Paradise Preoccupied

Back before Amazon was synonymous with online shopping, the word meant Girl Power writ big … please forego the temptation to put “shopping” and “girl power” together … where more than one breast was superfluous to need and women ran the show.

Turns out that on a tiny level this is still the case.

As this from today’s news reports, Amazonian ants have figured out that they don’t need any representatives of the male gender in their world.

No opposite sex, no sex.

There are advantages to life without sex, as Dr Himler explained.

“It avoids the energetic cost of producing males, and doubles the number of reproductive females produced each generation from 50% to 100% of the offspring.”

Don’t get me wrong here … I adore men, and sex is in the top one of my favorite recreational pastimes, but … lordy, lordy! … is there an “energetic cost”.

At the moment, I am up so steeped in male-induced drama and trauma from every direction … mine and that of so many friends … that the thought of an Amazonian world has some appeal.

There does seem to be a shift in this direction outside of antdom, as well, with songs like “I Kissed a Girl And I Liked It” sounding almost anthem-like as more women I know follow a trend to throw their hands up in horror at the thought of plighting their trough alongside that of some dude.

Our biological imperative may keep dangling an engorged carrot in front of us, but ending up with the shit end of the stick has taken a toll, so the lifestyle of Mycocepurus smithii … female ants cultivating asexually produced fungi farms … has a certain symmetry to it.

Imagining a world without men does make me sad when I think of missing out on all the guitar I get these days, that whiff of testosterone on the breeze I find so refreshing, the silhouette of shoulders, beefy hugs and such, but if I could take all the energy I have put into keeping those of the male gender in my life either happy or unhappy, depending on the agenda, and put it to other uses I could have cranked out as many novels as Tom Clancy, built a palace out of popsicle sticks, hiked the Atlas Mountains and cured the common cold.

What the hell, though. I have to admit to myself that ant Amazona is not my Utopia. I could no more live without men than I could survive on mushrooms.

Doomed. Doomed, I say …