not a step

Who needs the opposite sex when you have technology?

In the future, women will no longer need men. Apparently, technology will make interaction between the genders unnecessary, and once that happens, the fairer sex won't have any need for the beer and football sex.

This prediction comes from a Time magazine cover feature in which a group of actors, authors and architects attempts to forecast the future. Perhaps next year the magazine will do a piece featuring butchers', bakers' and bellhops' predictions, but for now, we're forced to deal with the prognostications of the "A" professions.

Members of this esteemed group, which included the noted intellectuals Ben Stiller, Julie Taymor and Moby, concluded that "ferrets will become the new family dog," and that "women will still wear makeup but they won't need it."

Some of the predictions in the article, and in the expanded version that appears on Time's Web site, appear to be in jest, but this is unfortunately not true of writer Barbara Ehnreich's piece headlined "Will women still need men?"

This rather passionate, more than 2,000-word rant explains why in vitro technology will make the relationship between the sexes an outdated convention few will bother with. Ehnreich does make some tired jokes about women not having to shave their legs and guys getting to watch Howard Stern with impunity, but humor aside, it's hard to read the piece without feeling she's not kidding.

Part of Ehnreich's logic comes from the fact that various birth-related technologies make sex unnecessary for reproduction. Though a man has to participate at some point, he no longer needs to burden women with the traditional, albeit messy, method of conception. Instead, he can do his part in a doctor's office (perhaps one with mirrors on the ceiling and Barry White on the stereo), and the actual "making a baby" part can happen in a test tube with neither mother nor father present.

This would make perfect sense if humans had sex only in order to propagate the species. Were that the case, the relationship between men and women might very well involve nothing more than him coming over to her place to change light bulbs and clean drains while she visits him to replace lost buttons and cook dinner.

Luckily, most people occasionally have sex for fun-perhaps as practice for future baby production-but more often than not, just for kicks. This hobby seems likely to continue even if future technological improvements take men out of the reproductive picture.

In place of the touchy-feely, seemingly outdated type of intercourse most of us enjoy on occasion, Ehnreich suggest that computer sex will take over. My computer's actually seeing other people at the moment, but even if it takes me back, I'm not sure the experience would be the same.

Although artificial women programs and full-body virtual-reality suits exist now and may improve in the future, the prospect seems a lot less fun than the real thing. Those products may bring a little happiness to the extremely lonely, and perhaps a few laughs to those not good at knocking before entering a room, but they won't contribute to the sexes giving up on each other.

Women may not need men in order to get pregnant, and men may not need women to have sex. I'm guessing we'll still want each other, though.

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