(Trigger Warning) Question

“Why have any men at all?” wrote Sally Miller Gearhart in a 1982 manifesto titled “The Future—If There Is One—Is Female.” Gearhart is an advocate of ovular merging, a process that involves the mating of two eggs, which has been successfully accomplished with mice. Only female offspring are produced. I’ve always worried that one day women would figure out how to get along without us and they would be able to reproduce unilaterally, like sponges. It’s not genocide, exactly. It’s more like job attrition, the way employers cut back positions without actually firing anyone. “A 75 percent female to 25 percent male ratio could be achieved in one generation if one half of a population reproduced heterosexually and one half by ovular merging,” according to Gearhart. “Such a prospect is attractive to women who feel that if they bear sons, no amount of love and care and nonsexist training will save those sons from a culture where male violence is institutionalized and revered. These women are saying, ‘No more sons. We will not spend twenty years of our lives raising a potential rapist, a potential batterer, a potential Big Man.’”

Yikes. I have grown up with a lot of shame about being male, and this quote perfectly encapsulates that shame. I've done a lot of work to accept my gender, but sentiments like this can still be triggering for me.

/r/AskFeminists Thread Parent