Novel Stats:

Words Today	0
Words Total	96,021

---

Short Story Stats:

Written	0
Submitted	1
In Circulation	1
Rejected	0
Sold	0

Thursday,
January 12, 2006

I've solved it!

Yes, after an afternoon of mulling over news of Christian Reconstructionists, Samuel Alito and continuing attempts to chip away at Roe v. Wade, I have boiled down the central problem facing humankind today:

A certain percentage of the male gender (I'm not painting all men with this brush, mainly because I'm married to one who's horrified by this idea) are obsessed with having total control over female reproduction.

Why? Because they can never be sure that their purported offspring are actually theirs.

Seriously. Think about it – why would your average member of Promisekeepers give a hoot about the plumbing hooked up to a woman's hoo-hoo and the products thereof unless he had a need to care – such as, oh, some dark suspicions that his darling wife was doing the horizontal mambo with that hot guy down the street? (And abortion just lets them get away with their betrayal, dontchaknow). Until the advent of paternity tests, any given male usually couldn't guarantee beyond any shadow of a doubt that Junior shared half of his genetic code, and I'm guessing that this really, REALLY irked a certain percentage of the male gender.

So, what’s the easiest way for a man to control the paternity of a woman's offspring? Why, take complete control over a woman's ability to reproduce in the first place, of course. From that single fact, so many things can be drawn -- the institution of marriage (which, when you strip away the pretty dresses and religious trappings, is simply a social control method meant to guarantee that the offspring of a particular couple were fathered by the male half of said couple), the conferring of sin on non-marital sex, the unfavorable social positions of bastards, etc. Mind you, this sort of social control may have made sense way back in pre-historic times when Oog had to go out and make sure he could kill enough small rodents to feed Ugga and little Oog, and might not have been too terribly thrilled about feeding another man's child. But these days? It's archaic, pure and simple.

So, what can we do to fix this? Well, stamping out the "I want to control your uterus, dammit!" mindset hasn't worked all that well, although Western Civilization has really only been at it for a little over a century, so maybe I'm being premature. Still, though, I suspect that it will be next to impossible to completely eradicate from the male mindset, as it probably has genetic roots, and trying to reason with it is like reasoning with a two-year-old – they don't want to listen to reason, they just want things their way NOW. And their way involves people like, oh, me, being kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Um, no.

So let's fix the problem genetically. Men want to make sure that a given child is actually theirs – bonzer, let's go one better and give them the actual, honest to Ghu ability to bear children. Let's turn the race hermaphroditic.

It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. If both genders could bear children, men wouldn't have to worry about their women sneaking around behind their back -- if Joe Blow wanted a kid that he knew was his, he could pop one out any time he liked (assuming he could find a partner willing to supply the other set of gametes, and let's be honest, that's not usually a problem). Problem solved! No more envy – better yet, no more need to control women! Of course, it would then mean that men ran the same risks as women did during pregnancy, and one suspects that birth control would immediately become available over the counter, abortion would be legalized in the darkest backwoods town in Alabama, and "the mommy track" would quickly become classed with antique terms like velocipede and reticule. But then, I've always been a cynical girl.

Needless to say, there are some serious roadblocks ahead of us on the path to hermaphroditic happiness – wee problems like balancing sex hormones in order to allow a pregnancy to take hold, and how to combine both sets of gonads in one body and keep them all functional. The biggest problem here is sperm – testicles are outside the body because sperm need to be kept at a lower temperature than the standard human core temp. Which is bad design, if you think about it (another reason why I have problems with ID – if a Great Designer exists, S/He should turn in their engineering license) – it would be smarter to redesign sperm so that they can thrive at core temperature, then reabsorb the testicles into the body (birds and reptiles don’t have external gonads – let's take a look at those strands of the phylogenetic tree and see if we can crib any ideas).

If you could solve the sperm problem, the rest follows naturally – a penile structure in front that can eject spermatozoa, a uterine structure in back that can receive it, and separate gonad pairs for each system. No testicles to interfere with penetration, and while we're at it we could enlarge the G-spot so that the catcher is guaranteed to have an orgasm, too.

Of course, even if we had the technology to turn gendered human beings into herms, there's the whole issue of implementation – for something like this to work, it would pretty much have to be mandatory for the entire race, and I imagine most men would be horrified at the thought of someone else imposing control over their body and their ability to procreate.

Gosh, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?