Cloning Aside, It Still Takes Two to Tango

“If only we could have children without the help of women!”

--Euripides, Hippolytus (428 BC)

For all that seems totally new about the current controversy over cloning, it is but the latest manifestation of the oldest and most important contest in all of history: the struggle over procreative power.

Karl Marx had it wrong. Control--or the claim of control--over the means of reproduction has been even more fundamental to history than has control over the means of production.

Sexual reproduction has many advantages beyond the pleasure it provides. The remixing of genes in sexually reproducing species gives those genes a diversity that can help to avoid extinction. But we and all other sexually reproducing organisms pay a heavy price for these benefits: We are in an important sense not whole; we are incapable of replicating ourselves.

Each sex has reason to lament its incompleteness, particularly an individual’s incapacity to reproduce himself or herself without the participation of someone from the other sex and the consequent dilution by half of the genetic endowment that can be passed on to offspring.

Even so, there is a very long history of changing views about which sex has procreative power. Women presumably were seen through most of human existence as the sex with this power. On the face of it, the male inability to bear and nourish children indicates that women have greater power than men. Because of this relative incapacity, many men have suffered, largely subconsciously, from what might be termed womb envy and breast envy, or even the “non-menstrual syndrome.”

The development of agriculture led to the major turning point in the struggle over reproductive power. Farming produced an irresistible metaphor that men used to reverse the seeming positions of the sexes in this realm. The apparent correspondence of a seed being planted in furrowed soil to a man “planting” semen in a woman allowed men to claim that they possess all procreative power and reduced women to the equivalent of the soil in which men plant seeds.

As the putative authors of new life, men could and did assert their authority. Women were classified as real estate that men could own, as they could the crops they grew in both their real and metaphorical farms. Everything from Aristotle to Freud about women being inferior, incomplete, deformed men flowed from this Neolithic misconception about conception.

Much of the male boasting through the millenniums about reproductive power belonging to them has, however, amounted to whistling past the menstrual hut or birthing room. The fact remained that women could do things that men could not, and this troubled some men deeply.

The complaint that Euripides placed in the mouth of Hippolytus gives voice to the jealousies and desires of insecure men across the ages. Men attempting to create on their own have been a staple of myth and fiction from the Greek Zeus to Victor Frankenstein.

All the talk of “self-made men” notwithstanding, men have never been able to make themselves or anyone else. Cloning seems to offer a way for men with such desires to achieve their fantasies and escape from the laws that have governed sexually reproducing species for the last billion or so years.

But cloning will not fulfill the dream of Hippolytus, Dr. Frankenstein and company. It will remain a chimera.

“It takes two to tango” is the most basic rule of species such as ours. I prefer to keep on dancing.