Article Title: Have sperm will travel. But what would an all-female planet look like?

Article Summary

The article at hand reports that frozen sperm can survive space travel, and reflects on what that means for a solely female populated planet, should one ever come to exist. The discovery of the durability of sperm comes in the wake of anti-female laws across the globe, including the abortion ban in states of the US of A. If sperm can indeed be frozen and transported, the day is not far off after the discovery of a new habitable planet, when only women live on the new land, reproducing without any need for men. This kind of exclusivist female land has been considered and written about as a Utopia in several sci-fi books authored by women in the past. Mizoraand Herlandare a few examples of such works. In these worlds, male and patriarchal standards are always shoved aside, and women are free to shed the mantles of conventional beauty and submissiveness they always have to don in this world. However, these Utopias are not nearly ideal, as they embrace the concept of eugenics among other harmful ideas. Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman has also been alluded to and praised by the author, but it also has pitfalls in the forms of catering to the male gaze and encouraging eugenics. A theme that runs through Wonder Woman is that a feminist ecosystem may be under attack by men at any which point and whim – men learning to be aggressive towards women is the problem that needs to be weeded out, feels the author, and not the male presence from the Earth. To do that, she urges, we must start with giving women more respect and power in this planet itself, before populating different ones.

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Words to learn from this article:

Procreate: reproduce to produce offspring of the same species.

Utopian: involving Utopia, a fictional ideal world where everything is perfect.

Parthenogenesis: asexual reproduction through cell division.

Eugenics: a practice that aims to improve the quality of a particular race or breed, by eliminating offspring with undesirable characteristics from the gene pool before they are even born.

Inflammatory: sensational, or inciting violence.

Feminist: from a school of thought that aims to champion the rights of women, by advocating they be treated with equality in the world.