A lawyer who donated sperm to pay his way through college has learned that he has fathered an astonishing 70 children.
More than 15 of those have already attempted to contact 33-year-old Ben Seisler.
The donor confessed to his fiancée as part of a new reality show, Sperm Donor, that aired on the Style Network on Tuesday.
I came across this via Instapundit, who links to Ann Althouse, one of whose commenters was amused by a quote from the story:
“On the one hand, these kids are biologically my kids. On the other hand they are not my kids.”
Does it really matter which hand he used?
Another quote, from the man’s fiancée: “Did you think of the consequences that would come of it?” Ba-da-BOOM-crash!
Here is a scene from the show:
That scene is the climax of the first episode. Ba-da-BOOM-crash!
More seriously, we learn that there is a “Donor Sibling Registry” that connects the offspring of sperm donors to their half-siblings and their biological fathers. The Boston Globe reported:
The situation highlights the complicated issues that are starting to emerge now that a sizable cohort of donor-conceived children are growing up and wanting information about their biological fathers. Issues such as: What if the kids want to meet the fathers? What if children from the same sperm donor meet each other, and unwittingly get married? When’s the right time to tell your girlfriend that you were a sperm donor?
These are issues a lot of men may not have considered back at the sperm bank, a lucrative source of quick cash. Seisler averaged $150 per donation . . .
This is another one of those unintended consequences of “progress” that no one seems to have foreseen when technology made possible the long-term storage of semen as a marketable commodity. Being the father of six children myself — did it the old-fashioned way, IYKWIMAITYD — I’m happy with the result. Thinking back to my youth, however, I might bemoan the missed opportunities for profit.
Hell, I could have been a millionaire by the time I was 17 . . .
Perhaps you’ll want to hit the tip jar as a gesture of gratitude that there aren’t hundreds of my offspring in the world, and to help provide for the (relatively) few there are.
Redheaded men are being turned away as sperm donors — because demand for their progeny is so low.
Ole Schou, director of Cryos in Denmark, the world’s biggest sperm bank, said the facility had become so successful it was now much more selective about choosing donors. . . . ‘There are too many redheads in relation to demand,’ Mr Schou told the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet.
‘I do not think you chose a redhead, unless the partner —for example, the sterile male — has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads.
‘And that’s perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case.’
Anatoly Strakhov discovered this rare mutant — a baby seal with reddish fur and blue eyes — among a family of seals on Tyuleniy Island, Russia:
According to the London Daily Mail, this bizarre creature was rescued after the other seals “took an instant dislike to the ginger pup, leaving it to fend for itself.” A similar genetic anomaly was recently discovered in the United States. Continue reading Freaks of Nature →
The August 17 Baltimore conference is sponsored by B4U-ACT, a group of pro-pedophile mental health professionals and sympathetic activists. According to the conference brochure, the event will examine “ways in which minor-attracted persons [pedophiles] can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process” and how the popular perceptions of pedophiles can be reframed to encourage tolerance.
Researchers from Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Illinois will be among the panelists at the conference. . . .
“Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can better understand Minor Attracted Persons,” Breslow writes in a summary of his upcoming August 17 presentation.
Wintery Knight has more. I’m sure some of these “researchers” are funded by federal grants. If they have their way, we may suppose that in the future all girls will be like Soya Keaveney.
This was originally going to be titled, “Agreeing With Richard Dawkins,” because one of the world’s most notorious Darwinists has offended feminists by telling them that there are worse things than being propositioned in a hotel elevator. But then I saw the video in which the atheist chick at the epicenter of this controversy made the complaint that prompted Dawkins’ rebuke and said, “Oh, hell.”
This gets funny, so keep reading. Hat-tip to Ann Althouse, and thanks to commenter Joe for pointing it out.
First, it seems that Rebecca Watson rates as the total smokin’ hotness of atheist chickdom. Atheist guys get all torqued up when they see awkward nerd chicks with magenta-tinted hair, and Rebecca’s been driving ’em wild with her weekly online videos.
Second, why did Watson feel the need to lecture the world of atheist guys about how it “creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner”? Here is the failed pick-up line that triggered it:
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”
He might as well have said, “Gimme dat thang, bitch,” to judge by Rebecca Watson’s reaction. Here, watch the video (skip to the 4:20 mark to hear the relevant part):
Granted, this occurred in an elevator, at 4 a.m., after Watson (and also, apparently, her propositioner) had just left the lobby bar of the hotel. But there wasn’t anything even vaguely uncivil about the man’s invitation, preceded as it was by “Don’t take this the wrong way . . .”
