“The monosexual utopia is at hand!”: A fembeing reflects on a revolution

Editor’s note: This satire, originally written in 1984, has not been published previously.

Here in the mid twenty-first century, as we stand on the brink of ultimate victory in the age-old struggle for fembeing rights, it is only fitting to review a few of the past developments that led to this point. I trust that readers will forgive my indelicacy in resorting to certain outmoded vulgarisms such as “woman” and “man” in the interest of historical flavor.

The brutal and pervasive sexism of the Roman Catholic Church is too well known to require description. But even that masculinist bastion was shaken when bishops, impatient with Vatican policy, publicly ordained women to the priesthood on their own authority. Naturally, their severest critics were religious women. With true prophetic distain for clerical pretentions, they declared that no act by a member of an oppressor class could impart or validate female celebrancy. Only lawyers profited from the resultant schisms and legal suits.

Later, a famous controversy erupted over women’s absolute right to use their bodies as their wished. The compassionate Sisters of the Newest Age announced that, after much prayerful reflection, they were opening a free brothel to provide warm, open, and caring sex for the poor, marginalized, and sexually disadvantaged. All requests by clients were promised non-judgmental attention because no desire should be stigmatized as “deviant.”

According to Sister Merry Malibu, “How can we know these people unless we know them?” Regrettably, Mafia harassment quickly drove the Holy House out of business before its daring apostolate could bear fruit.

By then, even timid prelates realized that formerly liberal policies, for example, indulgence towards pro-choice advocates, had become all too conventional. Anxious to reclaim progressive status, they redoubled efforts to purge the last vestiges of exclusive language from sacred texts, a campaign the Raddest Trads denounced as “the castration of Scripture.” But keen-eyed critics still detected vestiges of crypto-masculinist values lurking in such compositions as the new Supreme One’s Prayer.

Moreover, there was the distasteful matter of Christ’s sex. Unwilling to repudiate his problematic maleness completely, moderates urged compromise. Henceforth, the embarrassing corpus on the crucifix was to be replaced by a tastefully semi-nude androgyne.

Of course, these feeble concessions were doomed. Appeasement always fails. Dissident women founded the Church of the Sacred Womb to proclaim female redemption. (Bigoted wits called it the “Climax of the Miss-iah.”) Although its central Mystery was the menstrual cycle, this sect generously admitted feminine transsexuals to full communion, praising their “fervor of the converted. Bolder radicals flocked to the resolutely neuter Exaltationists who made themselves eunuchs for the Realm of Heaven or, at the other extreme, to the Children of Earth—the so-called “Dirties—whose joyous creed exhorted them to copulate early, often, and with everything.

The Absolutely Equal Rights Amendment outlawing all legal distinctions among people completed the transformation of marriage from sexist slavery to an institution that could accommodate any combination of individuals. Although pedophilic homosexual incest has remained a minority enthusiasm, the monogamous heterosexual has all but disappeared. Since then, we and our offspring have largely been spared the crippling effects of dual-parent households.

Except for the rare eccentric celebrities who beget and bear their own children, surrogate parenting has become the favorite reproductive strategy among the elite. They now bank ova and sperm for future in vitro conception followed by implantation in a rented uterus. This admirable system ought to have provided lucrative employment for low-income women. But most have unaccountably failed to seize the opportunity and thus sink ever deeper into poverty. Upbringing determines status. As countless studies have demonstrated, the impulsively procreated, home-reared child simply cannot compete with the professionally supervised product of the petri dish and the day-care center.

Absolute reproductive control remains the key to full liberation. Mandatory contraceptive implants at puberty free today’s adolescents for fearless sexual experimentation. Self-induced abortion is a routine precaution for the mature while free and unrestricted termination services provide a final safety net. Deliberately starting, then stopping a pregnancy for an aesthetic thrill remains fashionable in some advanced circles. Personal experience with abortion is now as indispensable for the aspiring politician as parenthood was. More than one female candidate’s dreams died when their past pregnancy terminations were unmasked as miscarriages.

Although our Supreme Court perversely continues to uphold a woman’s option to refuse an indicated abortion, those who ignore the findings of government mandated genetic counseling and pre-natal screening now forfeit all future claims to public assistance for a defective child.

Religious bodies, such as the Roman-loyalist remnant of the Catholic Church, who obdurately reject current enlightened practices must be made to feel society’s displeasure by appropriate legal action. To date, cancellation of tax exemptions and imposition of punitive fines have no sufficed to crush these retrograde elements.

This temporary setback is a sad symptom of larger failures. America, as well as the rest of the world, remains incorrigibly sexist. Masbeings will be men—and therefore oppressors—regardless of their protestations to the contrary. A rigidly phallus-free lifestyle has yet to be realized despite thoroughgoing historical revision, cultural modification, and social reconstruction as well as relentless imposition of femspeak.

Although cloning and genetically engineered hermaphroditism have never become practical realities, biotechnology is about to fulfill its promise. The recent discovery of two-ova fertilization and the development of a reliable artificial womb will eliminate the last necessity for tolerating males. (Already, thanks to the availability of certain sophisticated mechanisms, discriminating connoisseurs of orgasms no longer depend on the chancy potency of male partners for their pleasure.) Now that men will become obsolete as fathers as well as lovers, attrition will shortly render them extinct.

Although I am too old to see the final flowering of our glorious future, I salute it. Rejoice, femsiblings! The monosexual utopia is at hand!