Man sows seeds of seediness as the next Netflix villain
A new Netflix documentary emphasises the decline in standards of a once leading production house.
I’ve written a lot about Netflix, and how cheap, cheesy and off-the-peg it’s become. If you look at its output in the past year, for example, there is nothing even approaching the prestige brilliance of, say, its first big show, House of Cards.
Everything seems mass-produced by comparison; glib, lazy, yet compulsive, grotty viewing. And nothing illustrates this more than The Man with 1000 Kids (Netflix), a documentary about unregulated/illegal sperm donation.
This is the sort of hair-raising story you would once have expected to find in the centre pages of the National Enquirer, now rendered acceptable by Netflix’s gloss. Without the styling, it would be grim. I know this because six years ago a British channel broadcast 4 Men, 175 Babies, about men who drove round the English Midlands “altruistically” masturbating in vans, resulting in scores of children – all of it set up on Facebook. I found it too disgusting to review.
On Netflix, by contrast, nearly everyone’s a gorgeous, well-spoken, middle-class, silk-clad lesbian, sitting in a beautiful apartment in Rotterdam. We’re told how many of these women were looking for donors on The Netherlands’ biggest and earliest sperm websites and found one donor, Jonathan, a beautiful Dutch man with a stream of blond hair.
Jonathan turns out to be the perfect Netflix villain: a man it supposedly loathes, yet also treats like the most glamorous globetrotting stud, salivating over many pictures of him while the women admit how much they would fancy him.
There are women who agreed to accept his donation in a “natural” fashion, ie, through sex, not “a cup”. One of them drained him for six months before moving on to his business partner. Another, a woman whose husband couldn’t reverse his vasectomy, says she got the donation, rushed to her car, got lost and, because you couldn’t leave it too long, “I do the insemination in my car, sitting at the wheel” in a lay-by next to a motorway. How do people end up doing this? As one of them says: “He wants to have the most children in history.” To achieve this, he lied to everyone: the Tinder jizzler.
Peer closer, however, and it is a typically flaky Netflix product. We are told he could be father to as many as “3000” children, yet the official figure in Holland is 600. Where did the title’s sexier 1000 come from? Did Netflix just make it up?
As for how he operated: murky. Some of the women say they had contacted him through a sperm donor website we later find out Jonathan had set up with a friend. But then he had also been using clinics such as Cryos, giving sperm in many different countries. So how much did he use clinics and how much his own website? Why weren’t other people being sued?
Why bother with proper research, though, when you can just flood the show with footage of Jonathan looking hot or warn us about “the Luke and Leia complex”, where half-siblings who don’t know they are related “are more likely to be attracted to each other”? Is this a real condition? I can’t find it, and it doesn’t even work: in Star Wars, Luke and Leia don’t fall in love.
As for the men Jonathan worked with, this is the real story. He’s not alone, it turns out, in wanting to spread his “seed” far and wide. In fact, there’s an underground cabal of mass sperm donors – pronatalist, I guess, incels – who compete with each other to impregnate women.
One of them, posting on a site in Kenya, said he wanted to “BLEACH Africa”. Asked, later, by Netflix, he said that “soon more countries” would be “colonised by my glorious and mighty white seed”. What level of misogyny/hatred does it take to want to defile/abuse/trick vulnerable women on that scale?
The Man with 100 Kids is streaming on Netflix.
