What do critiques 2 and 5 have in common?
eBabe
This
week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion
models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show
Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to "bid on eggs from beautiful,
healthy and intelligent women." Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared
his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the
media and politicians who are "looking into" whether he can be stopped. Most
people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they
don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the
auction--and each other.
1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his
experience as a horse breeder and asks, "We bid for everything else in this
society--why not eggs?" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris "can put you into your
own designer baby by selling eggs," predict that his success will steer "the
future of human breeding" toward "genetic engineering."
2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While
fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts
simultaneously debunk that scenario. "Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but
the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture," observes
ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an
ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty.
Second, everyone carries "recessive" genes, which are invisible in this
generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can
pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a
child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can
inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.
3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest.
Doomsayers predict that once "beautiful eggs are available strictly to people
who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them," the rich will transform
themselves into a "super-race" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris
replies, "It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of
only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that
beauty usually goes to the highest bidder." But this reply only fuels concern
that gradually, society will separate into "genetic haves and have nots."
4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest.
Harris writes that only men with "substantial financial resources" are fit to
give his models' offspring "a financially secure and stable life." But skeptics
wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy
these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce
children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist
Sydney Sharpe put it, "Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact
has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who
sign her up."
5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the
unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A
model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs.
(One of Harris' "angels" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does
Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs?
"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the
truth," he says. Annas concludes that since there's "no way to know how much of
their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or
exercise," only a "naive" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the
photographs displayed on the site. "You don't want to see the models," he
points out. "You want to see pictures of their parents." On this theory,
children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on
one side and fools on the other.
6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that
beauty "shows healthiness and longevity." On his site, he writes, " 'Natural
Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful." Skeptics question
this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these
days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the
Today show how much "medical screening" he has given his egg donors,
Harris answered, "None."
7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says
he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold
sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris'
detractors reply that beauty is "superficial" and conveys a "harmful
preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of
character." This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer
who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the
movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.
8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises
beauty not as an end but as a means to "success," since people who are
physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having
chided Harris for exalting social advantage over "character," critics turn
around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful,
they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic
information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are "beautiful,
healthy and intelligent," he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT
scores. London's Independent envisions "Bimbo births." A fertility
expert shrugs, "If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous
woman who has an IQ of 68, let them."
9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure
capitalism, saying it's "unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make
money" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse
Harris of "taking advantage of couples trying to conceive" and exploiting
"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell." USA
Today laments, "This is about human need. And human greed."
10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday,
Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On
the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction.
Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA
Today described the models as "struggling actresses," reported that they
were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying,
"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse ." Harris' sole
verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was "better than
prostitution."
Harris
constantly refers to the donors as his "girls" and describes them like
cattle--"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls." He gets a 20
percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for
executing financial transactions or medical procedures. "We have no control
over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or
accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability
of buyers to buy items," he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to
"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on
the Web." To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women
throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps
like him have come away with the profit.
11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post
thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about
selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his
models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up
publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell
advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models),
hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to
his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that
ronsangels.com is really aimed at "adolescent boys."
12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology
watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by
Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing
other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and
woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a
human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. "Ever
since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization
of people and selling of eggs," one fertility expert complains to the New
York Times . USA Today says the egg auction "just might force an
Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the
Internet taking us?"
13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases.
The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the
critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. "When you have large
transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud," a
computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive
technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that "there's very little that you can do
to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected," and
"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to
scrutinize where the eggs are coming from."
14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences.
Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories
to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human
psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn
out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child
may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today
show, Harris said of this theory, "That's a pretty cynical view of human
nature.") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty
queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her
true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's
good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually
destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.
15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense
of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that "having sex
is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the
next generation." But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words:
"our genes." "The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much
stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site," Fisher
observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a
decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he
focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you
don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.
16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited.
Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to
favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have
successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious
response is to attack the whole "prejudice" in favor of beauty. "The standards
of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really
genetics facts," says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, "we
should think about" whether to "accept the existing prejudices and then try to
eugenically manipulate them" or to transcend those prejudices.
This
critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending
to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs
and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their
mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of
human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the
worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start
with the latter rather than the former?
Second, Harris assumes
that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian
perfection. "Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state," he
writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite
like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the
modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved
to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become
more than material. At least, most of us have.
they both believe that the models won't be truthful they both believe that egg auctions will create beautiful babies they both believe that people will get their hopes too high they both believe that bad genes could come through