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Women be crazy! You know it, I know it! And now they’re at their madness again.
According to a new report by the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority (which has such a pleasingly dystopic ring about it, no?), the number of single ladies having in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or donor insemination (DI) treatment – in other words, taking delivery of the sperm without the man attached – has tripled in the last decade.
What are they thinking, choosing to go it alone? What selfishness is rampant here, what twisted mind would rather have a baby alone than with a man – or not at all?
Feminism has gone mad, morality and possibly God is dead, and we are all going to hell in a handcart thanks to these hordes of bonkers bints queuing up to get injected with a stranger’s swimmers instead of a husband’s, or at least a partner’s, or at least a real live penis. These are, surely, the end times.
I paraphrase – but not by much – the immediate storm of outrage online and in various newspapers that has greeted the new statistic. And as ever, I have stood very quietly, listening, hoping – sometimes even pressing my ear to the ground in case I can hear the faintest, distant rumble of its approach – for the arrival of what is always missing when we begin to debate/react furiously to these issues. Namely, this question: “Oh my God – what are men doing so terribly wrong that this extraordinary situation has come about?!”
I never hear it. Just occasionally I hear the rumble, but the train of thought always seems to get diverted somewhere before it arrives at a conclusion.
So let’s try it now. Let’s try… “OMG! Being pregnant, having a baby and raising a child is such hard, all-consuming work! What could be making women feel that this extraordinary feat of labour (pardon the pun) is less burdensome executed alone than within the traditional model of parenting? I note that the number of women in same-sex couples having fertility treatment has doubled in the same period and so, men – let the self-interrogation and cultural excoriation begin!”
No? Okay, I’ll start. And I’ll start from the position, using 50 years of experience as a woman and 30 years of watching my friends navigate, and of navigating myself, the path to wanted pregnancy, that most heterosexual women would prefer to have a baby with a man they love, trust, can depend on, and who willingly and naturally shares half the domestic chores with them already, will be just as egalitarian when a baby arrives and upends the established order of things, and will be a patient, engaged, loving father thereafter, balking at none of the unpleasant new chores involved or the astonishing number of bodily fluids leaking from both his wife and the new arrival at inopportune moments.
The number of times this happens is… not great. Large numbers of candidates fall away at every stage. There are those who don’t want children ever. There are those who don’t want children yet. There are those who say they don’t want children yet but actually don’t want children ever but stick around until their partner’s peak fertile years are behind her. They often leave then, find a younger partner and have children with her. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it happens so very, very often.
What the reasoning is behind it, I do not know – and again, it’s not my business to work out. It’s something men as a class should be required to be working out and then NOT DOING ANY MORE.
There are those who want children but who are still effectively children themselves – doing chores unwillingly, incompetently (sometimes genuinely, sometimes tactically so they don’t get asked again), or not at all, always needing to be reminded (“nagged”) even if they then do them willingly. Which is to say, never the initiative, which is also to say never taking full adult responsibility for their lives.
Then there those who want children, but don’t want to stay faithful to their wife/partner – before, during and/or after the pregnancy, which is often only discovered by said wife/partner when it’s too late to make a perfectly unfettered decision about whether you want to stay under these conditions or not.
And then there is the risk that your partner will reveal himself to be violent. It is a well-documented phenomenon that pregnancy is when domestic violence either begins or, if it already present, spikes. The former may be a small risk, but it is one of the many that sits with us, always, that needs to be factored into any decision we make and especially of the life-altering kind that will also bring a new, vulnerable tiny being into the world.
I’m not saying women are perfect – of course they are not, of course we aren’t. I’m saying that we are made aware of all our imperfections, all our failings, all our sins by friends, family, acquaintances, passing strangers, sociocultural messaging and outright public condemnations by the great and good at every turn. No real or perceived female transgression is too small to be attended to, I assure you. Meanwhile, men get away – often quite literally actually! – with murder.
Until men start doing the hard, necessary work on themselves individually and as a group to make women not just feel but actually be safer, happier and better with than without them, I’m afraid more and more of them are going to go it alone – not just when it comes to having children, but more generally in life too. Men are crazy to have let it get this far.
