Paying attention to the details
I was reading a text on Kinship and how it's formulated in societies, the text was horribly written, it took me 48hrs to understand the gist, but it was interesting stuff. The text was talking about women wanting to get pregnant through infertility clinics. So it raised question like, “Who is the mother? How do you define motherhood?”
Apparently in recent years, IVF and gestational surrogacy has become more popular to couples that are willing and of course rich enough to afford making babies using third parties. The chick, the author, she tried to explain how biology does not necessarily dictate the kinship between the mother and the owner of the egg/ or uterus and the baby. She gave like, 6 different cases where the third party is always excluded from being considered as a mother or have agreed not to be related to the baby whatsoever. The point is that the kid will always have a mother but not necessarily the woman who went into labor or who donated the egg.
In this context, the arrangement is like an adoption and there's nothing morally wrong with that or illegal because some states still requires you to adopt the child created through surrogacy. But then, it starts getting weird and things become a little off when your own sister is getting inseminated with your brother's sperm and his woman's egg & the brother's kid is sharing bodily fluids with the sister & they say bodily fluids are more intimate than sharing genes and it's effin incest but not & and you want to pray to the lord & you're confused & your T.A says:
"Haven't you watched the Friends episode when Phoebe was pregnant with her brother's twins? Is everyone okay with that?!" & you laugh a lot because he overreacts way too much and he makes a funny face but you're still thinking, "Dude, I’m not!"
Then I was reading this book He, She and It by Marge Piercy. It's a sci-fi about how close we are to killing mama nature. Most people have come to rely on the Net and innovations in science and technology. Anyway, it's illegal but an android is created to protect a town except, he is conscious of his actions and he begins to learn what is right and wrong.
This is not the point of the story but this is my point, one of the scientist who helped create the cyborg, an 'experienced’ woman, her and the cyborg get it on. Then the grandchild comes back home, after quitting her work at another corporation to teach the cyborg proper human interactions and they too eventually do it.
Proper human interactions apparently doesn't consist of NOT doing it with your step sister or your mama & of course, he's not human & he's not entirely biological, so you can't really yell INCEST! Or that other term about mothers because he wasn’t really born, he just came into consciousness & you wonder, “Do morals and ethics still play into this situation?” & you think to yourself, damn this machine is a sex machine! & You realize your confuzzled! (One of those slang for confused and puzzled) & you wonder if you'd do it with a cyborg, but that's a scary thought so you stay away from THAT kind of fantasy.
But seriously, situations like these; it raises the issue of relationships between nature, people and technology. It makes you speculate on what kind is our world turning into? I'm not saying, all society would ever think about messing with the creation of life, some cultures go out of their way to maintain the lifestyles they've had ages before technology was prevalent. But obviously, more modern Western societies are more willing to blur out the limitations in science and technology. And I wonder whether this is a good thing or a bad thing?
In my Fantasy class, we touched on the probability of theory in fictions. He, She & It raises other important themes of course, like identity or dystopia vs utopia or science as diety and other such crap, but the theory within a fiction is what interested me the most about the book. I found myself in many parts of the book asking, “What if this happened?” as if it could really happen to me tomorrow. In reality of course, it won’t, but with what is happening now with the world and the Western impact in the environment and technological advances like IVF and in nanotechnology or robotics, the book was hitting a lot of “what if” nerves.
There is no doubt that even before this book was published the theory of creating a new life through the help scientific means was already present (i.e. The Golem- Story is interesting, you otta lookit up). But it still doesn’t make it less freaky to think that we can actually do that now in this age and we can do so without going through the acts of sex (I have yet to figure out if this is also a good thing or a bad thing).
We are opening a whole lot of new possibilities through science, but surely just because we can do it does not necessarily mean we should. Books like He, She & It, gives us the opportunity to ‘see’ and speculate how our scientific advances would affect our lives now as well as what the repercussions it could bring without actual harmful experimentations in real life.
