When they cloned Dolly the lamb, I wasn’t impressed. My dad’s from New Zealand. I’ve seen sheep. They’re pretty much the same – hooves, wool, pea-sized brain. I hear now they’ve cloned more animals, like frogs and aardvarks and whatnot. But I’m not impressed, Mr. Scientist.

I want to know when they make the kind of clones everybody’s been waiting for: sex clones. That’s right – the DNA of the beautiful reincarnated for the purposes of sex. And don’t think I’m sick. The minute the possibility of human cloning was raised, half the country scratched their chins thoughtfully and pondered, “How might we use this technology for sex?”

Science could clone us the celebrities who normally wouldn’t give us the time of day. Sure, you’d have to dig ol’ Jayne Mansfield out of the ground for a DNA sample and then fight her family in court. But people can’t inhibit scientific progress forever, especially when a horny American public might want to have sex with their dead relatives.

I realize the logistics of this plan are sketchy. I realize that a successfully cloned Jayne Mansfield or James Dean or John Ritter would take 18 years before it could legally have sex. But I think once science gets to the point of mass human cloning, it will be able to speed the maturation of the clones, allowing them to get sexier faster and then promptly vanish when their novelty wanes.

Perhaps an even more interesting prospect of sex clones would be cloning oneself. Everybody has a narcissistic friend who seems to be in love with his or herself. With self-cloning, they truly could be in love with themselves, once the clone appropriately aged, of course. They could treat themselves to the movies, go dancing with themselves, the whole thing. The after-date activities raise a whole new batch of moral questions – if you have sex with your clone, is it masturbation? Homosexuality? Incest? – but I think we should tackle those issues when the time comes.

And don’t say that cloning yourself purely for sexual purposes dehumanizes the clone. If you’re screwed-up enough to want to have sex with yourself, chances are the clone that shares 100 percent of your DNA would be all for it too.

Just consider a world of sex clones – sexual exploration the likes of which humanity has never seen before, a dead celebrity for every family and the chance to see what your own butt looks like. Isn’t that a world you want to live in?

Drew Mackie is the Daily Nexus opinion editor – and a different person than Drew Atkins.

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