Outsourcing Birth

Some people are not physically capable of carrying a child to term, so they get a surrogate to do it for them. This is why you hear stories of women giving birth to their own grandchildren and whatnot. Apparently, surrogacy is a growing business in India, where women carry babies for perfect strangers in exchange for housing, medical care, and an amount of money that is large to them but relatively small for the families who want a child.

The group that the article's author talked to says that they screen families based on need and counsel the surrogates after the birth. But the article speculates that some people may decide that using a surrogate is just easier than giving birth themselves, leading to perfectly healthy people to decide to use surrogates. Somehow, though, I don't see this becoming common place. Sure, there are women who are concerned about being out of work or worry about their figure, but I think enough women would prefer to have that first bond with their child if they could. Assuming that some very old instincts will somehow fall away for the sake of convenience or cosmetics in a large enough segment of the population for it to a have an effect on the market is, I think, stretching the limits plausibility. (David Levy should take notes here, though if his speculations come true, then surrogates for fertile women will probably become necessary).

Of course, despite this, my sci-fi brain went into over driver. I imagined a young woman in the future telling her family that she wants to have a child. They are excited until she mentions that she wants to carry it herself. What about your career? What about the side effects? You really should leave that to professionals! And then I thought of all of the sci-fi stories with three-gendered species. Is this where that would lead? Could we create an entire class of incubators? It's scary stuff.

No Touching!

All forms of physical contact have been banned at a Fairfax County, VA middle school. Apparently, because some kids don't know the difference between "good" touching and "bad" touching, they should never have the opportunity to learn the difference. In this school, high fives are as bad as punches. A hand on the shoulder as bad as groping. It's sounds to me like the school is too lazy or too scared to make judgment calls on a fuzzy line and figures it would just be easier to ban all physical contact and call it a day.

The school's principal says that she "has seen a poke escalate into a fight and a handshake that is a gang sign." Trash talking can also lead to fights. Will they ban verbal communication next? I'm pretty sure there are some gang signs that don't require physical contact. Will hand signals be banned, too? Or, better yet, all body language. And eye contact. Eye contact can be very intimidating. You know what? Middle school sucked anyway. Let's just ban middle school. The kids can stay home through the better part of puberty and become socially stunted in the comfort of their own living room instead of trudging to school to get that way. They can do distance learning. They can take classes on their impersonal computer which will become their wire mesh mothers, providing socialization only in the form of text messaging, e-mail, and bulletin boards. That will make everything better.

How Are You?

I’ve written a fair amount on this blog about the nature of human interaction, mostly because I don’t consider myself to be very good at it. I never know the right thing to say, and I’m particularly bad at asking questions. I always feel like I’m prying unless I know someone very well, and even then I have to think carefully about what I should ask. I probably come off as a little self-absorbed, but that happens when you spend your formative years being reverse-socialized. I’m perfectly good at watching people interact and knowing where other people are making social missteps, and I can have a fairly even exchange about non-personal stuff (philosophy, politics, religion, education, technology, movies, television? I’m good), but personal stuff is tricky. How much do you need to say to let someone know you care without getting too personal?

This is particularly difficult when you know someone is going through a hard time. To me, a sincere “how are you” is enough to know that someone cares. If someone feels like talking, they can answer honestly. But I don’t like asking specifics until the other person brings up the topic because I’m afraid to remind people of their pain. If someone does not open up after one or two questions, I assume they don’t feel like talking about it. And at that point, I feel it’s more my job to help them take their mind off of their problems than to help them dwell on them. I know that’s how I am. I’ve never been one for talk therapy, and I’m perfectly capable of dwelling on my problems on my own. If I feel like talking about it, I will talk about it. Otherwise, I want my time with my friends to be uplifting.

My aunt (who is going through a difficult time herself at the moment) seems to think that people who try to distract you from your problems are being insensitive. I suppose, yes, if they completely ignore that fact that you are in pain. However, she doesn’t see “how are you?” as enough. It’s too general, too common. While I’ve been desperate for human interaction and work and movies and anything to get my mind off the little pieces of my soul that are now buried in my parent’s front yard, she has been emotionally exhausted and desperate for alone time. But her friends and co-workers (mostly female), who are totally well meaning, keep asking her about her situation. My friends and co-workers (mostly male) are content to listen to me talk about my kitties for a few moments if I so chose, but they don’t dig at the wound. And that’s fine by me. I’ve probably talked about it too much as it is.

Maybe I’m just so used to being around guys and that’s how they deal with things. Or maybe my aunt and I really do live in completely different worlds – she in a world where people talk about their feelings and go to art galleries and hang out in coffee shops; me in a world where people talk about sci-fi and make constant pop-culture references and hang out on the Internet. It’s not that I don’t feel or don’t empathize when others are going through a difficult time. It’s just that there’s not always a lot you can say. Reassurances and sympathetic words feel so inadequate. I prefer to be a listener rather than an interrogator. I think that’s all most people really need – someone to listen. And opening that door really only takes one question: “How are you?”

Anonymity and the Internet

The Internet is the ultimate liberterian experiment: few rules and plenty of freedom, just the fact that the participants have a vested interest in its success preventing a decent into total chaos. As a Chappell Show sketch points out, if the Internet were a real place, it wouldn’t really be the kind of place you would want to visit. But he leaves out one very important factor: everyone is wearing Halloween costumes. Some people are dressed as themselves, but everyone is wearing a mask. There is simply no way to be sure who is who. After all, can you really be sure that someone posting under a real-enough-sounding name is actually named “John Smith”?

