You don’t have to be a radical feminist to accept that women’s reproductive rights are already under threat, particularly in America. In May 2019, the Alabama Senate passed a bill banning abortion in almost all cases, even those involving rape or incest. None of Alabama’s female senators backed the ban, but there were only four of them in the thirty-five-strong senate.
‘Would ectogenesis allow men to take control of birth?’ I ask.
‘I think there are men who explicitly would like to take control of birth, clearly, and if they could get rid of women to do that, I don’t think they would have much of a problem.’
* * *
It is eleven p.m. on a Friday, and I’m looking at a Reddit message board entitled ‘Women completely useless now: An Artificial Womb Successfully Grew Baby Sheep – and Humans Could Be Next’, created on 25 April 2017, the day CHOP’s paper on the biobag was published.
‘another amazing achievement of male ingenuity and creativity!’ the most popular comment reads.
‘Good,’ another one says. ‘In a decade or so I’ll just contract some worthless bitch for her egg and grow my own kid in a plastic bag.’
I’ve been hanging out on the MGTOW subreddit, the niche online community of ‘Men Going Their Own Way’. Allow me to put this specific subset of straight men with women issues in context: men’s rights activists (MRAs) fight to change social values and laws they think are misandrist so that men and women can coexist on a different basis; incels wish they could exist alongside women on almost any basis; MGTOWs have decided they do not want to exist alongside women at all. They are heterosexual male separatists.
MGTOWs (pronounced mig-tows ) believe that the world has become ‘gynocentric’ – concerned exclusively with the female point of view – and therefore hostile to men. They say women get all the attention on dating apps, all the spoils in the divorce courts and all the advantages when it comes to diverse recruitment strategies, while men are made to suffer harassment for child support, denied the right to stop their children being aborted, falsely accused of rape and under constant suspicion in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
The MGTOW answer is not to change the world by fighting feminism like the MRAs do, but to opt out of relationships with women altogether. The most ascetic MGTOWs go ‘full monk’: they choose celibacy and sometimes even vasectomies to avoid the traps they see as inherent in a life tainted by female contact. It is not a movement, it is a mode of living, as the primer on mgtow.com explains: ‘It exists in the hearts and minds of the next great generation of men. The Manosphere is the Big Bang of chaotic masculine disruption that will eventually bring into existence a new personal world of freedom for those who choose to be free.’
For men who define freedom as the freedom to walk away from women, ectogenesis is poetic payback for the diminishing role of men and masculinity in the twenty-first century. The biobag has the potential to be as much of a key to male liberation as the contraceptive pill was for the twentieth-century female liberation they lament so much. Once artificial wombs and sex robots both exist, men will be able to live with the human drives to have sex and reproduce, without having to live with women.
Reddit users can vote posts ‘up’ or ‘down’; the more up-votes a post gets, the nearer the top of the message board it appears. This encourages a particularly inflammatory kind of speech to flourish here. But threads like the one published on 25 April 2017 are not a one-off, by any reckoning. Search for ‘artificial wombs’ and you will find over a hundred threads in the MGTOW subreddit alone, some of them going back to the earliest days of the platform. Comments range from the pitiful:
i hope this becomes reality. i’m almost 40. i REALLY want to have a child. i like kids. i have money and time, i could afford to raise a child now.
yet as much as my desire to have a child has grown exponentially as i’ve gotten to middle age, my desire to touch, look at, fuck, or talk to women is at almost zero. this shit can’t come fast enough. artificial womb, sex robots, vr porno, endless movies and tv, my own hobbies, my OWN money, yeah, i’ll take that instead of taking care of some fat cow.
… to the truly disturbing:
Our holy duty is prying reproduction away from women (which is not science fiction, it’s very doable with our current technological knowledge), and then removing women altogether, physically. Not just relegating them into sex slavery, not just brainwashing them and artificially inseminating them in cattle pens, but getting rid of them forever. They’re the destroyers of civilizations, they’re the primordial natural carnal malevolence, literal fucking cancer in human form and the only reason we’ve kept them around for this long was the fact that we physically needed them to continue our species/race. Once they aren’t needed for reproduction, they won’t be needed for anything.
Are these men ramping up the rhetoric to impress one another and get more up-votes, or are the misogynists Soraya imagines in her darkest dystopian dreams already planning a womanless future with ectogenesis?
I have a look at who’s online and posting right now. Here’s DT1726. He commented on a thread about artificial wombs recently: ‘Sex dolls and artificial wombs will put women in their place for sure. Their only merits are the ability to make babies. Sex dolls will stay beautiful forever and much safer investment than a real woman. Artificial wombs will make women disposable just as men are. They could save our civilization,’ he wrote. ‘Lots of women will die, that’s my conclusion.’
I log in, and pick one of Reddit’s randomly generated user names: StreetSetting. Nicely gender neutral; I don’t want to frighten the MGTOWs by coming over all female. I open the private chat window and send a message to DT1726.
‘I’m a journalist,’ I write. ‘You say an artificial womb could save our civilization if done right. I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this.’
