For me, even if this were possible, and even if it led to a future society without men, I say “so what?”. What do I care if in X hundred years there are no men around? I won’t be around to care.
As long as Microsoft continues to produce overly complex and buggy software, I’m safe. Plus, I’ve done my reproductive donation already, and I’m still around.
Hopefully, someday in the way distant future, My clone’s spaceship will crash land on planet Lesbos. Where He/I will proceed to ROCK THEIR WORLD!
Not sure about you, but I remember reading a review of The White Plague when it came out. Wikipedia kindly enlarged upon my memories of a book review from 25 years ago. 
Otherwise, we did this subject a couple of months back - I don’t really have any new insights to add since then.
Once we get good at cloning, do we “need” men for biological purposes anymore? I don’t know much about how it works, but I thought the answer to that was “no”. Maybe your friend is on to something…
Men still largely dominate the sciences, don’t they? If some bizzaro gender war broke out the goal of which was to clone the other gender into obsolescence, men would probably get there first.
Worse, men wouldn’t clone women into obsolescence, they’d clone them into mindless, obedient super-model looking sex-pot baby factory Stepford Wives.
Hah, who’s paranoid now, feministas?
I’m lost… How does the verb “clone” work, now?
Actually in my case it was a written book I leafed through in the library, not a comic; I don’t recall the title, but it doesn’t sound much like Y judging from Y’s Wiki page. In that novel it was quite deliberate, and the few men who survived the plague were hunted down and killed.
It may surprise you to learn that Y: The Last Man is also a book which is written, and it can be found in many libraries.
Don’t worry, men. We women aren’t planning to get rid of you. There’s a big difference between being able to survive without men and actually wanting to make that happen.
You should focus more on your map reading skills. From Campbell Scott’s brilliant monologue in the beginning of Roger Dodger:
Our ability, men’s ability to read maps, to navigate, makes us useful. You should discourage your sister from even looking at a map.
…
The species is not static. We’re in a constant state of flux. Two genders has been the default setting for one reason only; so far it’s been the only way to propagate the race. So where are we headed? Equality? Equality, what is that? Is that a principle of nature? We all sit around reading subway maps together. No. Of course not. Natural selection. Now that is a principle of nature. Selection. Something has to lose. Something has to be defeated in order for something else to be selected. So, what does this mean? It means that ten or fifteen generations from now,men will be reduced to servitude. Technology and evolution will have combined to exclude sperm from procreation, and our final destiny will be to lift couches…and wait for that day when telepathy overcomes gravity…and our gender’s last remaining utility is lost forever. Forever.
It’s a little hyper-Darwinian, but amusing and likely mostly true. (And in the context of the film, extremely ironic.)
Stranger
Why should I care? I’m done reproducing.
No thanks. I’m a feminist, so that comic is probably just going to piss me off.
Speaking of which, the fact that so many people here legitimately believe that one gender would unanimously agree to off the other because it is no longer “needed” for biological purposes, is depressing.
Who said that ? Personally, to me the least plausible part of kill-all-men feminist fantasies is generally the idea that the majority of womenkind would go along with it.
Now I could see it happening in a scenario like in Larry Niven’s A Wolrd Out of Time, where a form of immortality was discovered that froze people in physical preadolescence. Society developed into two seperate camps, the Boys and the Girls, with a tiny adult breeding population. As the joke goes, the problem with the War Between the Sexes is fraternization with the enemy - but the Boys and Girls didn’t fraternize. Eventually, tensions rose, there was a war, and the Boys won, in an inherit-the-ruins sort of way.
That’s how I always interpreted the fish-bicycle quote.
[I assumed **fishbicylce** was a man; a ‘bicycle’ to his strong and confident ‘fish’. Was I wrong?]
BTW, ‘sow’, ‘feminista’, and the weird illusion that men are naturally endowed with better navigational skills than women? Have I wandered into AM Talk Radio here?
Men are better at navigation without landmarks; various experiments have shown it. Men and women are better at different things; the idea that all gender differences are socially programmed was never anything but an ideological assertion.
Just as you like. For the record, very little of it dwells on the whys and wherefores of the dirty deed - it’s mostly about the adventures of the eponymous “last man” (who looks a little like how I imagine you, ironically ), the lengthy journey he is on, the women who look after him (or try to enslave or kill him, in some cases), and exactly why it is he isn’t shagging every single female in sight. The story opens more or less with the death of every male mammal (possibly just primate - I forget), including those in utero but excluding our hero and his pet monkey.
Don’t worry, women. We men also realize that there’s a big difference between theoretically being able to reproduce without sperm and being able to survive without men.
I didn’t implicate you. That thing earlier was just that I missed the reference to whatever sci-fi thing you were talking about.
Where’s the proof that those differences are genetically, not socially, based?
Malacandra, I wish I could say I looked like that! The general style of dress isn’t too far off, though I’m generally a tiny bit more formal. You can’t blame him for being a minimalist in these situations, though.
I went to an Ivy League PhD program in the sexual differentiation of behavioral neuroscience (I never completed my dissertation). The answer to your question is: “Almost all evidence”. This statement questions tens of thousands of experiments and it seems kind of silly to feign complete ignorance of a well developed rigorous scientific sub-specialty even though it certainly wouldn’t be the first time no matter what your academic credentials are. This question is like asking what is the proof that atoms exist. It throws practitioners in that science off because the evidence is overwhelming and built up over decades. It is hard to summarize in a single paragraph or even a college lecture.
A beginners primer can and has been done for parts of your skepticism however the question is still much too big. Is there a particular statement about sex differences that you have trouble with?
I’m not skeptical of the fact that there are genuine neurobiological differences between men and women; after all, the physiological differences are usually striking. My problem is that Der Trihs dismissed the idea that society has any role whatsoever in the psychological, aptitudinal, etc. differences between men and women, and offered as proof that studies have proven that men and women are different. That’s a circular argument if I’ve ever seen one.
However, I must admit that, absent specific, detailed evidence, I don’t tend to take “Men are better at A because of brain feature C and women are better at B because of brain feature D” seriously, because entire industries (science journalism, for one) depend almost entirely on the willingness of the general public to accept trumped-up claims to that end. Examples abound.More, more, more, more. more. (although I grant that some of these last examples do not inherently involve neurobiological claims, they’re examples of the type of memes that the unscientific often jump on and use as “proof” when offered the opportunity).
That’s not to say that I’m closed off to the idea of neurobiologically-mandated sex differences, but it seems like when such studies do come out they’re exaggerated into a big difference or twisted into a new thing altogether with such regularity that it simply doesn’t pay to believe the specific claims without looking into the matter in depth.
This may be only IMHO, but can I ask for a few links to those various experiments? Ideally ones that clearly state the methodology, and maybe show some actual data? I don’t doubt that men and women are better at different things [opening pickle jars and giving birth come to mind], I just instinctively mistrust any experiment cited without mean, median, and the error! [All those political polls that claim one candidate is 5 points ahead in a poll with a 6% margin of error …]
As for neurophysiology, don’t studies in stroke victims, for example, indicate that the brain is far more ‘plastic’ [is that the correct term?] than was previously thought?
Given that humans need years to learn to walk and use language, and that few have any pre-verbal memories indicate that brain development continues after birth? And no one would argue that social experiences are not effected by gender from birth.
As for the OP, I do not know a single person, male or female, who thinks human cloning would be used for procreation, so no one is afraid the other gender is going to wipe theirs out because of it.