Letters to the Editor
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Just had to see this again....well said...
"We are screwed alike in the final analysis. We are the children of one of the most bankrupt cultures in human history. Spoiled rotten from birth - whether we know it or not - we have come to expect the best of life as a matter of course. We are all in for a nasty shock.
-- I Am, Of Course, Anonymous
PermalinkTuesday, November 29, 2005 6:37:00 PM"
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We're all related anyhow...
We humans all share most of our genes - we are about 99.9% genetically identical, according to the human genome project. We apparently went through a population bottleneck in the geologically recent past. So all this focus on "my genes, my reproduction, my eggs, my sperm" while partly valid in a strictly Darwinian view, may not be quite as crucial even were that framework all that mattered. Evolution does tend to operate on the small differences, it's true, but there is also a lot of randomness involved. Helping other people is also helping a lot of "your genes", especially if you help the species keep going instead of self-destructing - as someone already pointed out here.
It is a very difficult "Darwinian contradiction" in our Globally Warming World that the more children an individual has, the less likely anyone's children may be to survive long-term.
Many people feel that their ideas, beliefs, treatment of people and the planet, and world view are a larger part of what they can pass on to children than their eye color - the idea of "memes" (R. Dawkins) is a very interesting one that I'd recommend everyone read about. There are a lot of children of all ages who need to be adopted. Memes have no parental Expiration Date.
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We're all related anyhow...
We humans all share most of our genes - we are about 99.9% genetically identical, according to the human genome project. We apparently went through a population bottleneck in the geologically recent past. So all this focus on "my genes, my reproduction, my eggs, my sperm" while partly valid in a strictly Darwinian view, may not be quite as crucial even were that framework all that mattered. Evolution does tend to operate on the small differences, it's true, but there is also a lot of randomness involved. Helping other people is also helping a lot of "your genes", especially if you help the species keep going instead of self-destructing - as someone already pointed out here.
It is a very difficult "Darwinian contradiction" in our Globally Warming World that the more children an individual has, the less likely anyone's children may be to survive long-term.
Many people feel that their ideas, beliefs, treatment of people and the planet, and world view are a larger part of what they can pass on to children than their eye color - the idea of "memes" (R. Dawkins) is a very interesting one that I'd recommend everyone read about. There are a lot of children of all ages who need to be adopted. Memes have no parental Expiration Date.
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Men have time expiration dates, they just ignore them...and so do women
It has long been known that men have an expiration date too, although no one seems willing to point this out. I suupsoe this has to do with our mindset that women bear all responsibility for fertility problems, something that our whacko male dominated thinking hsa held to be true since Biblical times. This excerpt is from a JAMA article (http://www.malebiologicalclock.com/docs/mbc/
MBC-BioClockTicks-JAMA.pdf):
"Interestingly, while news reports on the CDC figures by various news outlets mentioned the link between increased female age and disease risk to
infants, none reported the vulnerabilities posed by aging fathers that researchers have turned up in recent years, such as the association between increased paternal age and genetic diseases such as
Apert syndrome (a disorder characterized by craniofacial and limb abnormalities)and achondroplasia (a skeletal disorder that causes dwarfism). Furthermore, studies show that 2% of
children born to men 50 years or older will have schizophrenia, three times the incidence of schizophrenia in offspring born to fathers in their early 20s."
Another citation:"A UK study, based on research carried out by research teams at Bristol and Brunel universities, has discovered that the older a man is the longer it may take his partner to conceive, regardless of her age.
Women with partners five or more years older have less chance of conceiving within a year of trying than those whose partners are the same age, or younger. The odds of conceiving within 6 months of trying decrease by 2% for every year that the man is older than 24 years, and for conception within a year decrease by 3% for each year...
Dr Chris Ford of the University Division of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at St Michael's Hospital, Bristol said that "it tells us that to some degree men as well as women have a biological clock that starts ticking as they get into their thirties and it also indicates that paternal age is another factor to be taken into account when doctors are looking at the prognosis for infertile couples". " (Human Reproduction 2000; 15(8): 1703-1708)
Since there is a space limitation, I won't go on and give more such information, but it is out there, and the notion that males can forever expend their sexual largesse without problem, while women are limited by their biological clock, is pernicious, fallacious, malicious, and sexist to boot. It actually makes sense for young women to seek out younger men to enhance of the likelihood of conceiving healthy offpsring. Maybe we should all stop and consider what are the real reasons for relationships of any kind, which are: friendship, support, love, and caring for each other, not the acquisisiton of assets (fertile mates) or manufacturing of assets (children).
In other words, would the real grown up men and women please stand up out there?
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Elizabeth, you're not listening.
If it isn't patently obvious by now, Feminism is not a dating service. Nor is it a set of rules that must be followed in order to be considered a Feminist at all, i.e. You cannot have children before the age of 35 or You must never have children or You must hate all men, etc, etc. The real problem here is not that Feminists have brainwashed women or filled their heads with "tripe", moreover that it is conservative men & women who have pigeonholed all Feminism into a few easily repeated anti-Feminist talking points that are now being parroted by a woman who is the direct benficiary of everything Feminism has accomplished in the past 100 years. I will say it over & over again: FEMINISM IS ABOUT BEING ABLE TO CHOOSE WHAT IS RIGHT. It is not about hating men or wanting to be better than me or anything having to do with men, at all. It is about having the ability to do anything you want to do, without fear of being shunned or discriminated against simply because you are XX instead of XY.
If you want to have children, that's great! If you don't want to have children, that's also great! If you want to have a career, go for it. If you want to stay home & be a mom, that's fine too. And if you want to do both, then that is absolutely wonderful & best of luck to you. The point is, you have a CHOICE. You can actually GO to college. You can VOTE. You can READ & WRITE. You can walk down the street in a skirt & not be thrown in jail for it or stoned to death. You are not required to stay at home, chained to the kitchen stove, popping out babies year after year due to no available form of contraceptive. Is this what you would prefer to be doing Elizabeth? Because by asserting that Feminism is simply "tripe" and bears no relevance whatsoever to your daily existance, that scenario is what you are endorsing.
Not having children is as valid a choice as having children & to look down on another woman's choices simply because they are not your own is ludicrous and self-defeating. As for the men, to consider a woman nothing more than a womb on legs or attractive simply because of her fertility is misogynist & wrong, not to mention about 150 years out of fashion. No doubt if most women knew your true motivations, there would be a cocktail splashed in your face & no second date. No woman wants to be considered a mere baby machine, not even, I'll bet, Elizabeth here.
We are never going back to those dark ages. You can't keep women out of the workplace, we're already here & we like it. You can't stop women from voting either. Most importantly, you can't stop women from speaking their minds. So you can stop your bitching about Feminism, tripe, blah, blah, blah. Also, Elizabeth, I find your remark about abortion extremely offensive, as if liberals are the only ones who have ever had abortions. But seeing as how you are on a golden pedestal & we are all mere grubs on the ground, I can understand why you would vomit up such a onesided and ridiculous remark. God help you if you ever are in such a tight spot, you might just have to change your thinking!