I would prefer to be a cyborg and
a goddess and I couldn’t begin to conceive of choosing one over the other.
I identify as female, which may
seem bizarre, but I’m certainly not the first male that’s been stuck in that
predicament, nor will I be the last; although the condition is being
increasingly detected in young children, sparing them from dealing with it as
they grow older, we are still a quantum leap away (in terms of taboos) from
eradicating these kinds of issues from our gene pool. This is possible;
Tayman-Sachs is nearly gone. The justification would be humane and not
supremacist. I would have nothing but eternal gratitude for the doctor that
flipped a gene or two for me before he fertilized one of my mother’s eggs with
genetically engineered sperm, which is the model of conception that men are
going to have to learn to deal with in the very short amount of time that they
have left. If you want a legitimate analysis of the situation from a highly
articulate and neurotically rigorous mind, in case you’ve ever been curious, as
a group we tend to simultaneously be well-read, independent minded, male hating
lipstick lesbians and emotionally stalled teenage girls, the latter for obvious
reasons of endocrinology. This is really the driving force behind the desire to
manipulate what most of us would argue are entirely meaningless physical
appearances; the mind can only develop separate from the body for so long
before it can no longer develop, in certain ways, at all. I’m not a virgin, but
I’m at the emotional level of one, stuck here until death ends the monotony as
even if my glands finally miraculously figure out that they’ve actually got it
all backwards this does not solve the psycho-sexual difficulties around the
absence of virginity being an impossible to attain goal.
Nonetheless, I don’t feel out
of place discussing feminist philosophy, despite the maniacal objections of the
tyrannical vagina-only fascists who would callously denigrate all those who suffer
from genetic mutations and hormonal imbalances, as though they are inhuman
monsters that are incapable of thought or emotion. Perhaps I should be brushed
off as the naïve young woman that I hormonally am, lacking in post-menopausal
wisdom, but to deny me of my female identity is so amazingly ironically
exclusionist and cruel that I can harbour nothing but the most deep seated
resentment possible towards those that would cast me aside as sub-female,
sub-vaginal and sub-human. I will neither heed nor recognize the objections,
criticisms and arguments that stem from that lobby. To them, I say, simply: Go
mutilate another carrot.
The goddess is far from dead;
she is the fundamental anchor that our increasingly matriarchal society is
rooted upon. The goddess sells us everything from tampons to condoms, from
lingerie to sports cars, from folk tunes to dark techno, from art films to
pornography; she is ubiquitous and appeals equally directly to both genders.
She transcends race, colour and political affiliation by shifting,
chameleon-like, and assuming uncounted characteristics as she travels amongst
us between the membranes of the eleventh dimension; she is an ideal that is as
old as ideals itself, quite probably our earliest abstraction and quite
certainly our most basest, primitive and universal relation. She is our
collective conscience, our guiding moral principle; she is peace, harmony,
love, justice and compassion. Even the most dystopian future conceivable could
not eliminate the Goddess as the dour and painful existence that would result
from her death is so ghastly that it is beyond human imagination. A world
without love, not even at the base level between a mother and a child or a monk
and his plants; a world where all life is as worthless as an annoying mosquito…this
is a Goddess-less reality.
An atheist would speak like
this! The Goddess is not and never has been a deity to be grovelled to, she is
not a master to serve or an overlord to appease; she is our most pure
abstraction of perfection and our most powerful symbol of euphoria, something
to behold in glory and to celebrate the beauty of. She reminds us that as
terrible as reality is, as humiliating as our roles all may be, there is still
hope because she still exists, even if she exists only as an abstraction. She
is karmic release, she is the second coming of Christ, she is the appearance of
the messiah; she is the end of war, the end of tyranny, the end of history…the
end of humanity. Yes, the end of humanity.
It’s become increasingly clear
over the last few decades that men are becoming increasingly superfluous. It is
a biological fact throughout the animal kingdom that, excluding situations
where sexual dimorphism demands otherwise, the female of the species always has
sole command over their choice of mates. She guides evolution at every level,
weeding out the strong from the weak and actually deducing, based on everything
from colour to aroma to conversation, which sperm is likely to be the most
valuable in creating the most fit offspring. The female of our own species are
far from immune to these base instincts and far from capable of transcending or
discarding them. As such, once the option is conceivable, the industrial use of
semen will revolutionize our society; it will be placed upon the shelf beside
the low-fat frozen yoghourt and sold to us by Goddesses. It is best to
acknowledge the best-before date, of course. At first, there will be various
flavours: blonde female, Somali model, linebacker male, etc but in time the
females will be selected as once sperm is easily obtainable for a few dollars
there will no longer be any need or desire to create men.
So, we will have Godesses who
will demand Goddesses; our political and business institutions will become
sterilized playboy mansions.
The most visible implementation
of our current cyborg reality is in the increasing normality of cosmetic
surgery. For women, a career in business, politics or media today is virtually
impossible without first becoming a cyborg goddess. The lofty and previously
unrealistic conceptions of the perfect female form are no longer thought of as
idealizations or as the luck of a selected few, it is now recognized that it is
a pragmatic necessity to conform to a certain plastic and constructed image if
any success whatsoever is desired.
When Haraway speaks of a
cosmetic science,
summer, 2009
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/thoughts/trolls/essayharaway.html