After a few minutes, up pop the three little dots that show someone’s typing.
‘You can ask me anything, as long as it’s not personal information,’ DT1726 responds.
‘What difference do you think artificial wombs will make to human civilization?’
The replies come thick and fast.
‘Women have evolved to seduce men to protect and provide for them. In a society where women have forgotten their biological roles of being the mothers and home keeper. A society in which they go around sleeping with whoever they want without restriction. A society where women became empowered because of technology plus their already heightened reproduction values. They become self-entitled princesses that look down on the builder of the civilizations they are living in,’ he writes. ‘When women see they don’t have the monopoly on their wombs anymore, they will be hit with a cruel reality that they will be phased out if they keep up with this current mindset.’
So he’s a grade-A misogynist, but he’s not quite calling for wholesale femicide. He hopes that artificial wombs will put women back in their ‘natural’ place.
‘Without the advantage of being the only ones with a womb, women can take out their eggs, fertilize them and grow them inside the artificial womb. They may be encouraged to do so if they want to pursue their career. When that happens they will have no excuses whatsoever that they are oppressed and can’t compete with men.’ He follows this with a blizzard of links to some scientific articles on how testosterone gives people the drive to be effective. As men have most of the testosterone, they will always do better. Women will realize there’s no point in trying, so they will just retreat back into the home. Bullshit cod-scientific evolutionary psychology does well in MGTOW circles. When Charles Darwin set sail on the Beagle, I wonder if he had any idea that this was where his theories would end up.
‘You say in your post on artificial wombs that if women are no longer necessary to make babies they will die off,’ I type. ‘Is that desirable?’
‘When talking about survival of the fittest in human society you have to look at stupid people, mentally challenge or birth defect. society still kee
ps them alive. we aren’t that cruel.’
‘Women will still be alive, but will be as useful to society as people who are mentally challenged or have birth defects?’
‘women are definitely worth more than mentally challenged or disabled people,’ he says graciously. ‘women are more average than men.’
‘Do you think artificial wombs will mean that men need not have any contact with women at all if they choose not to?’ I write. ‘Do you think many men will choose not to?’
‘Possibly. Although it’s hard to go against the natural instinct. Not many men can go full monk without any contact with women. With lover bot and realistic AI then very likely.’ But DT1726 isn’t interested in a sex robot and artificial womb combo. ‘I went full monk already,’ he explains.
‘How long have you been full monk?’
‘1 year. if you factor in the time before I knew of MGTOW maybe 15 years.’
‘Why did you decide to go full monk?’
‘Unless a man can control his lust, he’d never be free. Definitely, it’s more advantageous to have an artificial woman that you can control. I still wouldn’t touch it. nothing breed mediocre men better than to make him comfortable his whole life.’
I realize that English probably isn’t this guy’s first language. I ask what he’s prepared to tell me about who he is, and he says he’s from Vietnam, he works in IT and he’s twenty-eight. If he’s been full monk for fifteen years, that means he’s a celibate virgin. Unless something very terrible happened to him before he was thirteen.
‘Do you think people are more extreme here in the threads than they would be in real life?’ I ask.
‘Some of them I think so, especially new comers. those who just got burnt hard.’
‘Is that what brings most people here – personal experience of being burnt?’
‘sadly yes.’
This would be an accurate description of smithe8, the next guy I contact (smithe8 isn’t his username, it’s the pseudonym he asks me to use). He’s a twenty-six-year-old medical student from Chicago who’s only been on Reddit for two months. His first ever post was about how his life had been ruined by ‘a false, preposterous #MeToo accusation’. ‘Now I have developed an absolute paranoia, which makes it nearly impossible for me to talk to women I am not related to,’ he wrote then. Tonight, he’s written the most up-voted comment on an artificial wombs thread posted a few hours ago. His comment was, ‘Finally. Women made obsolete. It’s a necessity considering how hateful females are towards masculinity nowadays.’
‘Are there a lot of men who’d like to be fathers but don’t want to have to have a woman in their lives?’ I type into the private chat box.
He replies immediately. ‘For every stuck-up feminist who thinks of men as “pigs”, there is a lonely man who would love to have a child but can’t, because no sane man would date a feminist (if confused, “feminist” is fully interchangeable with “misandrist”). Spoiler: that man shall choose artificial womb technology.’
‘Couldn’t that lonely man date a non-feminist?’
‘Imply she’s taken. Nowadays, men just crave a normal woman.’
‘Are there not enough “normal” women?’
‘Nope.’
Maybe he’s worked out I’m female somehow, or maybe he’s embarrassed when asked to explain what he’s actually written. But things seem to change.
‘In your post you said, “Finally. Women made obsolete”,’ I say. ‘Is that what you want?’
‘Absolutely no lol,’ he replies. ‘I honestly only sh*tpost hatefully there to radicalize them and manipulate more men into going TOW. More MGTOWs equals less competition for me :)’
‘If you aren’t MGTOW, how come you are posting?’
