BYE BYE, Y

back in the 80s, i remember showing mike one of good vibrations new fangled contraptions. not only did the damn thing vibrate but it gyrated as it expanded & contracted in length.
"i'm amazed," i said & i was.
"no...you're replaced," was mike's equally amazed rejoinder.

i recognized early on that women could very happily take care of their sexual needs either by themselves or w/one another. w/the introduction of new gadgetry, in fact, things had gotten a lot easier & less conscience pricking(so to speak). when they developed the strap-on, it was all over but the crying.

of course, the catch in women's need for men was the procreation deal. i've known perfectly rational women who seemed on track to live lives w/o having children. they'd made a conscious deliberate decision based on various things ranging from career to health to lack of interest or means. i saw several of these same rational women break loose from their rational moorings & become nearly crazy in their pursuit of pregnancy. i'm not saying that a few of them didn't simply reconsider their youthful positions & change their minds. that did happen w/o doubt but there were also a few who simply became biological machines programmed to pursue a course of action w/o clearly thinking it through. thinking it through would include seriously considering the unavoidable: the mate. needless to say, in a biologically produced panic, choices aren't always measured & considered. ask any alcoholic about that.

technology has pretty much cleaned this messy deal up too. women can now buy sperm & get pregnant w/o having to deal w/all the messy interpersonal stuff. furthermore, they're close to actually making sperm in the lab. w/truly artificial sperm & surrogate mothers, we're very close to something i used to joke about way back when: simply producing children directly in the lab w/no real physical involvement necessary. forget the surrogate mothers. the lab will become the womb. no men necessary, just a female egg.

which brings us to this inevitable piece of news. in kurt vonnegut's galapagos, the human race evolves backwards due to true darwinian chance & necessity. humans bumblingly & idiotically push themselves onto a course of extinction, though their replacements are definitely better suited to continuing on. the real news in this latest development is pretty much what everyone already knew but were damned to admit: men just aren't necessary. we are being literally eliminated or, more to the point, replaced at the most basic biological level. i guess we should have listened & been gentler. so it goes.