By Peter

Remember this line?

Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death…

If you don’t recognize it, it’s a quotation from feminist icon Sarah Connor in the movie Terminator 2. The setup is that Sarah had just shown the creator of machine life that his work had led to a nuclear holocaust. While far from sophisticated, this bit of pop-culture feminism neatly encompasses the prevailing modern view of men and their contributions to the world and society, which is that men are primarily destructive and hateful creatures while it is women who civilize men, and are deserving of veneration for their acts of creation.

But is this true? I submit that it is not so simple. First off, the acts of creation that women go through are natural processes not of their own making. For a woman does not truly choose to have children, she can only choose to NOT have them, either through birth control or abortion. And while I’m firmly for abortion rights (as long as they are remade to protect men too), it is clear that women have prematurely terminated tens or hundreds of millions of lives, mostly for no other reason then their own convenience, since it’s been allowed. Thus, while woman’s ability to create the next generation is undeniable, the veneration of that ability is questionable.

So what about men, those agents of destruction and death? Did you know that two evil Patriarchal males living in the colonizing, racist, 19th century German Empire created billions of lives? No?

It’s called the Haber Process, and it allows nitrogen to be removed from the atmosphere and turned into ammonia, a fertilizer. While our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, our soil is not, and nitrogen must be “fixed” into the soil by the growth, death, and decay of plant life. By some estimates, without artificial fertilizer, Earth could not support more than 2 billion human lives. The story of course is not so simple – the dual nature of men is exemplified in Haber. He is the father of billions, but through his invention of mustard gas, the killer of millions. Still, the feminist narrative is looking a bit strained – after all, even in the example of this one man, the creation of death isn’t ALL that we know.

A couple of other examples to illustrate my point. While traditionally in most societies it has been women, midwives, who have assisted in the birthing of children, it was a 17th-century Frenchman who created an ingenious device that eventually allowed for what must by now be billions of lives to be saved. They’re called the obstetric forceps, and they’re crucial in assisting in childbirth (see pdf).

Over the following several centuries, it was again men who innovated and worked to perfect the device, which is still in use to this day. Read the article, it’s a tragic and familiar tale – under the Roman civilization, obstetrics was at an advanced state, but the knowledge was lost for centuries. When did obstetrics improve again? Under the care of medieval midwifery practices? Did the “oral traditions” of “authentic folk cultures”, “passed down from mother to daughter” help things at all? Please. Things improved when civilized men got involved, that’s when.

Another related example is the invention of penicillin, discovered in 1929 by a great man, Alexander Fleming. By the 1940′s, other unknown great men surmounted the considerable challenges of mass-production. But did you know that not only did the age of antibiotics help save billions of lives, it actually helped create them too? One of the most important applications of antibiotics is in the treatment of post-partum infections.

As you can see from the above link, “The overall postpartum infection rate was 6.0%.”, so 6000 infections per 100,000 births, but, of those infected today, “maternal death rates associated with infection range from 4-8%, or approximately 0.6 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.” That’s a whole lot fewer women dying from childbirth, which leaves them free to have more children later. Indeed, some have theorized that the baby boom was partly caused by this invention.

Not convinced? Look up the many examples of male inventions which improved agricultural yields, like the medieval horse collar which allowed a far stronger animal to plough the fields, or Canadian wheat, painstakingly cross-bred to withstand the cold and make use of an enormous tract of unused land. But the point is well made. One woman can create at most, what, a dozen lives? Thirty? How many has the hydrogen bomb killed so far? Sarah Connor, the brain-child of one of the biggest man-hating male feminists alive today, was wrong. We might not feel them growing inside us, but we create lives, by the billions.