Women be crazy! You know it, I know it! And now they’re at their madness again.
According to a new report by the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority (which has such a pleasingly dystopic ring about it, no?), the number of single ladies having in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or donor insemination (DI) treatment – in other words, taking delivery of the sperm without the man attached – has tripled in the last decade.
What are they thinking, choosing to go it alone? What selfishness is rampant here, what twisted mind would rather have a baby alone than with a man – or not at all?
Feminism has gone mad, morality and possibly God is dead, and we are all going to hell in a handcart thanks to these hordes of bonkers bints queuing up to get injected with a stranger’s swimmers instead of a husband’s, or at least a partner’s, or at least a real live penis. These are, surely, the end times.
I paraphrase – but not by much – the immediate storm of outrage online and in various newspapers that has greeted the new statistic. And as ever, I have stood very quietly, listening, hoping – sometimes even pressing my ear to the ground in case I can hear the faintest, distant rumble of its approach – for the arrival of what is always missing when we begin to debate/react furiously to these issues. Namely, this question: “Oh my God – what are men doing so terribly wrong that this extraordinary situation has come about?!”
I never hear it. Just occasionally I hear the rumble, but the train of thought always seems to get diverted somewhere before it arrives at a conclusion.
So let’s try it now. Let’s try… “OMG! Being pregnant, having a baby and raising a child is such hard, all-consuming work! What could be making women feel that this extraordinary feat of labour (pardon the pun) is less burdensome executed alone than within the traditional model of parenting? I note that the number of women in same-sex couples having fertility treatment has doubled in the same period and so, men – let the self-interrogation and cultural excoriation begin!”
No? Okay, I’ll start. And I’ll start from the position, using 50 years of experience as a woman and 30 years of watching my friends navigate, and of navigating myself, the path to wanted pregnancy, that most heterosexual women would prefer to have a baby with a man they love, trust, can depend on, and who willingly and naturally shares half the domestic chores with them already, will be just as egalitarian when a baby arrives and upends the established order of things, and will be a patient, engaged, loving father thereafter, balking at none of the unpleasant new chores involved or the astonishing number of bodily fluids leaking from both his wife and the new arrival at inopportune moments.
The number of times this happens is… not great. Large numbers of candidates fall away at every stage. There are those who don’t want children ever. There are those who don’t want children yet. There are those who say they don’t want children yet but actually don’t want children ever but stick around until their partner’s peak fertile years are behind her. They often leave then, find a younger partner and have children with her. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it happens so very, very often.
What the reasoning is behind it, I do not know – and again, it’s not my business to work out. It’s something men as a class should be required to be working out and then NOT DOING ANY MORE.
There are those who want children but who are still effectively children themselves – doing chores unwillingly, incompetently (sometimes genuinely, sometimes tactically so they don’t get asked again), or not at all, always needing to be reminded (“nagged”) even if they then do them willingly. Which is to say, never the initiative, which is also to say never taking full adult responsibility for their lives.
Then there those who want children, but don’t want to stay faithful to their wife/partner – before, during and/or after the pregnancy, which is often only discovered by said wife/partner when it’s too late to make a perfectly unfettered decision about whether you want to stay under these conditions or not.
And then there is the risk that your partner will reveal himself to be violent. It is a well-documented phenomenon that pregnancy is when domestic violence either begins or, if it already present, spikes. The former may be a small risk, but it is one of the many that sits with us, always, that needs to be factored into any decision we make and especially of the life-altering kind that will also bring a new, vulnerable tiny being into the world.
I’m not saying women are perfect – of course they are not, of course we aren’t. I’m saying that we are made aware of all our imperfections, all our failings, all our sins by friends, family, acquaintances, passing strangers, sociocultural messaging and outright public condemnations by the great and good at every turn. No real or perceived female transgression is too small to be attended to, I assure you. Meanwhile, men get away – often quite literally actually! – with murder.
Until men start doing the hard, necessary work on themselves individually and as a group to make women not just feel but actually be safer, happier and better with than without them, I’m afraid more and more of them are going to go it alone – not just when it comes to having children, but more generally in life too. Men are crazy to have let it get this far.
