F*@k the Clones
by Matt Tobey
A week after Matilda, the first sheep cloned in Australia, passed away under
mysterious circumstances, Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, also
met her maker's maker. And while it's certainly unfortunate that lives have ended,
those of us conceived and born the messy old-fashioned way can't help but breathe a
small sigh of relief.
Not ignoring the wondrous and exciting possibilities genetic engineering holds
for curing diseases and making bacon as healthy as spinach, we have to face the
fact that a successful step in cloning is a damaging blow to the sex lives of us
regular folks. Certainly one can't deny the fact that the only reason evolution
ever made our private parts feel so good was to encourage us to propagate the
species. Logically speaking, as real-live penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse
becomes less essential to reproduction, our bodies will find more useful
places to put all of those nerves.
But who really cares about whether our great-great grandchildren will be able to
have a satisfying orgasm, right? Not when there are more immediate effects
of cloning to fear.
Think about the sexual-microcosm game you play when you're in a waiting room or on
a bus, the game in which you look around and consider, in the event the entire
world's population is reduced to the people in that room or on that bus, who you're
better looking than, and based on that, whom you could likely have sex with. Now
think about playing that game on a bus filled with breathtakingly beautiful
geniuses-after all no one's planning on cloning Clint Howard. How do you fare?
You're going to end up with the bus driver, aren't you? Now, make that microcosm
a macrocosm.
See, in a world saturated with flawless clones, good looking people suddenly become
average-looking people, average-looking people suddenly become ugly people, and
ugly people suddenly become ... well, uglier. And since Dolly and her clone kin have
all aged at an accelerated rate, it's possible that the clones will be
penetrating the dating scene while you're still in it.
So join in on the sigh of relief, because for every dead sheep, we're given a
little more time before society bumps the majority of us from moderately attractive
to hideous.
E-mail Matt Tobey at mtobey77@hotmail.com.
— graphic by Mike Fisher (crspeedy@crspeedy.com)
