I'm a Serial Sperm Killer

I ask you, how could I not at least notice the headline of this little Paul Waldman piece from The Gadflyer?

Stop the Sperm Massacre!
President Bush has opened my eyes to what may be the greatest tragedy currently taking place in our nation. Embryos, he has told us, are "life" that must not be destroyed. Well, actually he says they're life that must not be destroyed, unless they're already being destroyed for the purpose of giving couples kids, which is OK, but not for the purpose of curing Parkinson's, which is not OK. But you get the idea. [etc.]

Just today we were talking among ourselve about how far we've gone in returning to Medieval notions about where children come from, fast approaching the old, old notion that the wiggly little guys are actually little guys, just waiting to crawl up into a nice, cozy womb and become a somewhat bigger guy.*
So anyway, since we in the US at least seem to be regressing scientifically — no doubt in the interests of national security somehow — it comes as no surprise that zygotes are now sacred, nor will it come as a surprise when we realize that the little wiggly guys are therefore sacred, because they may contain half a human soul, at the least.
The implication, of course, is that the sin of onanism will almost certainly become a federal offense, and all us jerk offs will have to stop jerking off. I know that in my own lifetime I've killed lots of spermatozoa, enough for probably milllions of consecutive life sentences.
I can't stop, either. I know, deep in my heart, that I'm likely to continue the massacre unless someone stops me.
———-
* I'm a little loose with the historical details, but I'm only a scientist. According to Clara Pinto-Correia, author of this essay that I'm looking at right now ("Homunculus: Historiographic Misunderstandings of Preformationist Terminology"), the picture I'm describing emerged in the early seventeenth century with the "preformationist" theory, the idea that all humans had been formed at the time of creation and were hidden as tiny individuals inside the reproductive organs of one or the other gender, hence the tension between the "ovists" and "spermists". Her essay, by the way, is directed more towards discovering when the word "homunculus" was mistakenly applied to the object of the Preformationist's ideas. Fascinating stuff.

Posted on May 30, 2005 at 19.41 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Such Language!

One Response

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  1. Written by Shakespeare's Sister
    on Tuesday, 31 May 2005 at 21.44
    Permalink

    I can't stop, either. I know, deep in my heart, that I'm likely to continue the massacre unless someone stops me.

    LOL!

    Easy for you, though – I have to find some way to stop having my period!

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