True equality between men and women cannot happen without biological equality. For most of human history, the sexual equation was utterly unequal as the mere act of having sex potentially meant pregnancy for the woman — with all subsequent life changing consequences. For this reason, women were mostly very careful and conservative in their sexual choices. As much as physical attributes, they looked for trust and dependability in their mates — if not more.
In the 20th century, Contraception — for the first time gave women freedom to have sex without it directly resulting in pregnancy. For the first time ever, Sex became no-string-attached for women — just like it always had been for men. This led to a drastic lowering of guard by women and a significant increase in sexual activity as recreation. The hedonism witnessed during the ‘flower power’ era in the 1960s in America was probably a direct result of this sexual liberation that women felt after contraception dissociated sex from reproduction for the first time in history.
And yet — the burden of child bearing fell still on women. The inevitable pregnancy — whenever it would happen — would result in drastic emotional and physical changes in the female body culminating in the painful childbirth. For majority of the women, their bodies are never the same again. For that matter, even without a pregnancy, a regular sex life takes a heavier toll on the woman body than it does on the man. That is the primary reason why it’s always the male — for whom the physical cost of having sex is just a caloric burn — that woos the female. It remains a universal biological truth across diverse cultures, geographies, countries — and species !
In the 20th century, Sex dissociated from Reproduction. And now in the 21st, Child-birth is set to go the same way in the next few decades. With the advent of artificial wombs, women will no longer bear the burden of conceiving, carrying and giving birth to the child. Conception has already been happening in test tubes for quite sometime now. The advent of artificial wombs will take care of the carrying and birth part too. It will be entirely commonplace in the future for a couple to go to incubation clinics to hand over their sperm & egg and — come back 9 months later to collect their child.
The sexual equation between men and women forms the lynch-pin of human societies everywhere. With this equation about to get drastically disrupted, many social mores and practices that we take for granted today will disappear or transform beyond recognition. For starters, the wooing game will become a lot more equal with women pursuing men with equal vigor. For a change, we just might see women going down on their knees in a full restaurant to propose to the man — and the man accepting the proposal with the formulaic graciousness that we all know so well from the movies !
And as if Artificial wombs were not enough, there is an another entirely new factor coming up on the horizon to further cause a potential disruption in the gender equation— Sex with Robots. But let’s save that for another day :)
So tighten your belt and hang on— coz the imminent future is gonna be one hell of a roller coaster :)
