Lysistrata

by Anthony M. Ludovici

Fresh legislation will now be passed, which will make it a felony for a man to give a woman a child in the old corporeal sense, and any male found guilty of such an offence will be sentenced to death or else to a long term of hard labour. In view of the initial heavy cost of extra-corporeal gestation, however, public centres will be provided where the Borough Council will undertake to “grow” children for the destitute and the poor.

A little later on, of course, this artificial aid will be perfected, and even the cow will become unnecessary. The fertilized ovum, cultivated in embryonic tissue-juice, will then be independent of the foster uterus of animals, and will mature very much as chickens now do in incubators.

These discoveries are all potential in the scientific achievements of our day, and implicit in our values. All they need to bring them into existence is the further direction of these values, together with the continued anti-sexual and anti-masculine bias of Feminism.

With this final blow levelled at the corporeal equipment of sex, triumphant Feminism will probably reach its zenith, and in a few generations a kind of woman will appear the only vestige of whose sex will be her smooth face and primary genital glands. Men will then be frankly regarded as quite superfluous. Having lost their powers, first as spiritual and bodily leaders, secondly as masters and lovers, thirdly as skilled craftsmen and soldiers, and fourthly as specialized workers, their social use will have lapsed, and their numbers will begin to be felt as a source of irritation and even indignation.

At this stage the social muddle will have become so intricate, and have grown so alarmingly out of hand, that nothing but the most drastic and sweeping changes will be able to prolong the life of the community. A shortage of food, occasioned by difficulties arising in the Government Department responsible for food-preparation and food-distribution, will give the signal for the last and most bitter sex-struggle. Either through incompetent administration or the revolt of the workers, there will be a threat of starvation. No food will be made for weeks, stores will be on the point of being depleted, and panic will reign everywhere; when suddenly a few of the leading women will perceive with apocalyptic clarity not only that the superfluity of men has become a burden on the community and a menace to the food of the children, but also that the reduction of their numbers to the barest minimum indispensable for the purposes of fertilization would be a twofold boon—it would relieve the food-crisis both for the moment and possibly also for the future, and obviate for ever the danger of a masculine or slave rising.

A sex-fight at the distributing station of a large store will suffice to light the first spark of this new conflagration. A dead set will be made against the men, not only round the original focus of the trouble, but everywhere. The legislature, recognizing their opportunity, will support the popular fury, and proceed to a systematic slaughter of males, until, with the help of the regular troops, it will be found necessary to protect and preserve a small nucleus for next year’s fertilization.

By that time, however, a significant precedent will have been established, and a lesson learnt that will not easily be forgotten. The superfluousness of men above a certain essential minimum (about 5 to every 1,000 women) will have become recognized officially and unofficially as a social fact. The legislature will establish laws to guarantee that this minimum should not be surpassed, and in a very short while it will become a mere matter of routine to proceed to an annual slaughter of males who have either outlived their prime or else have failed to fulfil the promise of their youth in meekness, general emasculateness, and stupidity.

The only circumstance that can avert this ultimate development is the discovery by science of a means of determining the sex of the ovum. If this can be done, then, of course, only a certain small number of males (½%) will be reared every year, and the periodical slaughter will be avoided. But in this connection it should be remembered that man will long since have grown too dull to be capable of scientific wonders of any kind; and, as it is not in woman’s nature to be inventive or to make great discoveries, the probability is that society will petrify at the level of mechanical and scientific progress reached at the moment of man’s most serious decline, and, therefore, that the periodical slaughter of males will remain just as much a necessity with the human female workers as with the worker-bees.

Meanwhile, to these millions of workers life will have become little more than a dreary, colourless, and hopeless round of toil and self-sacrifice. The only sources of excitement and pleasure will be the pastimes offering chances for public parade and appeals to vanity, the criticism of the latest Government foods and their corresponding digestive aids, and the reading in the papers about the prosecution of refractory female characters, either for sedition, immorality, or indolence. Under immorality will be included all attempts at writing, reading, or circulating any poem, novel, or treatise faintly reminiscent of love as we now know it, all attempts at unearthing or recalling the “obscene” literature of former ages—particularly the romantic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and all efforts to draw, paint, carve, or otherwise represent any graphic image of barbaric woman, when she still bore on her body the traces of the corporeal equipment for motherhood.

Looking round upon this cold, hard, and business-like world, however, in which the unremitting industry, so much exalted by Maeterlinck, will be the only activity and almost the only interest, it is not unlikely that millions of these female workers will ask themselves, with ever increasing perplexity and distress, what purpose it all serves, what good it all does, and what advantage or pleasure they derive from it. In their lives of stoic “purity” and monotonous bread-winning alone, they are likely to discover that even waiting for the end is intolerable, and many who will regard the normal term of human life as an unmerciful prolongation of their inexplicable misery will have recourse to all possible means of terminating their hardships. Gradually it will dawn upon a few independent and rebellious spirits that to have attempted to live like spirits before the spirit-world was reached, to have attempted to extinguish the joys and thrills of the body and to taste of the interests of angels, before having shuffled off this mortal coil—in fact to have planned and organized an æsthetic phenomenon such as life without retaining its æsthetic side, was a tragic and utterly brutal blunder. By the time, however, that this inevitable discovery is made—the only great discovery that an exclusively female community is ever likely to make—those who will be responsible for it will look aghast upon their own and their sisters’ bodies; and, perceiving with horror the impossibility at that late hour of recovering the functions, powers, and bodily parts, which centuries of disuse and degeneration will have withered to nothing, they will, if they still have enough spirit left, execrate and curse the memory of those who first envisaged their state as a future possibility, and who, having once conceived it as desirable, deliberately planned and schemed to bring it about.