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Summary
What does it mean when men want children but not the women who make them? This essay confronts the entitlement, hypocrisy, and misogyny embedded in the growing male fantasy of wombs without women.
When men want the children, but not the women who make them.
There is something unsettling about the way men—modern men—talk about surrogacy. So blasé and casual, a betrayal of what the popular and assumed ideas of surrogacy represent: altruism, agency, or an aspirational pro-choice world.
Certainly, it could be argued that men being misogynistic about some concepts has more to do with their socialised nature, but it is not entirely true that some concepts, on a fundamental level, aren’t problematic, thus feeding into men’s warped beliefs about these things. Both are worthy of examination.
A growing subset of self-styled men’s rights activists are proudly proclaiming their desire for a baby, for whatever twisted patriarchal fantasy, and they propose going about achieving this through a surrogate. They speak about it with the inhumane, nonchalant air of ordering for goods online, and to hell with the prevailing cultural discourses around the ethics of surrogacy or the prevalence of misogyny—they can afford a surrogate and are, therefore, entitled to one.
What’s more ironic—utterly laughable—is that they present this as an alternative to partnering with women. I cannot sit with that illogic (and smacking entitlement) for a minute. You still ultimately require a woman, a woman’s body, including her life and bodily autonomy, signed off for a period of 9+ months, until she delivers and hopefully goes on her way, alive and healthy.
They think marriage with women is a hassle and relationships are a non-yielding investment, but a womb? Now that they want. A child, not its mother. The experience of parenthood stripped of connection, commitment, and consequences. Oh, there could be a million, seemingly justifiable reasons or comparisons for this, with one being the death or divorce of a wife, but this instance still carries a thread of connection. A man who became a single, happy father is wholly different from a man choosing to be a single father via surrogacy. Not only is there a difference in intentions, but there is a difference in the way by which they came upon their present states, and that difference is significant.
A womb is not just a womb—an object for rent, it is a part of a full human being, and there is no way to morally bypass all that makes a woman human, to pay for the part that serves one’s emotional craving. This is also remarkably different from a woman birthing a child without a legal husband, because obviously, it is a baby she carried.
It’s also humorous when such men rail and bicker about the 21st century being increasingly anti-men, yet they throw out the window all instances of ‘wokeness’ and think a utopian world full of surrogates will cater to them.
They should know this for free: contracting a woman for birthing services will never be separate from gender, class, and power so long as these concepts continue to exist. Much to their dismay, their surrogacy wet dream is never going to be just an abstract trade to engage in, guiltless, and apolitical.
You cannot pay your way into parenthood. Just as you cannot pay your way into intimacy, be it via prostitution, porn, ‘female-like’ sex objects or sugar dating.
Whether it is the sexual or birthing services industry, the fact is that their ‘source materials,’ unfortunately, are unusually made up of demoralised, economically trapped women, subject to desperation and exploitation just to survive.
There is also a show of hypocrisy to their desire—one reason for them to ever consider surrogacy as a viable alternative to a fulfilled and unencumbered (dating) life in the first place is feminism. Yes, the very feminism they drag online, insult on podcasts, and mock over hangouts. Feminists are the ones who fought for reproductive justice, maternal protections, bodily autonomy, and access to medical technology.
You don’t have to like the reality of it, but the surrogacy you now see as a solution to “avoid dealing with women” wouldn’t exist without the people who centred women in the first place.
But if I have any say about it, in my feminist world, there would be no wombs to rent. No prostituted women, sugar babies, and enslaved wives. No women stripped of dignity and agency just so men can experience connection on their terms. No fragmented and re-packaged female body parts of women, nor their personalities, would be available for hire or purchase.
And to the men who wish for such a world, I hope they can be honest enough to sit the grim truth underneath their want—control (and not alienation), just as they have always wanted over women. The illusion of (proximity to) womanhood without the responsibility of relating to a woman, and if this doesn’t put up a mirror to the faces about their sick idea of love, womanhood and commitment, I don’t know what will.
