Wanker of many generations!

Bill Johnson, ex-politician (R-Alabama, sometime gubernatorial candidate) and current international humanitarian, discussed in a post here last December, resurfaced recently (via General Stuck in comments at Balloon Juice).

Possible recipients in the Rotorua mud baths. Picture from Fodors.

Johnson was the strange soul who went off to New Zealand to help with earthquake relief and while living in Christchurch took to the unusual hobby of sperm donation, [jump]
donating his precious pakeha guy-gametes to some 10 or 11 Kiwi ladies all told, some of them said to be Lesbian ladies, which was the hook run with by the bloggerati in general—antigay Alabama ex-councilman involved in literally creating gay families.

My own take was on another unexpected literalism. We are constantly using the metaphor of the wanker as epitomizing that greasy, fatuous self-regard of certain bloggists and paper pandits (I don't use the annoying spelling "pundit") who have never quite emerged from adolcescent solipsism and are therefore willing to condemn thousands at a time to starvation or war or illiteracy or what have you for the sake of a theoretical principle*—but here is the spectacle of a for-real wanker, apparently whacking it for the most selfless humanitarian reasons, to help women become moms.

The new news is a report from Mrs. Johnson according to which, sadly, five months of work to reconcile their marriage have not succeeded in keeping him away from the Land of the Long White Cloud**, where he hopes to spend a bit of daddy time with all his progeny.

Johnson, a former Birmingham city councilman and cabinet member for Gov. Bob Riley, said he was unable to have children with his wife and that the desire to father a child was “a need that I have.”

Kathy Johnson, a two-time Mrs America finalist with three children from a previous relationship, said the first baby is a girl and due to arrive this month. There are at least two others, also girls, who are due in June and July, she said....

"He doesn't really know how many pregnancies there are out there. Some women were so angry they didn't want to talk to him again," she said. He assured her that the donations were non-sexual, she said.

*Generally a pretty frail principle, too, like "My boss shouldn't have to pay higher taxes," or "University of Michigan didn't let me into law school."
**Also known (chiefly in Australia) as the Land of the Wrong White Crowd. 

Uncredited photo from AGBeat.

What struck me this time round was how there is some kind of implicit theological argument here. Mr. Johnson may have argued himself into a whole new concept of what sexual intercourse consists of alongside what God wants it to be, via an abstraction of its vital parts down to just the two elements of the emission of semen and the availability of an egg. The emission is what makes it sex, and the egg is what makes it legitimate. It doesn't matter, though, where the egg is at the moment of emission—just a quick swim away across the Hellespont of the cervix or all the way into downtown Christchurch in an office that is at the moment not even open.

In this way, Mr. Johnson may have come to fear that shtupping Mrs. Johnson was a kind of wanking, in that there was no egg anywhere in that process hopefully waiting, but that wanking was not, if you happened to be in New Zealand and in touch with a welcoming egg or two. Mr. Johnson may have concluded that what looks like wanking to an unsympathetic observer is actually the only way he is ever going to have sex acceptable to the Lord for the rest of his life!