Before I start, let me clarify that the few times I watched the program Sex and the City I found the premise absurd. There you have four promiscuos women a little past prime marriageable age setting out on episode 1 to “have sex the way men do”, meaning, treating men the way some men treat women: like crap. They spend all their money on Manolo Blahnik shoes, clothes and restaurants, have a large number of sexual liaisons of various durations, and otherwise all they think about is how to use men. In the last episode, Carrie, the central character, turns down Mikhail Baryshnikov, and falls into the waiting arms of rich Mr. Big (now, if that’s not objectifying a person, I don’t know what is), who’s been patiently waiting all along in the lobby of the Paris hotel where she had been shacking up with Baryshnikov.
Obviously I’m in the wrong demographic, since I don’t believe in Sex and the City fairy tales. In real life, women who treat men like garbage end up alone, bitter, and living with too many cats. Women who don’t look after their own finances end up poor. And the fresh bloom of fertility and youth is temporary, no matter what your reproductive endocrinologist and your plastic surgeon want you to believe. What it comes down to is, Mr. Big’s not going to be waiting in the lobby.
I was thinking of Sex and the City while reading Wanted: A Few Good Sperm
Tired of waiting for the right guy to come along, more and more women are just looking for the right sperm. But for a woman trying to have a child alone, choosing a donor is only the beginning.
The article describes several women of varying ages who have focused on things other than starting a family, and now find themselves with the biological clock ringing a very loud alarm.
They’re shopping for motherhood.
After all,
Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes.
The article even quotes a woman who says,
“Most women in New York impulse-buy Manolo Blahniks, and I said, ‘I’ll take the eight units.’ It was $3,100.” The price included six months of storage.
Men will tell you that sperm isn’t shoes.
And, may I point out, children aren’t shoes.
As a mother, I guarantee you that the huge responsibilities of parenting only become real AFTER you have children. Some of the women in the article are starting to find that out.
On the Styles section of the Sunday paper, a younger woman, after getting pregnant and marrying a convicted murderer, realizes that it wasn’t such a good idea to bring her daughter to prison and now notices that “I Need to Woman Up and Do This on My Own“. To say that marrying a convicted murderer is a huge mistake won’t go down well among some, but the fact remains, it is a huge mistake.
The cover story on the Styles section, titled Weekends With Dad, Courtesy of D.S.L. describes virtual parental visits:
As the legal system begins to acknowledge the potential benefits of technology in bridging the physical and emotional distance caused by divorce and separation, more families are experimenting with computer-assisted custody sharing.
That might look fine on paper, but, as any CEO can tell you, nothing beats being there in person.
The Times article says about the unmarried shopping-mothers-to-be that “this radical social change feels strangely inevitable”, as if we were talking about day following night.
So I’m proposing a revolutionary and innovative concept: If you want to be a parent, find a person you can marry and stay married to. Be of the mentality that once you have children, except in cases of abuse, you will stay married:
Update, Monday, March 10: MaxedOutMama looks at Roe V Wade For Men: The Debate. Go and read her entire post.
