by Mark Morford

Created on: November 28, 2008

Who Loves Designer Vaginas?

This just in: Science and nature are mocking America's fickle God. Please, no screaming.

What are you gonna do about it?

What are you gonna do about the fact that Mother Nature once again appears to be thwarting and mocking and then grinning like a wicked divine trickster at every cute rigid godly idea of how humans and animals are supposed to move and hump and lick and behave, as loosely and, yes, rather bitterly delineated in the Bible and by the Bush administration and Focus on the Family and every other uptight sexually confounded person you have ever known, et al. and ad nauseam?

What, furthermore, are you gonna do about human knowledge? About how science insists on marching hell-bent forward with such astonishing speed and with such incredible dexterity toward some glorious otherworldly nightmare dreamscape of anima manipulation, a land where we can effortlessly rescramble our genetic code and reconfigure this none-too-solid flesh as we "play God" in so many bewildering ways the Christian right can't even figure out where to aim its hollow, horrified indignation?

Here is the thing you must know: It is all changing with incredible, butt-tingling speed. It is all fast becoming more than we ever imagined, with ramifications we are only beginning to fully taste. There is no stopping it. There is little that can slow it down. There is only the single, looming question: How will you respond? Will you recoil and gag and spit, or will you gurgle and swallow and smile?

Example: We are on the cusp of being able choose, should you so desire, the exact size and length and speed and eye color and specific pleasing fur markings of ... your dog. And your cat. And your baby (well, minus the fur). And by the way, we have also invented new drugs to eliminate menstruation and we can now grow designer vaginas in the lab and plastic surgery is more common than bad sacrum tattoos and it's becoming increasingly obvious that males of many species - including our own - are largely unnecessary for procreation (but not, say, parallel parking, the lifting of heavy things or buying you a nice postcoital breakfast).

Fascinating, that last thing. Have you heard? Scientists are discovering more and more creatures, from sharks to bees to ants to turkeys to Komodo dragons to turtles to sea bass, that can reproduce via parthenogenesis (i.e., virgin birth; i.e., no father) either by actually switching sexes so as to fertilize themselves, or via storing sperm for years

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