That is what’s so great in finding theory in fiction. You can endlessly imagine the, what could be and push it to the very limit without breaking any ethical or moral laws or twisting any relationships to its most unrecognizable state.
Apparently in recent years, IVF and gestational surrogacy has become more popular to couples that are willing and of course rich enough to afford making babies using third parties. The chick, the author, she tried to explain how biology does not necessarily dictate the kinship between the mother and the owner of the egg/ or uterus and the baby. She gave like, 6 different cases where the third party is always excluded from being considered as a mother or have agreed not to be related to the baby whatsoever. The point is that the kid will always have a mother but not necessarily the woman who went into labor or who donated the egg.
In this context, the arrangement is like an adoption and there's nothing morally wrong with that or illegal because some states still requires you to adopt the child created through surrogacy. But then, it starts getting weird and things become a little off when your own sister is getting inseminated with your brother's sperm and his woman's egg & the brother's kid is sharing bodily fluids with the sister & they say bodily fluids are more intimate than sharing genes and it's effin incest but not & and you want to pray to the lord & you're confused & your T.A says:
"Haven't you watched the Friends episode when Phoebe was pregnant with her brother's twins? Is everyone okay with that?!" & you laugh a lot because he overreacts way too much and he makes a funny face but you're still thinking, "Dude, I’m not!"
Then I was reading this book He, She and It by Marge Piercy. It's a sci-fi about how close we are to killing mama nature. Most people have come to rely on the Net and innovations in science and technology. Anyway, it's illegal but an android is created to protect a town except, he is conscious of his actions and he begins to learn what is right and wrong.
This is not the point of the story but this is my point, one of the scientist who helped create the cyborg, an 'experienced’ woman, her and the cyborg get it on. Then the grandchild comes back home, after quitting her work at another corporation to teach the cyborg proper human interactions and they too eventually do it.
Proper human interactions apparently doesn't consist of NOT doing it with your step sister or your mama & of course, he's not human & he's not entirely biological, so you can't really yell INCEST! Or that other term about mothers because he wasn’t really born, he just came into consciousness & you wonder, “Do morals and ethics still play into this situation?” & you think to yourself, damn this machine is a sex machine! & You realize your confuzzled! (One of those slang for confused and puzzled) & you wonder if you'd do it with a cyborg, but that's a scary thought so you stay away from THAT kind of fantasy.
But seriously, situations like these; it raises the issue of relationships between nature, people and technology. It makes you speculate on what kind is our world turning into? I'm not saying, all society would ever think about messing with the creation of life, some cultures go out of their way to maintain the lifestyles they've had ages before technology was prevalent. But obviously, more modern Western societies are more willing to blur out the limitations in science and technology. And I wonder whether this is a good thing or a bad thing?
In my Fantasy class, we touched on the probability of theory in fictions. He, She & It raises other important themes of course, like identity or dystopia vs utopia or science as diety and other such crap, but the theory within a fiction is what interested me the most about the book. I found myself in many parts of the book asking, “What if this happened?” as if it could really happen to me tomorrow. In reality of course, it won’t, but with what is happening now with the world and the Western impact in the environment and technological advances like IVF and in nanotechnology or robotics, the book was hitting a lot of “what if” nerves.
There is no doubt that even before this book was published the theory of creating a new life through the help scientific means was already present (i.e. The Golem- Story is interesting, you otta lookit up). But it still doesn’t make it less freaky to think that we can actually do that now in this age and we can do so without going through the acts of sex (I have yet to figure out if this is also a good thing or a bad thing).
We are opening a whole lot of new possibilities through science, but surely just because we can do it does not necessarily mean we should. Books like He, She & It, gives us the opportunity to ‘see’ and speculate how our scientific advances would affect our lives now as well as what the repercussions it could bring without actual harmful experimentations in real life.
That is what’s so great in finding theory in fiction. You can endlessly imagine the, what could be and push it to the very limit without breaking any ethical or moral laws or twisting any relationships to its most unrecognizable state.