So the folks over in the Collapse subreddit — devoted to the allegedly impending end of civilization as we know it — are worried about a danger most people haven’t even heard about: the worldwide drop in fertility.
And they’re not altogether wrong to be worried. Due in part to the prevalence of plastics in our drinking water, scientists suggest, sperm counts have been dropping dramatically. Indeed, if current trends continue, we could be looking at something akin to a Children of Men scenario by midcentury — at least according to the somewhat alarmist articles I’ve read on the subject.
Happily, a Redditor known as DorkHonor has come up with a simple solution to this mess. In a recent discussion of the infertility crisis, Dork notes that
like one fertile dude can impregnate a different woman literally every day. With the help of some scientists, microscope, and a turkey baster they can up that to a hundred easy. You don’t necessarily need a lot of highly fertile men.
When another commenter called collapse2050 points out that it might be hard to find volunteers willing to “serve themselves to men who want to cum in all of them,” Dork offers a more detailed explanation of his plan, which involves not only a turkey baster but also a big bucket of cum.
“That’s easily solvable though,” he tells collapse2050.
Make it a religious ritual. Once a month the local men can get together and cum in a bucket (I know, I know, just hear me out for a second). They mix that a bit. Then any woman who’s having trouble conceiving and wants a child gets a quick turkey baster injection. Nobody knows for sure who the father is, the woman doesn’t have to boink some randos. Everyone is happy. Now obviously they’d have to dress it up a bit, you know. Make it all churchy, our father who art in heaven bless this offering and pass on your blessings to our young women in their time of need, etc, etc. Make it classy. Then the clergy signs off on the whole thing and spends every weekend indoctrinating the faithful so they accept it. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
It’s simple, scalable, and likely to mean windfall profits for the manufacturers of buckets and turkey basters. What’s not to love about this plan — besides everything.
DorkHonor may not have solved the infertility problem. But he might have invented a new porn genre.
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… Isn’t this literally part of Homestuck troll reproduction kinda?
Uh… Am I the only one whose brain mistook the baster for a Hitachi Wand, given the subject matter? Please tell me I’m not.
Re the fertility crisis, TBH I imagine a solution involving egg fusion cloning – I know there are obstacles to that, but it’s definitely still in the realm of possibility. This would have potentially bad implications for the future of trans folks like me, but I’d hope that by the time it happens, binary gender roles/identities are a thing of the past anyway.
(Really though I think it’s more likely that we’ll develop novel drugs to counteract the effect of xenoestrogens. The pharmaceutical industry would stand to profit much more, and you can bet it would be a more popular idea with the likes of Mitch McConnell than the one that might make cis men obsolete.)
More seriously though, the discourse on the fertility crisis scares the hell out of me. It dovetails really well with “great replacement” racist conspiracies, anti-abortion bullshit, “protecting our daughters from reproductive harm” transphobia, and way too many other kinds of bigotry. And I’ve been personally called a xenoestrogen-induced abomination against nature, so… It’s worrying, very worrying. And all the more so with the rise of fascism, white nationalism, and Christian supremacy over the last few decades.
I can easily imagine fashy and/ or religious types using this as an all out attack on abortion rights and access to birth control and starting some sort of Gidead type movement. They’re already coming for abortion and eyeing bc so be afraid.
Huh. This sounds more weird cult than mysonigistic. Both men and women are free to choose and all.
Of course, weird cult often translates to horrific abuse in some way or another, so even if the proposed plan seems relatively harmless as far as human rights go, there is probably more attached to that. (Ignoring the high risk of STDs that would very obviously be involved.)
I “like” how this guy doesn’t understand that the wimminz won’t all automatically be fertile on CumBucket Day. Not to mention ignoring various genetic factors like Rh, and that you’ll still be able to tell who the father is from DNA or just who the kid looks like. If it’s completely unknown, you get that whole incest problem in the next generation.
@Cyborgette: You can bet that egg fusion (if it’s ever developed — there’s not much research for some reason) will be illegal in countries run by men, which… yeah.
