It is with great personal joy and no little
excitement - in which I’m sure my readers will join me - that I can announce
that I’m engaged to be married to the Internet.
I know what some of you are going to say and
I have to agree that; yes, it is not currently legal in the UK
My family and friends are more worried for
me now that a lifelong connection is potentially in the offing; more so even than
that spectacular family gathering when I first announced that I had ‘gone
online.’ They had hoped that for all my flamboyant browsing (often in public places
and using hand-held devices where it’s commonly called ‘surfing’) that being an
Internet user was for me just a phase; that I’d post my wild oats, grow out of
it and settle down with a nice girl, etc, etc.
They just didn’t get that for many men of my
age-group and later generations, love could truly, madly, deeply be found in
the beautiful and exotic world of the Web. But how can any man-machine
relationship, no matter how pleasurable, be regarded as even remotely
equivalent to the genetically-determined and 3 billion-year history of sexual
reproduction and hence of sex within species between male and female? How
absurd such arguments seem now in our enlightened, sophisticated days? As if
evolution is somehow true; as if
species really thrive by successfully adapting to mutations and producing similarly-mutated
offspring and then somehow enabling their survival. I mean, what kind of
Neanderthal crackpot fundamentalist actually believes in Evolution, for
gossake?
And as
for the Internet not providing the companionship, social cohesion, comfort,
sense of belonging and material security that marriage to a woman… well, fyi: Facebook,
YouTube, Amazon, Google, Wikipedia, MSN.. say no more, right? We’re happy together;
isn’t that enough?
But what I and I really want to do is to
adopt.
Again, I know what many of you are going to say:
that a man and Internet can’t possibly be good enough substitutes for the
father and a mother who produced them. As if smelly, grunting biologicals had
any kind of imperative to help their spawn to survive. Some; many even, ‘traditional’
marriages fail or are imperfect, and still children suffer discomfort and
injury at the hands of one or more biological or adoptive parent or guardian,
so what’s the point in preserving such and inadequate definition of marriage
and family at all?
Soon a man and the Internet will be able to adopt, cherish and raise, say , a little boy of six and seven years largely or
entirely unsupervised by a suspicious and authoritarian State. It’s not as if children
living in homes with their biological parents means they aren't going to encounter
violence or pornography or nasty belief systems; ‘marriage’ already allows such
things to happen in some cases, so it is only logical and just that homo-digital
partnerships are likely to be just as good for kids as their meat-breeder ‘parents.’
Human-cyborg relations are every bit as likely to produce well cared-for and socialized
children as the randomly joined, unscientific, undesigned pairings of tree-refugee
primates who just happened to have indulged in mouse-free sex together.
Internet will be a perfect co-parent for me as I try to bring up some orphaned
or abandoned waif in the privacy of my own home; away from prying eyes, apart
from Skype and other places where pictures can be exchanged.
I
mean, it’s not as if men are some kind of monsters predisposed to having as much
sex with as many bedmates as possible and that are consequently less willing than mothers
to sacrifice themselves or their time or resources to enable the survival and health of
their own (much less other men’s) children. You’d have to be some kind of
man-hating feminist to argue such a thing and what nutcases they are, yeah?
It’s
all so clear why I would be so good helping
me raise a son: it would never leave him, and
it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say
it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there.
And just say for an instant, to all of those
repressive paperbook-readers and traditionalists that all this is all very well
but there’s no background or tradition of man-digital partnerships being truly willing
and able to protect children, then I’m sure that kids in such exciting new
family structures can be protected at the stroke of a legislator’s pen.
I’m certain, for example, that that successful
gay marriage advocate (and coincidentally equivocal
opponent of paedophila ) Peter Tatchell has insisted that safeguards be put
in place to protect little boys who are now to be adopted by couples of married men and
that such safeguards can also be applied to the wards of homo-digital marriages
too.
I’m sure they’ll be every bit as effective (as
if they were truly-needed!) as the wise and well-funded professional State
apparatus that protected Baby
P and the fatherless
children raped by Muslim paedophile gangs in Lancashire.
It’s going to be awesome.
Picture
from here.
