Fallopian Tube Monarchy - How The Sexual Revolution Changed The Reproductive Calculus

August Strindberg's The Father is a telling tale of female power.  The Captain is a Victorian master, king of the castle, and self-assured family oligarch - until he crosses his wife, Laura, who uses her deviousness, wiles, and absolute will to unman him, send him to the insane asylum, and assume total control over their daughter and the family finances. 

She, like the devilishly evil Iago, sows doubt in her victim.  Perhaps our daughter is not yours, she suggests; and for all these years you have been a fool.  At firsts the Captain dismisses his wife's intimations. Like Othello, The Captain feels he has no reason to question his wife. The Victorian corset has always been bound tightly and her chastity never suspected. 

Yet, male emotional male febrility and eggshell ego being what they are, his nights are sleepless.  Just the suggestion that his wife has been unfaithful corrodes his confidence and his once-rock solid self-assuredness. 

It is not so much the idea of her infidelity that addles him, but the doubt.  He could deal with certainty - as unthinkable as sexual waywardness might be - but he cannot accept the niggling, unpleasant, idea of possibility.  His wife, of course, understands the nature of emotional disassembly, and goes about the progressive dismantling of her husband with patience and psychological mastery. 

The Captain cannot confront his wife directly, for that would her claim credibility; but alone he unravels, tormenting, torturing himself with thoughts of her with another man, passionately conceiving the child he has always thought was his. Quickly and progressively, with only a little help from his wife - only an innuendo here and there is enough to deepen his anxiety - he becomes mad, an incoherent, disfigured character who is eventually carted away in a straitjacket. 

This paradigm - the powerful, irresistible, corrosive force of jealousy is of course not new.  Leontes, the King in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is convinced that his wife has been unfaithful with his closest friend.  Hermione has been nothing but faithful, a dutiful chaste woman, but Leontes builds a case against her - her overly warm solicitude of Polixenes, her overgenerous hospitality, her kindness and friendly invitations can only mean an illicit relationship. 

 

Because of this deforming, hateful jealousy, he sends their infant daughter whom he suspects is not his - off to die, and because of his madness his son dies of grief and his wife, presumed dead of inconsolable despair, disappears.

This scenario is played out over and over again throughout literature and life - the story of murderous, jealous husbands is not new; but what is often overlooked is the more central issue of female power.  Only a woman knows for sure who the father of her child is, and this terrible knowledge is enough to shake the emotional foundations of any man. 

All that has changed, of course.  Silvio Parker was one of a thousand children born to sperm donor X, and he represented the new modern calculus for paternity. 'Who's your daddy?' was the new ironic meme circulating on the playground. Fatherhood has become an irrelevant, outdated fashion. 

Laura, The Captain's wife, tells him as the asylum van is drawing up to the door to take him away, that he was good only for his rooster's contribution, the final dismissive, callous, and consigning statement of her power and control. 

Silvio's mother wanted never to be in that situation, to cede any authority to a man.  Although her son carried some anonymous donor's DNA, that was quickly forgotten - a bit of mechanistic, unfortunately necessary reconfiguration of reproduction only.  The boy was better off without what would certainly turn out to be a bullying, abusive, irresponsible father. 

When the boy was born, she felt complete - woman, mother, independent unallied, untethered social being riding above the herd.  An Übermensch, a uniquely modern, fulfilled woman. 

Jennifer Fields also wanted a child but no husband, so had sex with men in her acceptability range.  When she became pregnant, she cared little whose child it was - it was hers certainly and nothing else mattered.  She used these men as instruments, sperm vehicles, incidental to her life. 

Muffy Billings was a lesbian who wanted a child and convinced her brother to sleep with her partner.  The child of this relationship would have her family genes, another ingenious solution in an age of women without men.  

Progressives who have promoted transgenderism as the highest form of human sexuality have dismissed the idea of paternity - and maternity - entirely, except in the case of Bradford Alling, a transitioned woman.  Before Bradford's radical transformative surgery, she conceived a child with her lover, a man who was transitioning to become a woman.  It was a normal heterosexual relationship, and a child was conceived from it, and this product of what had become known as 'imposter fertility', an ironic term for the rejection of so-called normality for the most advanced sexology imaginable, was a poster child for the new sexology.  

Now, the calculus is quite different for two gay men who must resort to surrogacy - easy enough done, but such women who are in it for the money - surrogacy is highly paid, perhaps not enough to compensate for nine months of morning sickness, bloating, and overweight, but still remunerative - are not exactly la creme de la creme.  Be that as it may, these men with only childhood memories of their own mothers and long since given up women completely, really are not that concerned.  In a similar reaction to two lesbian 'mothers' the other sex was instrumental - nothing more than a tool, a vehicle, a vessel. 

Many straight men and women in normal heterosexual marriages find all this distasteful at best and disgusting at worst.  Even the most politically correct among them wince at the thought.  As much as they might champion the rights of their gay brothers and sisters, there has got to be another way.

This reaction is nothing to the most religious Americans who find such configurations the worst form of apostasy, a horrific distortion of God's Creation, a rejection of the Gospels, and another nail in the hands and feet of Jesus Christ. 

Perhaps all this whiny fundamentalism and Midwestern values will go by the wayside once designer babies become the norm.  In the not too distant future, couples will be able to select the genetic makeup of 'their' children - bits of DNA from the most beautiful Hollywood starlets, exhumed remains of Albert Einstein, and NBA jumping jacks purchased at market prices, combined in the laboratory and placed in choice eggs and sperm. God and Nature will be taken completely out of the equation, so any niggling moral or ethical concerns will not be an issue. 

 

This will also signal the end to female power and control.  The issue of paternity, so long the hole card of all women, will be a non-starter.  Back to the drawing board, a new world of surprising algorithms.

Many researchers have written about the 'post-human generation' - a race of humanoids which, thanks to genetic engineering and a seamless brain-computer interface which will replace reality with virtuality, will become the new inhabitants of Earth.  In view of this, the hoopla over reproductivity will seem like a parlor game; but for the time being, it really is quite something to watch the circus acts of sexual combinations and permutations coming online.