Not that they exist, but then it's fashionable these days to declare wars against concepts which can't fight back. Like "war on terror". Bush can't do anything about my terror when facing a dentist's chair. The "war on drugs" is a similar stupid term. Wouldn't the best way to fight drugs be to destroy them, by, for example, consuming them? -- This is all linguistic bullshit, but I'm joining in because I need a vacation.
So back to the sperm wars. I got the idea from a funny blog post at the English Guardian website, on the question whether men will be eradicated now that we can clone sperm from mice. Not that mouse sperm will work on humans, but the writer suffered from a more existential angst:
What interested us much more, though, was the response, in various newspapers and broadcasts, to the news of this research. The response, essentially, was the question "Will this make men redundant?" In other words, when the technology develops to the extent that it can be used on humans, will a significant number of women want to be fertilised without using sperm that has been acquired by the old-school method?
And, if they do, how will this make men feel?
Pretty bad, was my initial feeling.
After all, biologically speaking, a man is two things. He is, first, a sperm-making factory, and, second, a sperm-shooting machine. So it would not be surprising if, on some level, men felt put out - a little emasculated, even - by the "artificial" sperm production technique. Soon, if you want sperm, you will be able to get it without going to the traditional sperm factory. You might say that, for men, this is rather like owning a cotton plantation, and reading about the discovery of nylon.
It's funny. But weird. Then the piece gets even weirder. To get the idea, you need to know that the setup is two guys talking about all this stuff:
Cloned sperm, of course, is a different matter. One day, some time in the near future, the scientists might get it right. And then what? Since the dawn of time, men have always known that, whatever they do, however badly they behave, they are still the only place to go if you want sperm.
Well, possibly not for much longer. Won't this affect us, somewhere deep inside our brains?
Maybe a little bit, we decided. And then we tried to imagine what would happen if the situation were reversed. If scientists discovered a way of cloning eggs from stem cells, would men even consider the possibility of doing without women? Would newspaper articles trumpet the possible redundancy of the female half of the species?
"Never," I said. "Men would never want to get rid of women."
"Yes, but that's not to say they feel the same way about us."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, look at how we revere women and their eggs. And compare that with how sperm is depicted."
This is where I lost it, possibly because I can't remember the last time I passed a temple for the egg worshippers. Indeed, the main religions don't even need an ovary to create the world these days. It all comes from a Father, or at most from a Father and a Son, with a little bit of holy ghost thrown in. No women at all there. So what's the reverence of women and their eggs all about? The rest of the post doesn't tell us. It never goes back to this argument that eggs are more revered than sperm; it just goes on to make fun of the poor sperm. We are supposed to see the whole thing as a parable about men (the poor sperm) and women (the worshipped eggs).
And that charming statement earlier on, the one about how men would never want to get rid of women, even if uterine replicators were readily available. There are some feminists, fairly radical ones, who believe that men would like nothing as well as getting rid of women, provided that some robot class is invented to care for children and to do laundry and simple, uncreative cooking. There's even a pretty famous science-fiction short story about the final killing of all women. -- Not that most men would want to do this, or even the majority of men, but it's important to set the charming statement into some perspective here.
Additional perspective can be obtained from all those countries which have strict laws about the places where women can exist and the places where they can't exist. Which really is a partial eradication of women if you think about it.