Women complain of the pressure of the biological clock—which dictates many of the choices we make like where to live, or whether to go for a promotion—and do all sorts of things to try to escape it, like freezing our eggs. Meanwhile, men skate blissfully through their twenties without so much as a second thought to family matters.
But imagine, for a moment, another solution. Imagine if, instead of ridding women of their biological clocks, we forced men to have them as well.
Below, Amelia Miller, a student studying intimacy and technology at Oxford, conducts a—well—ballsy thought experiment over what might happen if all men were obligated to get the snip, around when women’s fertility starts to drop.
We’re basically already in a sci-fi movie when it comes to making babies anyway. But feasibility and, you know, morality aside, Miller’s satire gets to an important point. Namely, “the real social problem that’s enabled by men’s nearly lifelong fertility: prolonged adolescence.” Hopefully we can solve it. Failing that, there’s always reproductive dictatorship.
A version of this story originally appeared in The Oxford Student.
—Suzy Weiss
Thousands of women will freeze their eggs this year, or thaw them if they’re ready to mate. Fertility interventions, like in vitro fertilization and intrauterine insemination, are becoming the norm for women who can afford them, and feminists praise the technology for freeing women from our biological constraints. But as women rush to the clinic, we should take a step back.
What exactly are women trying to delay? And why?
The common refrain is that women today want serious careers, aren’t willing to sacrifice ambition for motherhood, and need to borrow time. But the real problem isn’t that women’s biological timelines are too short—it’s that men’s and women’s timelines are mismatched. For years we’ve complained that women feel pressure that men just don’t. That’s because women’s fertility taps out around 40, while men can keep hope alive through 70-plus. Just ask Al Pacino, who had his fourth child last year at 83. It’s a sad fact of nature: Most women are eager to start a family before men are.
But why should women bend over backward to slow down their biological clocks, when we could more easily speed up men’s?