Glutton for PWNishment

 

Makemebabies.com, originally uploaded by spraynardkreuger.

The Internet has spawned some of the most socially repugnant forces known to nature. The snaggle toothed beast known only as Facebook, for example, has forever sullied the way individuals interact. Online chat has eroded human connection to the point that some people can barely convey information face to face. Basically, the point is, the Internet enables our most baser tendencies. Fringe fetish pornography, online gambling, inescapable social sloth and, now, thanks to Makemebabies.com, the obsessive hope of procreation.

Makemebabies.com does exactly what its moniker suggests, it makes you some bouncin’ babes. First, load your photo file onto the site’s server, make some quick cropping adjustments, and you’re ready to pick your new baby daddy (or mommy). Either choose from the site’s extensive stockpile of celebrity photos, or upload your own “real” person picture. Next, select a gender, race and name, and presto! You’ve just actualized a baby.

Aside from the obvious uses for hopeful moms-to-be and celebrity-enamored tweens, Makemebabies.com could be one of the most ridiculous applications of technology I’ve ever seen. This is the kind of thing that’s fodder for middle school slumber parties, games of M.A.S.H, not the sort of thing one parlays into a viable website.

The site does deliver for its users and their insatiable thirst for glimpses of potential offspring. What ten-year-old hasn’t wondered what her and David Cassidy/Taylor Hanson/Zac Effron’s baby would look like the day he finally pulls her into the tour bus to take her away? Although, the server is often too busy to accommodate your “baby request” in a timely fashion.

In spite of the bolded warning that “the site is for entertainment only, real genetics is a bit more complicated than that,” it seems to have an inscrutable pull. Even I found myself loading up a photo, creating mutant strains of Nicki-meets-Jake Gyllenhaal, (and I must say, our child would not be very attractive). So, what is this all about? I’m certainly not on the mommy plan, and I don’t really care to even “conceive” of having a child for another decade. Yet, somehow, Makemebabies.com, with all its salacious, saccharine pull, beckons to even the most hardened of hearts, the most cynical of liberated women (and potentially men, although I can’t imagine many making use of the site.)