Tick-Tock: The Male Bio-Clock

For years now, men have rested on the assumption that they will be able to pump the women of their choosing full of babyjuice at any point in their lives. Take a look at famous examples of (way) past-their-prime dads like Tony Randall and David Letterman.

Why, then, are single women in their thirties bombarded with their male counterparts' instant marriage-and-baby proposals? Why can't a girl wishing to remain child-free go on a first date without having to vet dating candidates by making sure they are unsuccessful (successful men feel more ready to impregnate), sterile (or, in a pinch, impotent, though that's not as much fun), or not yet past the age of 25?

News flash: Research over the last couple of years has revealed that the quality of a man's sperm is inversely proportional to his age. The higher his age, the lower his sperm quality. Meaning the older he gets, the more likely he is to spawn offspring with birth defects, genetic weaknesses, and gene mutations. These findings support what single girls in their thirties have known for as long as there have been single girls in their thirties--single guys in their thirties are downright mad for babies.

We've all heard the urban legends, the cautionary tales, the cruel jokes about women in their thirties. There's the woman who wanted it ALL (gods forbid she should want everything men take for granted) until one day it's too late and she wakes up a childless monster in her late 40s, collecting cats and sobbing into her wine glass (albeit a wine glass in First Class as she's on her way to Europe, where she goes twice a month). There's the woman who traps a man by getting pregnant because she is desperate for a child (and any loser with a cock will do, apparently). There's the woman who sets up dates like interviews looking for candidates for Babydaddy ("I'm sorry. Based on your IQ, I can't let you have access to my sacred ova"). There's the woman who has a mental breakdown and threatens her man with abandonment if he doesn't relent and give her a child. (You might remember this term from misogynist psychology: Hysteria!) And most of all, there is the single girl out hitting the bars in groups of other single girls, pouncing on any available man and immediately bringing up the baby names she has picked out for both boys and girls.

Men and women are both more or less comfortable with these stereotypes, because, after all, women have a fairly marked and visible outer limit to their ability to reproduce. Menopause is menopause, and by the gods, these girls have to hurry. Science tells us so. Bring up the male biological clock, however, or men who behave very much like the female stereotypes above, and there is blowback. Denial, laughter, patronizing pats on the obviously histrionic head.

Yet I've had thirtysomething men propose to me on the first date, tell me after our first kiss that he thinks I'll be an amazing mother to his children, talk about how imagining that he is knocking a girl up makes him come harder than anything else, insist that the reason I "think" I don't want kids is because I had not yet considered that HE (who is obviously perfect and superior to all other men) might want to be their daddy... It's pretty clear men in their thirties have at least as high-pressure a "biological clock" as the much-dreaded one supposedly possessed by women in their thirties. Somewhere deep in their reptilian brains men know their one-celled amphibious terrorists have expiration dates.

I'm here to tell you, from firsthand experience in SoCal and elsewhere, bros aren't just looking for hos. They are looking for hos they can knock up. What's truly beautiful about the whole thing is that the most Dudebro-iest, the most surf-catching-est, the Darwin award winners clogging up the sewers of SoCal with their worthless jizz are the men most looking to spawn.

If, like salmon, men had to actually work to get a woman preggers by swimming upstream or by even making the barest modicum of effort, SoCal natives would be a dying breed instead of growing like fungus under every dark rock. And I wouldn't have to worry so much about whether my man of the hour has made pinholes in my condom supply.

The BMW Philosophy

This rant, originally written in 2007, predicts my experience with dating and sex in SoCal even more than it describes my situation in Chicago during the original writing.

              

                If Becker’s analysis of anality and Straus’s take on the sexuality of obsessives are at all accurate (and both anecdote and intuition say they are), it is no small wonder the heterosexual American men of my generation are so pre-occupied with anal intercourse in its various forms. Such intercourse in its cultural context is the intersection of anality with the reduction of our potentially life-affirming sexual natures to nothing more than the non-unifying acts of obsessives driven by our neurotic culture to assuage (pun intended) each other’s existential lonelinesses through the pursuit of what has become just another empty marker of success, the passage of time, or a false notion of self-worth.

Anal sex is this decade’s BMW.

                If you’re male or male-oriented, you’ve gotta have it if you want to be viewed in a positive light; if you want the envy of your peers; if you want to achieve that debauched, luxuriant feeling so necessary in keeping you obsessed with shame—obsessed with obsession at least—instead of free to enjoy the perfect, creative, limitless forces brought about by real, unforced, unhurried, unscripted intimacy. Of which all possible sexual behaviors are clearly a vital part, with the difference being an intangible sense of co-being, of cooperation, harmony, beauty, unity, and comfort rather than a sense of performing, of worry, of shame/guilt, of isolation even in such close quarters.

                I am only at this point in my life realizing the cardinality of shame in the average American sexuality. Raised outside both religion and atheism, I was damned with neither shame nor an irresponsible amount of personal liberty, but was instead blessed with common sense and balance. Unfortunately for me, those traits are not at all valuable in this society, where one is required to be a Puritan above the table and a libertine beneath it (neither of which acts under his own volition but under pressures from above and from below). I end up feeling isolated not as a result of any incapacity for unity, but as a result of my extreme and thorough difference.

                Granted, part of my blessing/curse is my lack of interest in being male-oriented/masculine and my enjoyment of my feminine identity and thought. Part is also my facility with words and thereby with certain insights, and my need to use both in (arguably) poetic forms. As Ernest Becker reminds me today, “[M]an’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation…to take such a miracle [as feminine beauty] and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out—the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much.” According to him, our daily intimacy with the persistent, irreconcilable paradox of being fully human—and of knowing it—mired knee-deep in shit, nevertheless having, as Oscar Wilde put it, “a view of the stars,” is the reason “poets live in torture.” (The Denial of Death, Part I, Ch. 3.)

                Thus tortured am I, and baffled that so few admit to being baffled and instead choose a sort of purposeful furious path to forgetting through getting and getting and getting. I have chosen, as have a few others before me, “to live deliberately,” neither forgetting nor regretting my humanity and all its facets.