Over on Dalrock’s blog Anonymous Reader had an interesting insight about the Alpha Fucks – Beta Bucks dichotomy:
Turning to the Missouri sperm donor case, I got to thinking about the whole notion of a sperm bank. Without bothering to search, they seem to be an invention of the 1960′s. I recall reading about the concept in high school biology, and the original justification was to provide infertile married couples with the chance for the wife to bear a child into the marriage. A couple of the matriarchs of my family were absolutely shocked when sperm banks started serving, or perhaps servicing, unmarried women. That was immoral, in their eyes. Looking backwards it should be no surprise that in some progressive, coastal venues men began providing turkey-baster filling for lesbian couples in the 1990′s – it’s not that big a step from “woman goes to specialized OB/GYN for syringe of semen” to “woman and her partner get together with male friend and turkey baster”. Bonus points in some quarters if the man is gay…but I digress.
Let’s look at this abstractly. Man and woman marry, find that she isn’t getting pregnant, determine from medical testing that his swimmers aren’t winning the race. So they pay for another man to impregnate her, although via a medical go-between. The original sperm banks screened donors and pretty much limited them to med students and other college men.
This is “Alpha Sperm, Beta Provisioning”, and nothing less. Putting a tech or a doctor in the middle wearing gloves and a lab coat, and injecting semen with a syringe rather than the usual method doesn’t change that. Sperm banks are therefore a clinical version of AF-BB, and as such clearly serve the Female Imperative in the same manner as a married woman having an affair while she’s ovulating – except that the latter is still sorta frowned upon, while the former has been a part of US culture for 40-50 or more years. I wonder what the time line is – did sperm banks show up about the same time as hormonal contraception, for example?
Now turning back to the sucker in Missouri: what’s his real crime? Sperm donor without a license, I guess, his lesbian friends failed to use the medical go-between, and his ignorance left him liable. But in terms of the Female Imperative, perhaps he wasn’t alpha enough – they could find him – or perhaps he was alpha enough for breeding purposes (paging Mary Daly…) but beta enough for provisioning as well? I have to ponder this one more.
But the sperm bank? That’s obvious now that I wear the glasses, but it’s still kind of startling to realize that it just hit me last night that the whole idea of a sperm bank is a clear, medicalized, fully legal example of the Female Imperative of AF-BB and it’s been right out in the open for at least two generations. And it is totally normal. In fact it was apparently not all that controversial even at the start. Certainly today we all accept it because teh wimmenz deserve their own bay-bee if they want one (or more), no matter the cost to anyone else.
Another case of the Female Imperative hiding in plain sight. Someone alert Rollo.
On virtually any post I’ve made about feminism directly or where the topic of the Feminine Imperative gets redirected to one of how feminism (and previously chivalry) are social structure arms of the Feminine Imperative, one or more commenters invariably post the youtube video about how feminism was conceived to destabilize western society (by the Rockefellers?). I’m not going to speculate about some conspiracy to use the “Women’s Movement” as a premeditated social influence (there are better resources than RM for this if you’re really interested), however the fact that sperm banks were an unheard of development prior to the sexual revolution does give me pause to think that they were a need anticipated to better facilitate and perpetuate a future feminine-primary society.
It’s interesting to note that at the time of their institution, a sperm bank was a shocking development for the culture of that era. Now, a repository of men’s (presumably the best of men) genetic material can be had by any woman seeking to have a child is just part of our social scenery. The inherent hypergamic influence in this long since normalized institution can’t be ignored – just from a pragmatic standpoint hypergamy is going to dictate that women will seek out the best genetic potential for their offspring, whether artificially inseminated or by the ‘traditional’ means.
Institutionalized “Alpha” Fucks
The fact that sperm banks’ existence have been practically ubiquitous for well over 60 years now brings up some interesting social and biological dynamics.
The first of course being what Anonymous Reader observes; the fact that a repository of ‘Elite’ men’s genetic material would exist at all is the final indictment of the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks dynamic (case closed). Presumably the bank, uniquely instituted to fulfill only women genetic imperatives, would be interested in superior male specimens. What constitutes ‘superior’ or at least good quality stock is determined by a particular bank’s standards, but one might assume they would filter for overall health and viability of a man’s sperm.
I’m no expert, but I would think screening for a family history of genetic diseases, cancer, mental stability and of course HIV are on the list. I may be mistaken, but I’d also guess that a bank would screen for relatively younger men with more fertilization-viable sperm, since there is evidence that a man’s quality of sperm does in fact decay into his later years.
Beyond the biological aspects I suspect women would want a child with at least an imagined potential for future success in life so a personal background would most likely be a part of that screening process. Granted, that may be subjective depending on the demographic of women seeking (and can afford) fertilization, but I think it’s safe to assume that ethnicity, socio-economic, educational and personal success all factor into this assessment. Long story short, hypergamy, at least in the breeding aspect of it, dictates the selection process for women. As Anonymous points out, the original intent of a sperm bank / fertility clinic was to provide a woman (presumably wife) with the sperm of a viable man when her husband’s sperm was inviable – in essence, in vitro cuckolding.
If all this reads as an institutionalization of the Alpha Fucks side of women sexual pluralism (hypergamy) you’re not too far from the mark. It’s really an institutionalized form of selective breeding, entirely beholden to feminine hypergamous interests. But before I go off the deep end here, let me state that I fully realize that there’s never been some mass influx of women making ‘runs on the sperm bank’ to wantonly get themselves pregnant. Given the option, I’m sure most women would rather go with the holistic approach to impregnation (and long term private support), but the operative here is that the concept and institution of a sperm bank available to facilitate women’s biological imperative (at as optimized hypergamy as reasonable) is a normalized, almost ubiquitous social concept for modern culture.
There is really no parallel to this degree of institutionalized sexual selection for men. While there are fertility clinics for couples who may purchase donor eggs, there are no commercial ‘egg banks’, nor are there commercially available volunteer women eager to gestate and birth children to exclusively facilitate men’s biological imperatives. That isn’t to discount surrogate mothers gestating the fetuses of a sponsor couple (another extension of fulfilling the feminine biological imperative), but a man uniquely looking for a donor egg to inseminate and/or a surrogate mother to birth the child for him is all but unheard of.
And really, even if he was so predisposed to it, why would a man go to the trouble and expense? Suspending disbelief, even if he did father the child, the mother could still have exclusive rights to custody with the child if it were pressing enough for her.
From a social perspective it’s interesting to note the era in which sperm banks became normalized in society; immediately after the sexual revolution. Almost as if in anticipation for the unfettering of women’s hypergamy, the facility of insuring a woman’s best optimized hypergamy was institutionalized and normalized. This may sound like conjecture (since the socially proposed purpose was to facilitate pregnancy for an infertile man), but the utility of sperm banks quickly shifted to facilitating the pregnancy of women who wouldn’t be married or had no intention of marrying to start a family.
This was the first institution, legalized and normalized that laid bare feminism latent purpose – strong independent women® could remove the man from the equation of effecting an optimal hypergamy, while at the same time effecting future legislation and social engineering to enlist men (either publicly or privately) in the provisioning of this new breed of motherhood. And with every guy dutifully jerking off into a petrie dish, they effectually contribute one more element to institutionalized Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks.