‘I hope to make it grow a lot,’ he says. ‘Under many YouTube videos there is a MGTOW comment out of nowhere. My male friend got into it all the way. There are MGTOW sign stickers even in the toilet of the pizza hut nearby. It has potential to grow into millions. We have a weird type of fight club going on. Let them fight as I pass by into future with a great wife. Less competition.’
There is something so desperately sad about this keyboard warrior trying to radicalize his fellow burnt men into the wholesale rejection of women so that he’s more likely to get laid. His ‘Women made obsolete’ comment on the thread is only a few hours old, and it already has 250 up-votes. I’d like to think they were all from men like him who are bluffing and posturing and don’t really mean it. But as the incel mass shooters have shown, it only needs one or two people to take these comments seriously for them to have dark consequences in the real world.
‘I appreciate you talking to me,’ I type as I sign off.
‘No problem man/madame,’ he replies.
The MGTOWs might not mean all that they say when they write posts about their desire to ‘remove women altogether, physically’, but they are unsettlingly fluent when they write them, even with English as a second language. These are not all brainless morons jabbing at their keyboards with one finger; they are educated people who have thought a lot about this, who devour scientific papers and news reports to feed into their twisted view of mankind. They are people who may one day be doctors, lawyers or lawmakers. Decisions about artificial wombs, and who gets to use them, may well be in their hands.
Artificial wombs will be an incredibly powerful new technology. How that power will manifest depends very largely on who is demanding that technology, who is making it, who is in control of it and who is paying for it.
Ectogenesis will free women from the uncertainty, pain and vulnerability of pregnancy and childbirth, which can be such a burden when women are living, working and competing with men who never have to go through any of it. But the equality will come from women giving up a fundamental power, in the only realm where men have always had a subordinate role. Artificial wombs might be far more beneficial for men than for women.
More than any other technology I’ve looked at, ectogenesis reveals the chasm between an ideal world and the real one. In a perfect world, it would liberate women and save the most vulnerable babies on earth. In the real world, women are judged and disenfranchised, prosecuted and sterilized, and despised by ever more radicalized angry men.
Once IVF became mainstream, research into treating fertility problems like blocked fallopian tubes all but stopped. Why bother, if the problem can be circumvented by assisted reproduction? In the same way, ectogenesis will mean it is even harder to justify research that makes it easier and safer for women to be pregnant and give birth without being sliced, probed and torn. And there will be even less reason to try to solve the social problems that make it so difficult for women to have babies. What’s the point, if the solution is already there?
Women gain so much more than we lose by bearing our own children. We gain the immediate closeness, the intimacy that Juno craves so much. We gain the creative power of being a mother, the knowledge that our children are definitely our own, the right to choose whether to become a parent at all. Having a womb makes us vulnerable at the same time as giving us great power. How can the freedom to have babies without being pregnant be worth sacrificing any of this?
Full ectogenesis will not exist for decades, but artificial wombs are coming. We still have time to try to ensure that, when they do arrive, it’s in a society that values women for more than just their reproductive capacity, and that they are put to use for the benefit of people who can’t be pregnant for biological rather than social reasons. We do still have time. But maybe not enough.
PART FOUR THE FUTURE OF DEATH
The death machines
CHAPTER THIRTEEN DIY Death
Lesley Basset is nervous, but trying to hide it behind a welcoming smile. The people streaming into the hired Covent Garden meeting hall all look over sixty: the men are in jackets and ties; the women wear pastel cardigans and pretty scarves. Genteel enough to be mistaken for a bridge club or the audience at a classical recital, they have paid to be here beca
use they want to learn how to kill themselves. They are pinning on plastic name badges and taking their seats in the hope that Lesley will teach them.
Lesley is the new coordinator of the UK chapter of Exit International, the grass-roots voluntary euthanasia group that makes Dignitas look meek and conservative. Where other right to die organizations campaign for terminally ill people to be able to decide when they die, Exit argues that anyone of sound mind should have the right to end their lives peacefully, at a time and place of their choosing, without the permission of any doctor or state. It’s what Dr Philip Nitschke, the Australian founder and director of Exit, calls ‘rational suicide’.
First founded in Australia in 1997, Exit has chapters in Canada, the US and New Zealand, as well as this new one in the UK. You don’t have to be ill or even old to be an Exit member – it’s officially for over-fifties, but younger people are allowed to join on a case-by-case basis. For a fee, members get information, advice and also materials they can use to end their lives. So many British members are signing up that Exit hired Lesley to open the UK office a couple of months ago.
I know Lesley would rather I wasn’t here today – I’m only allowed through the door because Philip Nitschke has told her she has to let me in – so I try to keep out of her way. A volunteer with a puff of white hair is handing out teas, biscuits and suggestion forms for future meetings. She tells me she’s seventy-four, and a former nurse. ‘Exit and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society don’t get on,’ she explains as she pours my tea. ‘Dignity in Dying don’t like how Philip is doing it; they want to work within English law, they want judicial reform. Then there’s FATE – Friends At The End – who escort people to Dignitas. They don’t like Philip either.’ It sounds like the Judean People’s Front.
Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Page 24