'The Man With 1000 Children' Is a Glimpse into the Depths of Fragile Masculinity

By Alison Lanier | TV | July 11, 2024 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | July 11, 2024 |

Sperm donation and artificial insemination are big business, to the tune of billions of dollars globally. And it’s an industry that is also wildly unregulated. There are hand-wavy limitations, sure: there is a certain number of donations per nation that a donor is meant to be limited to. All the donation history and amount of donation data are self-reported by the donor. Which, yeah. Not great.

This is how we end up with disasters like Jonathan Meijer, a Dutch man who donated as often as he could in any country that he could, as told in the new Netflix docuseries The Man With 1000 Children. Meijer was registered with eleven sperm banks in the Netherlands alone (you’re only supposed to work with one at a time) and was also donating privately via websites relied on by women who wanted to manage the process themselves. He traveled extensively, filming his insipid video travel/philosophy vlog in front of touristy landmarks, continuing his vast fraud wherever humanly possible.

Through interviews with parents, both queer and straight, single and married, who had been duped by Meijer’s lies, the docuseries digs through the mess Meijer left behind him. The issue here isn’t only the deception and violation of trust in this very vulnerable and personal journey toward parenthood. There’s also the vastly disturbing number and proximity of unwitting half-siblings growing up together. They share neighborhoods, schools, and playgrounds.

One mother, after discovering the fraud and bringing together the affected parents and their children for a meeting about what to do about it, was told by her eleven-year-old that she had a crush on one of the boys there. The documentary describes the psychological “Luke and Leia” phenomenon where two people who don’t know that they’re related mistake a recognition of shared traits and features for romantic and/or sexual attraction. Needless to say, that’s a very disturbing thing to learn (imagine giving your kid the talk and having to throw in hey be sure to get a DNA test before you decide you like somebody) and very dangerous for both physical and mental health down the line. Running the numbers, Meijer could have fathered up to about 3000 children.

But Meijer doesn’t see a problem. He also, it is increasingly clear, doesn’t see any of the parents or the children as actual people. They’re all part of a massive ego flex: in something between a mission and an addiction, Meijer is part of an online community of “super donors” who see themselves as meant to have as many offspring as possible by working the system. I won’t bore you with the so-called psychology of such a community, except to say that they exercise a racialized hyper-masculinity that turns them into some kind of sick protagonist in the lives of thousands of other people.

The cherry on top of all this is that this man is a complete and total fool. He claims that science is just stories on his ego-tastic YouTube channel while perpetrating massive fraud via an industry run on medical science. When he’s finally brought to account legally, Meijer insists there’s no danger toward his many offspring … they should just add a badge to their social media profile to mark them as his. Problem solved. Yeah. This isn’t some brilliant scheme on Meijer’s part; it’s just lack of regulation and some dregs-of-humanity insecure dudes online who noticed an opportunity to be awful.

This documentary is a very good thing for a few different reasons, the main one being that Meijer can no longer hide. His face and name are trending in fertility communities all over the globe, because of Netflix. This is another example of true crime being put through its paces as a highly visible media platform. Is the quality of the actual documentary anything new or innovative? Not really, but it doesn’t have to be. The info is out there, and that’s the best ending to this story that can reasonably be asked for…until this industry is brought under any kind of actually meaningful regulation.

The Man With 1000 Children is now streaming on Netflix.