Was the guy a creepy stalker, perhaps a serial killer? Was he thinking: “Nerd chicks are easy”? Or was it possible that he was just a Nice Guy being entirely sincere? Maybe he only wanted to continue the conversation over coffee because he really, really liked her.
Was Watson merely criticizing this guy’s timing and tactics? Was she dissing his game? Or was she saying that men should never make the first move or take the initiative in matters romantic? Because that’s what it comes down to, really. Watson is saying that if she is interested in a guy, she’ll let him know, and that only when she gives the clear green light is a guy even permitted to approach her.
The female exercises unquestionable authority. That’s “equality.”
And it’s rather obvious why atheists aren’t taking over the world, isn’t it? Despite their enthusiasm for Darwin’s theories, they seem to lack the rudimentary animal vigor necessary to the procreative project. The world of atheism is apparently a place where nervous Nice Guys make fumbling advances toward awkward Nerd Girls — and it creeps the girls out, as well it should.
Meanwhile, lusty red-blooded Pentacostals, Evangelicals and Catholics are gleefully doing the horizontal boogie and getting busy with the whole “be fruitful and multiply” plan.
The meek shall not inherit the earth merely by being meek but by faith in God. Having abandoned God, the atheist Nice Guys and Nerd Girls have abandoned all hope.
Richard Dawkins believes I should be a good girl and just shut up about being sexually objectified because it doesn’t bother him. Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man! . . .
[Women complained to Watson they didn’t want to attend atheist events] because they felt uncomfortable in a room full of men. They told me about how they were hit on constantly and it drove them away. I didn’t fully get it at the time, because I didn’t mind getting hit on. But I acknowledged their right to feel that way and I started suggesting to the men that maybe they relax a little and not try to get in the pants of every woman who walks through the door. Maybe they could wait for her to make the first move, just in case.
So the typical atheist event is a Sausage Festival, and atheist guys are lonely desperate creeps with poor social skills whose only interest in women is sexual. That’s what the proudly atheist Rebecca Watson is saying, and for that I am grateful.
I’m also grateful that Ms. Watson has given Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan an opportunity for further auto-beclownment, but that will have to wait for the next update.
Talking about my commitment to feminism through an atheist angle always pleases me, since the two are firmly intertwined in my mind — religion and patriarchy are so intertwined as to be functionally the same thing in most ways, especially in the context of history. Pulilng down one means pulling down the other, and I think it’s naive when anyone denies that and instead claims that there’s a way to preserve religion without patriarchy or vice versa. I’m thinking long term here; obviously in the short term there are religious feminists and sexist atheists.
That’s some Grade A industrial strength idiocy, my friends: Somehow Dawkins’s patriarchal attitudes must be blamed on religion, even though he is one of the world’s most famous atheists. You should read the whole thing, because Marcotte throws elbows at both Ann Althouse and Dr. Helen Smith, and includes this interesting comment about the man who propositioned Rebecca Watson:
In sum, men who corner women know what they’re doing. And yes, they are relying on the fear of rape to grease the wheels towards getting laid. . . . It also strikes me, in my dealing with geek culture, that there’s a taboo against rejecting someone, and creepy dudes also are happy to exploit that, knowing that women who reject them will be condemned for violating the “don’t be judgmental” rule.
OK, so now we have Amanda Marcotte accusing this guy of using fear of rape, and being part of a “geek culture” wherein guys exploit non-judgmentalism for sex.
All of this, you understand, because the guy asked Watson to come to his room for coffee. Nice Guy makes a clumsy play for Nerd Girl, and it becomes a world-historic apocalypse of feminist auto-beclownment. And we haven’t even gotten to Melissa McEwan’s reaction yet.
And I was on a panel with AronRa and Richard Dawkins [which] was on ‘communicating atheism.’ They sort of left it open for us to talk about whatever we wanted, really, within that realm. I was going to talk about blogging and podcasting, but, um, a few hours prior to that panel, there was another panel on women atheist activists, and I disagreed with a lot of what happened on that panel, uh, particularly with something that Paula Kirby had said.
Paula Kirby doesn’t have a problem with sexism in the atheism community, and, because of that, she assumes that there is no sexism, um, so I thought that I would, during my panel, discuss what it’s like to communicate atheism as me, um, as a woman, but from a different perspective from Paula. I don’t assume that every woman will have the same experience that I’ve had, but I think it’s worthwhile to publicize the fact that some women will go through this, and, um, that way we can warn women, ahead of time, as to what they might expect, give them the tools they need to fight back, and also give them the support structure they need to, uh, to keep going in the face of blatant misogyny.
