Good Thing My Cloning Machine Is In The Mail

In today's creepy eugenics news, the Washington Post reports that our nation's most prolific sperm donor, an anonymous pair of testicles dubbed "Donor 401" by his middleman, the Fairfax Cryobank in northeast Virginia, is retiring. Hanging up his hat, so to speak. Across the country, rich professional women who, one assumes, are too hideous and devoid of personality to find boyfriends, are disappointed and frantically swapping around whatever vials of this dude's spunk are still around chilling in their doctors' freezers. The rest of us inferior man-beasts can take slight solace in the knowledge that Fairfax Cryobank's plans to create a Donor 401 master race will have to be put on hold temporarily.

I don't have anything against sperm donation, and I'm just as excited as the next backwood hick about the incest possibilities that arise from this guy anonymously fathering eleven kids (that we know of). It's the women paying $425 for doctor or attorney semen — standard semen from someone less valuable to society is a bargain at $345 — who are disturbing, and not just in an "I'm so desperate for friends I must create life" way. They're disturbing in an "The apocalypse is upon us and mankind must defend the planet from a race of superbeings" kind of way. Here's a real-life quote from single mom Carla Schouten regarding the 401-uterus-container clique: "It's an emotional connection. We have a common base... we were all attracted to the same donor," which, usually when eleven women are attracted to the same man, there's some sort of humiliating rose ceremony or a lot of spitting and hair-pulling.

If you've never purchased sperm over the Internet, well, damn you're missing out on one of life's little pleasures. You get to genetically engineer your own baby, choosing his or her future race and ethnicity, and hedging your bets on its future height and hair type. I hate kids, so here's my search: I want a Caucasian kid — better job opportunities, less shit with the police to deal with, the usual benefits of being white — from a Chinese or Japanese background so the little bugger will be good at math, with wavy blond hair, green eyes, and less than five-foot-six. Oh, and Canadian. (Yeah, I don't really understand why Canadian is an option either.)

What? No records found! Where's my dream man?

Mr. Formula 401 is apparently the type of mimbo vacuous women swoon over. According to his profile, which, sadly, is no longer online for my entertainment, he's from the Washington metro area, he's of Teutonic heritage (someone German trying to create their own race of people? I can't believe it!), he's six-foot-four, has a masters' degree, is athletic, and... well, the article in the Post euphemizes, "is very close to his mother." He called her "a ray of light" in his personal essay, which reeks of Oedipus complex to me, but not to Schouten, because she is a vapid incubator who should not be allowed to reproduce.

It was one of those sweet details about a man that most women couldn't walk away from. "Such a nice guy," said Schouten, 43.

I'm sorry, Carla, but how exactly do you know he didn't fill out the metaphor by killing his father?

More superficial stupidity from the women who got their turkey basters on a vial of this uber-sperm: "He was tall and so am I," explained Carolyn George, 34, of Oklahoma... "He seemed likeable." That's like when you talk to some guy on the phone and then tell your girlfriends that he sounded hot. And Louisa Weix, 43, "was attracted to 401 because of his genetic health, athletic ability (college football star) and because he tanned well. 'Athleticism was more important to me than intelligence,' she said. There's a kid who'll be working in a loading dock in his twenties.

Behind this inane quest for the physically perfect family, there's a sad oblivousness to the impersonal alienation innate to online semen-hunting. I can see that there might be fewer emotional burdens when you don't know the child's father and he doesn't even know about the child's existence, but that's not what's driving these women. They're imagining an actual relationship with Mr. German College Football Guy — one woman who couldn't get 401 seed "reluctantly settled for her second choice," like her one and only soulmate is marrying the bitch down the street. Schouten thinks she's "attracted" to this guy even though she's never met him outside of her fantasies. Good for her: she literally created him, she probably even named him something like Hans or Lars or something.

But I take solace in knowing that deep down, these 401 women are really alone, reaching out to each other over the Internet as if they'll really make some connection through their randomly dispersed half-sibling children. Meanwhile, I'm here waiting, virile and, as far as I know, disease-free. I know I'm not perfect, and I'm not six foot four, but I do have one thing over 401. I'll tell you my name.