The "baby-making machine" comment by a senior politician continues to reverberate through Japanese society. One might forgive a slip of the tongue, yet whenever the age-old misunderstanding between men and women re-emerges, it always exposes more ironies and issues than, simply, whose turn it is to get up in the middle of the night and take care of the baby. Indeed, if there are any babies.
"Machine" is the least appropriate metaphor. During pregnancy, women run through such a gamut of emotions that "machine" is about the last thing most fathers-to-be would come up with. After birth, of course, it is minds, not bodies, that do the work. If all this were machine work, one would have long ago been invented to take care of midnight crying and feeding. Machines would never become sleep-deprived. Neither, of course, could they smile and coo with affection.
The biological irony is that men, not women, are really the baby-making machines. After men drop off a genetic packet, they are, biologically speaking, unnecessary. And with the advent of sperm banks, even more so. Perhaps it is being reproductively equaled by a test tube that makes so many men so uneasy.
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