Time Immortal

Count Roland writes in with a follow-up thought to this article.

How about women who ‘adopt’ lifelike dolls (we would not want women to BUY child surrogates) and ‘love’ and ‘care’ for them like one does for an actual child - change, cuddle, but not wake up throughout the night to feed etc., and, as a doll, stays an infant forever?

Indeed — all the pleasures, but none of the attendant hardships. That’s a pity for several reasons, both because it weds people to the delusion of permanence that infuses this age, and because true happiness doesn’t just come from the good experiences, but from the bad as well (and the learning that accompanies said same).

What a predictable thought process for our age, O Reader, that we should pander to the very natural desire of women to love, care, and nurture children, and yet do so in a way that utterly removes from the picture those circumstances where nurturing care is at its most poignant. Although I suppose, in an age where women are encouraged to sidestep — by use of ingested hormones — the natural processes at work within their own bodies, and in which fulfillment in a woman’s life has been defined by society to include all manner of employment and material success, and in a society that regards semi-permanent adolescence as something to aspire to, that we should not be surprised that women are encouraged to soothe certain biological needs with dolls that provide only a simulacrum of the real process of raising a child.

How long, I wonder, before Aldous Huxley’s vision of periodic hormone treatments — to mimic the chemical changes that accompany a completed pregnancy and in so doing “fool” a body into thinking it has sated its desire to nurture new life — will become standard fare for women?

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

On one hand, increased birthrates among young British women could be a very good thing for Britain in the medium-to-long term; the more “native born” Britons there are now, the fewer potentially subversive, potentially violent immigrants Britan will have to import, some number of years down the line, in order to make up the population.

On the other hand, going through a pregnancy and raising a child are not exactly the sorts of things that young girls — I’m thinking here of 12- to 17-year olds — are usually well-equipped, mentally and financially, to deal with. And it’s a travesty that the rates of teenage pregnancy in Britain, as in many Western nations, are as high as they are. Of course, the blame for those swelling (ahem) pregnancy rates among teens never gets placed in the correct place (i.e. at the feet of comprehensive sex-ed, which has only served to, as Kathy Shaidle puts it, “decouple sex from physical realities”).

But as conflicted as I might be about the implications of such a vastly increased rate of teenage pregnancy in Britain, I’m of one mind about at least one proposed solution to the problem: mandatory temporary sterilizations.

With teenage pregnancies vastly increased in number in the last decade, the authorities — in an apparent attempt to rectify the problem — have encouraged teenagers to engage in oral sex (instead of copulation), and are now examining the idea of compulsory sex lessons for 5 year olds.  As if Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is playing out before our eyes, government minister Dawn Primarolo has even suggested that teenage girls should be sterilized.  That way they would be free to have sex with anyone they want, or don’t want.

I think this would be a case of “solving the wrong problem.”

Somewhere along the line, it seems like our society gave up on the notion that it could expect its teenagers to restrain themselves where sex was concerned, switching its attitude from “they shouldn’t” to “well, they’re going to anyway.” I think that’s a massive betrayal of the younger generation by the older, and I don’t imagine that continuing in that attitude is going to do anything to solve the problems that said attitude has caused. Forcing young girls to get temporary sterilizations solves the wrong problem because it still assumes that teenagers can’t be expected to take a pass on sexual activity until such time as they are ready and able to cope with some of its natural implications; it likewise absolves teens of any responsibility in that regard.

Take away responsibility from anyone in any other situation and the result will be chaos. Why do people think that doing so in regard to sexuality will not have a similar effect?