Will Women Still Need Men?

By Barbara Ehrenreich

This could be the century when the sexes go their separate ways. Sure, we've hung in there together for about a thousand millenniums so far--through hunting-gathering, agriculture and heavy industry--but what choice did we have? For most of human existence, if you wanted to make a living, raise children or even have a roaring good time now and then, you had to get the cooperation of the other sex.

What's new about the future, and potentially more challenging to our species than Martian colonization or silicon brain implants, is that the partnership between the sexes is becoming entirely voluntary. We can decide to stick together--or we can finally say, "Sayonara, other sex!" For the first time in human history and prehistory combined, the choice will be ours.

I predict three possible scenarios, starting with the Big Divorce. Somewhere around 2025, people will pick a gender equivalent of the Mason-Dixon Line and sort themselves out accordingly. In Guy Land the men will be free to spend their evenings staging belching contests and watching old Howard Stern tapes. In Gal Land the women will all be fat and happy, and no one will bother to shave her legs. Aside from a few initial border clashes, the separation will for the most part be amicable. At least the "battle of the sexes," insofar as anyone can remember it, will be removed from the kitchens and bedrooms of America and into the U.N.

And why not? If the monosexual way of life were counter to human nature, men wouldn't have spent so much of the past millennium dodging women by enlisting in armies, monasteries and all-male guilds and professions. Up until the past half-century, women only fantasized about their version of the same: a utopia like the one described by 19th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, where women would lead placidly sexless lives and reproduce by parthenogenesis. But a real separation began to look feasible about 50 years ago. With the invention of TV dinners and drip-dry shirts, for the first time the average man became capable of feeding and dressing himself. Sensing their increasing dispensability on the home front, and tired of picking up dropped socks, women rushed into the work force. They haven't achieved full economic independence by any means (women still earn only 75% of what men do), but more and more of them are realizing that ancient female dream--a room, or better yet, a condo of their own.

The truly species-shaking change is coming from the new technologies of reproduction. Up until now, if you wanted to reproduce, you not only had to fraternize with a member of the other sex for at least a few minutes, but you also ran a 50% risk that any resulting baby would turn out be a member of the foreign sex. No more. Thanks to in vitro fertilization, we can have babies without having sex. And with the latest techniques of sex selection, we can have babies of whatever sex we want.

Obviously women, with their built-in baby incubators, will have the advantage in a monosexual future. They just have to pack up a good supply of frozen semen, a truckload of turkey basters and go their own way. But men will be catching up. For one thing, until now, frozen-and-thawed ova have been tricky to fertilize because their outer membrane gets too hard. But a new technique called intracytoplasmic sperm injection makes frozen ova fully fertilizable, and so now Guy Land can have its ovum banks. As for the incubation problem, a few years ago feminist writer Gena Corea offered the seemingly paranoid suggestion that men might eventually keep just a few women around in "reproductive brothels," gestating on demand. A guy will pick an ovum for attractive qualities like smart, tall and allergy-free, then have it inserted into some faceless surrogate mother employed as a reproductive slave.

What about sex, though, meaning the experience, not the category? Chances are, we will be having sex with machines, mostly computers. Even today you can buy interactive CD-ROMs like Virtual Valerie, and there's talk of full-body, virtual-reality sex in which the pleasure seeker wears a specially fitted suit--very specially fitted--allowing for tactile as well as audiovisual sensation. If that sounds farfetched, consider the fact that cyber-innovation is currently in the hands of social skills-challenged geeks who couldn't hope to get a date without flashing their Internet stock options.

Still, there's a reason why the Big Divorce scenario isn't likely to work out, even by Y3K: we love each other, we males and females--madly, sporadically, intermittently, to be sure--but at least enough to keep us pair bonding furiously, even when there's no obvious hardheaded reason to do so. Hence, despite predictions of the imminent "breakdown of the family," the divorce rate leveled off in the 1990s, and the average couple is still hopeful or deluded enough to invest about $20,000 in their first wedding. True, fewer people are marrying: 88% of Americans have married at least once, down from 94% in 1988. But the difference is largely made up by couples who set up housekeeping without the blessing of the state. And an astounding 16% of the population has been married three times--which shows a remarkable commitment to, if nothing else, the institution of marriage.

The question for the new century is, Do we love each other enough--enough, that is, to sustain the old pair-bonded way of life? Many experts see the glass half empty: cohabitation may be replacing marriage, but it's even less likely to last. Hearts are routinely broken and children's lives disrupted as we churn, ever starry-eyed, from one relationship to the next. Even liberal icons like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Harvard Afro-American studies professor Cornel West have been heard muttering about the need to limit the ease and accessibility of divorce.