Tom Grubisich addresses the issue of Internet anonymity in today’s Washington Post. However, he completely neglects something very important that gets drilled into our heads regarding conversing on the Internet: never give out your personal information. And these days, even giving out your name can give people access to some very personal information. The anonymity goes both ways: I may not be able to find the Internet bully, but the bully can’t find me, either.

Insisting that the people who write on bulletin boards or even blogs be open about their identity does nothing to protect them from the people who anonymously read their posts. As Dahlia Lithwick discusses here, having your personal information plastered on the Internet (especially when accompanied by threats) is a very real and menacing problem (and, no, female bloggers aren’t the only targets). Those who are open about their identities can more easily be victimized by those who make no such efforts towards open and civil discourse. Reporters who publish their names have long received negative and even threatening reactions to their writings, but they have their publishers and editors behind them. They can report abusing and threatening e-mails and comments to their boss. If some idiot starts flaming me in the comments or e-mails me directly, I have no such luxury.

Though I generally try to be careful on my blog, the average internet stalker obsessively reading through it could figure out my first name, my birth date, my gender, what area I live in, where I work (though not the company I work for), where I went to college, the first names of several of my friends, the names of my cats, and probably a few more things that, if I put them all into one post, I wouldn’t publish it. You won’t find my address, my phone number, or anything that specific. But if you had my name, they would be a lot easier to get.

My only defense is my hit counter which tells me how people reached my blog, what time they visited, where they were when they visited, what service provider they used, how many pages they viewed, what OS and browser they used, and various other random tidbits that I bet you didn’t know the websites you visit were collecting from you. Given that I only get about 19 hits a day and my regular readers are well distributed, I can generally tell exactly who read my blog. If someone discovered this blog and decided to read through the whole thing (note to internet stalkers: that’s 812 posts over a 3 year period, so settle in) to uncover all of the information I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I would notice.

There are ways to defend against drive-by flamers and Internet bullies. There are plenty of forums and even blogs that require registration to post comments. This discourages drive-by posts of the juvenile variety and gives a name (even if it’s a fake one) to repeat troublemakers. Some forums allow users to block other users, so if another poster starts flinging insults, you can just ignore them. Some bloggers and forums moderate their comments, which can prevent flame wars from getting out of hand. This can lead to posters whose messages are deleted to complain about censorship and to scream about the first amendment and whatnot, to which I say: my house, my rules. If you insult me, I have every right to kick you off my property. Go start your own forum/blog if you want. It’s a free Internet.

Having forums and blogs with required registration and rules of conduct, even if the rules are minimal, go a long way toward making online conversations more civil. It’s not necessary to take people’s online identities and match them up with their social security numbers. That, too, has the potential for abuse. Registered pseudonyms still give posters an identity, just one without a birth certificate. Besides, without pseudonyms, the U.S. wouldn’t be the country it is today. They can’t be all bad.

Inappropriate Dinner Conversation

This post is rated PG-13 for adult content.

(She's doing adult content now? Next she'll be swearing and drinking!) Hush, you.

At a Super Secret Happy Hour in an undisclosed location (where I consumed copious amounts of Pepsi and a disagreeable taco), a truly baffling topic dominated the conversation for much of the evening. Apparently, earlier in the day, one of the attendees (whom, for the purposes of this post, we shall call Bacchus) had declared that, should he embark upon a trip to Alpha Centauri to build a new society, his minimal requirements would include, not female companionship (not even his wife), but a 4 GB RAM stick containing, shall we say, explicit material. Women, he posited further, would soon become obsolete. Technology would be able to fulfill all of man’s needs.

Robots would serve him food, pick out his clothes, balance his checkbook, and do everything else that the women in his life had thus far done for him. And the RAM stick would do what little the robots… couldn’t. Did I mention “inappropriate”? I did? Good. Moving right along. He would even have robots raise children, which would be incubated by a machine and generated from pre-existing zygotes. By the time he reached Alpha Centauri, he would have a whole team of young, healthy people who had been trained during the flight to build his new colony entirely populated by males.

But Bacchus’ woman-less world has many problems. In fact, his world is more apt to be male-less. First, if this were a female-only society rather than a male-only society, the technology to incubate a fetus for the needed amount of time would be unnecessary. You would, of course, still have the problem of eventually running out of the original zygotes, which would force you to turn to cloning to continue the species. But the female-only society once again has benefits over the male-only society here because the male-only society would not only have to have the technology to create the incubators but also an artificial egg to populate with the cloned DNA. A female-only society would have natural eggs ready to go, no new tech needed.

The other problem is the one I brought up here. I even specifically addressed this to Bacchus: Without women to motivate men to do something other than watch the content of the RAM stick, how could you possibly build a society? He paused, then said “You may have a point.” But that was not the end of it, no. His solution was not to reintroduce women to society but to use the RAM stick as a reward for constructive contribution to society. In other words, the RAM stick would replace women even in the capacity of denying men their pleasure when they haven’t done what they are supposed to.

But who controls the RAM sticks? Does the computer decide who’s been a productive citizen? You know someone would figure out how to hack into that. Do you put a person in charge? How do you decide who that person is? And wouldn’t that put an awful lot of power into the hands of one individual? Better to distribute that power among many. But those many would not be able to access the RAM stick without also giving permission to someone else to access the RAM stick. So, how exactly is this better than having women?

I’m still trying to figure out if having this conversation was better or worse than talking about work, which is what we usually do.

(As a side note, someone sitting beside Bacchus gets bonus points for asking “If the RAM stick dies, does it get 72 MB of unused memory?”, which was made even more hilarious by the fact that Bacchus didn’t get it.)