The International Writers Magazine: A World Without Men!

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Why Men will soon be extinct • Leanne Browning Utopia: A world without men! It sounds like a dream. No men to tell us our driving sucks when actually theirs does. No men to say, "I’ll fix it dear," mess it up chronically, continue to insist upon fixing his mess and mess it up so badly you have to call in a professional.

Utopia: The ideal world without men. It seems impossible but this is becoming an increasing reality.
Bryan Sykes, a professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford believes that men are headed for extinction in approximately 125,000 years time. This is due to the deterioration of the Y-chromosome that is making men ever more infertile, whilst the X-chromosome has a duplicate, which can repair itself and avoid bad mutations, bringing women out on top (Sykes, 2003, pp. 289-294).

According to Sykes, 7% of men are infertile and 1% of men are infertile because of a mutation of the Y-Chromosome. Also, when these mutated or decaying Y-chromosomes are passed down from father to son, they make the son less fertile by approximately 10%. Sykes works out that in each generation, 1% of men will be 10% less fertile than their father; hence, "the fertility of the whole population will decline by 0.1% in each generation" (Sykes, 2003, pp.292-293).

After sending a few emails, Dr David Salt (a principal lecturer at the University of Portsmouth) assisted me with the following calculations, in order for me to work out how this would affect the fertility of the population in twenty years time. According to Bryan Sykes, 125,000 years equals 5000 generations. Taking these statistics, Dr Salt explains: "125000 divided by 5000 equals 25 years in a generation. So in one generation or 25 years, the fertility will have dropped by 0.1%. Now your 20 years is 20 divided by 25 which equals 0.8 of a generation. So we have a slight hiccup because we can’t back track ths approach to 0.8 of a generation. So lets assume that we can take the 0.1% and calculate the approximate drop per year. Lets call this approximate average yearly drop r, then we have a result which I’m borrowing from banking which is (1 - r)^25 = 0.999 where the ^ means raise to the power, as in x^2 (x to the power of 2). Now we can solve this result to give r=0.00004 per year. So shuffling this back into our formula we have (1 – 0.00004)^20 = 0.9992
0r 99.92% which is a drop of 0.08%."
Hence, in twenty years time, the fertility of the whole population will drop by 0.08%

The disadvantage of men becoming extinct is that all women could effectively become lesbians. (They will still need emotional lives after all.) They will also be capable of having a child with another female. As Sykes explains: "They are the same mixture of their parents genes, shuffled by recombination just as thoroughly as any of today’s children. They have two biological parents, not just one. Their only difference from any other child is that both parents are women"
Utopia: A world without men, just women.

Leanne Browning is a Creative Arts student at Portsmouth University

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