Hence, perhaps, Scenario B: seeing that the old economic and biological pressures to marry don't work anymore, people will decide to replace them with new forms of coercion. Divorce will be outlawed, along with abortion and possibly contraception. Extramarital hanky-panky will be punishable with shunning or, in the more hard-line jurisdictions, stoning. There will still be sex, and probably plenty of it inside marriage, thanks to what will be known as Chemically Assisted Monogamy: Viagra for men and Viagra-like drugs for women, such as apomorphine and Estratest (both are being tested right now), to reignite the spark long after familiarity has threatened to extinguish it. Naturally, prescriptions will be available only upon presentation of a valid marriage license.

It couldn't happen here, even in a thousand years? Already, a growing "marriage movement," including groups like the Promise Keepers, is working to make divorce lawyers as rare as elevator operators. Since 1997, Louisiana and Arizona have been offering ultratight "covenant marriages," which can be dissolved only in the case of infidelity, abuse or felony conviction, and similar measures have been introduced in 17 other states. As for the age-old problem of premarital fooling around, some extremely conservative Christian activists have launched a movement to halt the dangerous practice of dating and replace it with parent-supervised betrothals leading swiftly and ineluctably to the altar.

But Scenario B has a lot going against it too. The 1998 impeachment fiasco showed just how hard it will be to restigmatize extramarital sex. Sure, we think adultery is a bad thing, just not bad enough to disqualify anyone from ruling the world. Meanwhile, there have been few takers for covenant marriages, showing that most people like to keep their options open. Tulane University sociologist Laura Sanchez speculates that the ultimate effect of covenant marriages may be to open up the subversive possibility of diversifying the institution of marriage--with different types for different folks, including, perhaps someday, even gay folks.

Which brings us to the third big scenario. This is the diversity option, arising from the realization that the one-size-fits-all model of marriage may have been one of the biggest sources of tension between the sexes all along--based as it is on the wildly unrealistic expectation that a single spouse can meet one's needs for a lover, friend, co-parent, financial partner, reliably, 24-7. Instead there will be renewable marriages, which get re-evaluated every five to seven years, after which they can be revised, recelebrated or dissolved with no, or at least fewer, hard feelings. There will be unions between people who don't live together full-time but do want to share a home base. And of course there will always be plenty of people who live together but don't want to make a big deal out of it. Already, thanks to the gay-rights movement, more than 600 corporations and other employers offer domestic-partner benefits, a 60-fold increase since 1990.

And the children? The real paradigm shift will come when we stop trying to base our entire society on the wavering sexual connection between individuals. Romantic love ebbs and surges unaccountably; it's the bond between parents and children that has to remain rocklike year after year. Putting children first would mean that adults would make a contract--not to live together or sleep together but to take joint responsibility for a child or an elderly adult. Some of these arrangements will look very much like today's marriages, with a heterosexual couple undertaking the care of their biological children. Others will look like nothing we've seen before, at least not in suburban America, especially since there's no natural limit on the number of contracting caretakers. A group of people--male, female, gay, straight--will unite in their responsibility for the children they bear or acquire through the local Artificial Reproduction Center. Heather may routinely have two mommies, or at least a whole bunch of resident aunts--which is, of course, more or less how things have been for eons in such distinctly unbohemian settings as the tribal village.

So how will things play out this century and beyond? Just so you will be prepared, here's my timeline:

Between 2000 and 2339: geographical diversity prevails. The Southeast and a large swath of the Rockies will go for Scenario B (early marriage, no divorce). Oregon, California and New York will offer renewable marriages, and a few states will go monosexual, as in Scenario A. But because of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, each state is entitled to recognize only the kinds of "marriages" it approves of, so you will need a "marriage visa" to travel across the country, at least if you intend to share a motel room.

Between 2340 and 2387: NATO will be forced to intervene in the Custody Wars that break out between the Polygamous Republic of Utah and the Free Love Zone of the Central Southwest. A huge refugee crisis will develop when singles are ethnically cleansed from the Christian Nation of Idaho. Florida will be partitioned into divorce-free and marriage-free zones.

In 2786: the new President's Inauguration will be attended by all five members of the mixed-sex, multiracial commune that raised her. She will establish sizable tax reductions for couples or groups of any size that create stable households for their children and other dependents. Peace will break out.

And in 2999: a scholar of ancient history will discover these words penned by a gay writer named Fenton Johnson back in 1996: "The mystery of love and life and death is really grander and more glorious than human beings can grasp, much less legislate." He will put this sentence onto a bumper sticker. The message will spread. We will realize that the sexes can't live without each other, but neither can they be joined at the hip. We will grow up.

Barbara Ehrenreich is author of the forthcoming book Nickle-and-Dimed: Surviving in Low-Wage America