So, I was interested in the response to my sort of rambling on that panel, um, which, like this video, was unscripted and rambling, for which I apologize. [grins] But the response was really fascinating. The response at the conference itself was wonderful, um, there were a ton of great feminists there, male and female, and also just open-minded people who had maybe never considered the, um, the way that women are treated in this community, but were interested in learning more.
So, thank you to everyone who was at that conference who, uh, engaged in those discussions outside of that panel, um, you were all fantastic; I loved talking to you guys—um, all of you except for the one man who, um, didn’t really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel…? Because, um, at the bar later that night—actually, at four in the morning—um, we were at the hotel bar, 4am, I said, you know, “I’ve had enough, guys, I’m exhausted, going to bed,” uh, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me, and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more; would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”
Um. Just a word to the wise here, guys: Uhhhh, don’t do that. Um, you know. [laughs] Uh, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4 am, in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and—don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
So, yeah. But everybody else seemed to really get it.
There is nothing wrong with “don’t do that” as advice. The guy’s approach was clumsy and creepy. But it seems obvious, to me at least, that he was merely exhibiting a deficiency of social skills, rather than predatory menace.
While we cannot rule out the possibility that the guy is a serial killer with the bodies of 11 victims buried in his backyard, I’m inclined to believe he was just awkward and clueless. It was 4 a.m. and, in the famous words of Mickey Gilley, “The women all get prettier at closing time.” What was this guy’s blood-alcohol content? Was he at the beer-goggles stage where he saw Watson as Ingrid Bergman and thought he was Humphrey Bogart?
Well, as Watson says, “don’t do that.” But it’s a huge leap from “don’t do that” to a very broad and general accusation of misogyny and a complaint about being sexualized.
What set off the big brouhaha amongst atheists and feminists, however, was when Dawkins showed up in the comments of a blog to belittle Watson’s complaint by comparing her unpleasant elevator experience to the sufferings of women in the Islamic world. Once the feminists started screaming for blood, Dawkins’s fellow atheists were only too happy to throw him under the bus. The reaction was as if Dawkins himself had hit on Watson.
This is one of those episodes where the totalitarian impulse of feminism is glaringly apparent. Feminists ferociously suppress dissent and seek to impose a conformity of thought, so that anyone within the movement who expresses doubt about the dogma and the agenda is condemned as a heretic. Tammy Bruce got purged from the National Organization for Women because she didn’t check with headquarters before organizing a domestic violence awareness protest against O.J. Simpson. (NOW enforced an official silence about Simpson because they didn’t want to be accused of racism.)
“One of the things we could do about [global warming] is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children . . . and when that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices and more balanced choices.”
— Al Gore, “Games for Change” conference keynote speaker
If the former vice-president can masquerade as an authority on environmental science — even winning a Nobel Prize for his climate-change fear-mongering — why shouldn’t he venture into family-planning and other fields where lesser mortals are in need of his all-purpose expertise? So now, thanks to Al Gore, we know what the most dangerous threat to the planet looks like: Continue reading Al Gore, Population Control Expert →
Well, excuse me for disagreeing. It is a preposterously stupid idea to encourage women deliberately to postpone first-time motherhood until they are middle-aged, without concern for the obvious arguments against such a decision.
For a woman to have her first (and most likely only) child at age 45 — to do this deliberately, as I say — is to ensure that her child grows up with an elderly mother, one who will be in her 60s when her child is a teenager. And it is quite likely that, should this child eventually become a parent, that child’s grandmother will already be in the grave. You are almost guaranteeing a sundering of direct cultural continuity between generations.
It is one thing, I say, when such things happen by luck or accident or fate (call it what you will), but it is another thing to pursue this preposterously unnatural course of action deliberately, with the aid and encouragement of science. And I wish Professor Reynolds, whose admiration of science extends also to science fiction, would keep in mind how often sci-fi offers dystopian warnings about well-intentioned Science Gone Wrong.
If you have a brain aneurysm, drinking coffee, having sex or even getting angry may boost the risk of it rupturing, a new study suggests.
One day, you’ll be having a nice cup of coffee, relaxing after sex, and your brain will just explode all over the place, like in Scanners or something. Science is taking all the fun out of life.