So glad that these guys have solved the infertility crisis. I’m quite impressed.
Actually, it will probably solve itself, for two reasons: one, Darwinian selection (men with genes conferring resistance to the effects of the xenoestrogens will out-reproduce ones without, and the resistance genes will spread) and two, the xenoestrogens won’t be around much longer, because the source of them (ultimately, petroleum) is unsustainable and must sooner or later be either abandoned or exhausted.
Ooh, nasty. Did you point out that there have been two-spirit people and such for thousands of years before microplastics were so much as a twinkle in DuPont’s eye?
If the cult makes all the women cohabit, their cycles will synchronize, and then the day could be set on whatever day would produce maximal fertility … which already starts constraining the women’s freedoms and could get a lot ickier fast.
On the other hand, I can think of at least one scenario where something not entirely unlike this would likely be required: a long term space colony/generation ship situation where the population cannot grow and is not especially large, but must reproduce to replenish itself over time. In order to avoid catastrophic inbreeding and various social problems it would likely be necessary to make reproduction a highly impersonal and computer-guided procedure, complete with sequencing everyone’s genomes. The machine would be matchmaker, deciding which pairings will maximally preserve the population’s genetic diversity, but unless you want arranged marriages, that also means divorcing reproduction from sex entirely: sex is for fun and bonding, while reproduction is a clinical matter that (particularly for the women) takes place in hospital-like settings with white-coated detached professionals and tech everywhere … not unlike what already happens when fertility-challenged couples resort to IVF. One imagines everyone having a requirement of spending some number of years performing civic duty, as some European countries currently do, and one option for women being to bear several children to ensure the population doesn’t crash, with serving as part of the maintenance and watch crew being the other option. That assumes no artificial womb technology, of course.
All of that may be moot, though, now that it looks likely that Putin will get us all blown up long before any such spacecraft gets off the ground. :/
Curiously enough, this is tailor made to hack off one of the groups that show up most frequently on this blog.
The incels.
Consider this– for all their protestations of not having an opportunity to spread their genes (which they claim are nearly subhuman anyway, but…) their real issue is that they ain’t getting any, aren’t likely to get any, and most sane women extant aren’t going to give them any.
Now here comes a fellow who’s saying, “Hey, we’re having a fertility problem here. Let’s put all our seed into a common receptacle and then artificially inseminate all the women that way.”
It wouldn’t take long for the average incel to interpret this as a plot to deny them any shot as getting any, because no-one’s getting any.
When the group that complains “It’s not fair that Chad gets any when I can’t get any” is confronted with “Well, here no-one’s getting any, so that’s fair, right?” they might explode.
Because they don’t want fair, they want to get laid.
You know, I’d like to see the meltdown. It should be magnificent.
So he’s suggesting… bucket-kake?
(I’m so sorry… I will hang my head in shame.)
@Cyborbette
No, that’s totally what I saw at first too.
But really, guys, they already have a better method for this. Men freeze and store sperm all the time. No need for your weird bucket fetish.
Personally, I think we could stand to drop the Earth’s population a lot more. Not that Covid isn’t trying, but innocent people keep getting caught in the mix along with the covidiots, so the preferable solution is less babies, not getting rid of the people who already exist.
It is with great resignation in my voice that I must admit that it is, in fact, appropriate to bust out the
“The nature of humanity is just that every so often someone accidentally invents homestuck again”
tweet. I’d link the source image, but I don’t know if embedded images in comments are cool. Either way it’s not strictly necessary.
But, like, the religious significance element and everything. Like… geebus.
At least in the comic it was an example of “haha, look how over-the-top weird and oppressive this alien society is.” It was definitely not a suggestion on how reproductive rights should be managed.
A, sperm only survive outside the human body for about an hour, tops, and B, I think most women would rather let the human race go extinct than have a key party inside their uterus. Especially if incels are among the contributors.
Who supports the resulting families, or are the women just left on their own to magically raise these babies with no income and no father?
Put a string quartet next to the bucket. Fanceeeee!
@ Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
iirc, most societies that don’t have marriage tend to be matrilineal (since generally speaking, nobody wonders if the baby they’ve just given birth to is really theirs) and uncles usually have the “male parent” role.
Uh.
Reproductive endocrinology is NOT that simple. Insert a few hundred words from me about predatory lenders who target childless couples desperate for IVF or other assistive measures. And these guys think it can be fixed with a circle jerk?
@Surplus
Menstrual synchrony is a myth. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/myth-truth-period-really-sync-close-friends/
You have to wonder, too, why it took off. The idea of pre-agrarian tribes where every single cis woman would be sick and in pain at the same time, once a month, seems awfully convenient for purposes of benevolent sexism and the idea that women can’t rely on each other.
Negative, I blocked them and kvetched to my friends about it. At the time I was waaaay too exhausted to debate some ecofascist creep over my right to exist.
Not really sure because I’m not a evolutionary biologist or an environmental scientist, but… I feel like a) the time frame is too short for Darwinian selection to prevent a population crash, and b) a lot of xenoestrogens have a pretty long lifespan in the biosphere. Again though, I’m not anywhere near an expert.
@GSS ex-noob
Ugh. I wasn’t aware that little research had been done on it, but that makes terrifying sense. And correspondingly, the (weirdly successful) research on sperm fusion (with a non-gamete for the cytoplasm IIRC) makes even more terrifying sense. Just because trans women aren’t part of it, doesn’t mean exterminationist misogyny isn’t alive and kicking.
And, yes. Nor would it surprise me if Republicans try to specifically outlaw research homosexual reproduction at some point.
Why is this even a problem? Mass infertility may be one of the few ways we can get out of this mess. Cut down the population, break existing social and family traditions, and give a genuine chance at something new.
Although, knowing human beings, we’ll probably take it as an excuse to come up with something even more horrifying than our current society. That tends to be how it goes.
@Cyborgette
You are correct about both your a) evoluttion would take too long in humans at any rate, things like mice and rats with far shorter generations might be ok, and your b) that xenoestrogens generally have a long life span, that is one of the reasons they are so worrying, we have bequeathed them to future generations. Another worry is that they are everywhere, even in Antarctica.
@Lukas Xavier
It’s a problem for various reasons, but the most obvious which is already showing up in countries like the UK is because there will be too few young to support and look after the old. It will also cause huge distress to a lot of couples who want children and are unable to have them.
@Moon Custafer:
That brings up another problem: assuming this is a family church, how do you prevent inadvertent incest, unless you very carefully regulate the donor pool vs the recipients?
Knowing how trustworthy authoritarian quasi-cult-religious leaders are with sexual matters (which is to say not at all), I wouldn’t be surprised if surreptitious substitutions got made in this scenario. There was an IVF scandal some years ago involving a male doctor in Indiana who was swapping his own sperm for that of the donor and impregnated dozens of women.
Another problem: male fertility isn’t only a question of sperm quantity. Quality is important too. It doesn’t matter if you have a bucket full of half a billion sperm, if they’re all two-headed and can’t swim.
There is a point where one wonders if the continued existence of humanity would be worth it. If this would be the only way to maintain the existence of humanity, I’d definitely vote ‘let’s go meet the dinosaurs’.
Maybe we’ve got this backwards.
Maybe the weird religious cult and worry about fertility is just a cover for what this guy really wants to do.
I mean, nothin’ wrong with a circle jerk kink amongst a guy and his male friends, but leave the ladies out of it.
yegads. This sounds like what happens when poorly socialized male Homestucks get older…
How romantic. See me swooning.
Non-religious people thinking it’s just that easy.
@Buttercup
Obligatory:
This seems like one of the most … wholesome posts you’ve found lately?
Guys consensually cum into a bucket, mix it all up, and women consensually turkey-baste. Ya know, if that’s your kink, I’m not stopping anyone. It’s of course a great way to get widespread venereal diseases but, details.
What fertility crisis exactly? The one where sperm isn’t doing so hot because it turns out a lot of pollutants mess them up, or the one where women are deciding not to have so many kids?
This has gotta be a homestuck reference.