MoJo Joss Whedon Interview And The Heartbreak of Womb Envy

Here.

Joss on "womb envy":

Everybody makes fun of Uncle Joss when he brings up womb envy! But I still believe in it. It's a very simple theory and I gave it a silly name, but basically it just seemed to be a fundamental thing that women have something men don't, the obvious being an ability to bear children, and the resilience to hang in as parents. I don't understand why or how anyone ever pulled off the whole idea of "women are inferior." Men not only don't get what's important about what women are capable of, but in fact they fear it, and envy it, and want to throw stones at it, because it's the thing they can't have.

Uh...no.

In the great hierarchy of falseness, this theory--perhaps unsurprisingly--shows up at around the same level as "penis envy," which itself shows up around the same level as Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, and logical psychologism. And that ain't good.

Now, I dig girls, and I dig girl heroes, and I dig Joss Whedon in part because he digs girls and girl heroes. But recognizing the awesome coolness of women and the also awesome coolness of female heroes needs no support from a dopey theory about how guys want wombs, fear wombs, etc. In fact, IMHO, female awesomeness has basically nothing to do with reproduction or wombiness.

Personally, I rank not being able to get pregnant as perhaps the best thing about being a guy. (Runners up: (i) automatically being assumed to be smarter and more competent than comparable females; (ii) being able to stand up to pee.) I have no doubt that there are guys who'd like to bear children, just as I have no doubt that there are girls who'd like to have penises.* But as a general rule, no. In general, females do not want penises, and in general males do not want wombs.

So dump the theory, Joss. It is false and silly.

* Which is not exactly what "penis envy" is, actually. Technically, it's a different dumb theory. The complex dumbness of Freudian pseudoscience seems to know no bounds...