women were not allowed to do it, but I was allowed to do much heavier unskilled work on the factory floor. I visited New Zealand in the 70s and women were not allowed into pubs. Margaret Thatcher was famously excluded from the Conservative Club because of being female. Can you think of any examples of women excluding men either in the past or now? (I mean in the mainstream, not in some wierd outpost of radical lesbian feminism). I simply dont see what you mean by saying that I share 'prevailing prejudices against men', that is entirely wrong. I am saying that before feminism there was a great deal of social unfairness against women (do you really contradict that?) which is now largely gone due to the efforts of feminists and the goodwill of many men. If the 'vast majority' of slave owners do 'right' by their slaves, does that make slavery okay? no, but perhaps it means that those slave owners were good individuals caught up in a rotten system, the system changed when ethical standards changed in society what had previously been accepted became seen as wrong and abhorent. A parallel can be seen with feminism. Personally I think both men and women have benefitted from feminism - no more 'shotgun weddings' for one thing.

Posted by Hilary Easton at 11:46am on July 30, 2009