Snip, snip, grin, grin, say no more
Toby Young is under orders from his wife to get a vasectomy. But why should men agree to biological redundancy? What about their duty to keep up the birthrate? And what about the pain?
Iknew we should never have gone to Legoland. My wife and I were emerging from a scale model of London, having just managed to stop our two toddlers pulling down Canary Wharf, when she dropped the bombshell.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘One more baby and you’re having a vasectomy.’ Had I not been pushing a double buggy at the time, I would instinctively have lowered my hands to protect my crotch. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that I’d sacrificed all my masculine pride in order to meet my wife’s expectation of how a ‘new man’ should behave. Now she wanted literally to castrate me as well.
‘Erm, couldn’t you just, er, you know, go on the pill?’ ‘Why the hell should I? Why should I retain water, gain weight and increase my risk of getting cancer just to make your life more convenient?’ ‘Well, er, why me? Why don’t you have a hysterectomy?’ ‘Jesus Christ, you can’t be serious. I’ve had two children and I’m willing to have a third. Isn’t that enough pain and suffering for one lifetime? It’s time you did something for me.’ I racked my brains. I knew I had to come up with something better than this if I was to stand any chance of winning the argument.
‘What if you leave me for another man?’ I said. ‘I’ll then have to find someone else and if I’m incapable of producing children my value as a prospective partner will be seriously diminished.’ ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Go and do the business into a test tube and stick it in the freezer. If you ever meet another woman who wants to have your babies, you can use that.’ She made this sound about as probable as discovering a cure for cancer.
Like most men, I get the heebie-jeebies at the mere thought of a vasectomy. Take the operation itself. Evangelical family planners refer to it as ‘the snip’, giving the impression that it is a quick, painless procedure not unlike having your hair cut. But the reality is very different.
‘The first thing that hit me when I entered the operating theatre was the smell,’ says Rory Clements, a features executive on the London Evening Standard who went under the knife four years ago. ‘There was this overwhelming stench of burning flesh.’ The reason for this is that the operation is carried out with an instrument that burns a half-inch hole in your scrotum and then seals up and cauterises the tubes that carry your sperm. The operating table doesn’t actually resemble the laser platform James Bond is strapped to in Goldfinger, but it may as well.
‘There was a lot of very uncomfortable tugging and wrenching as tubes were manipulated and burnt,’ says Clements. ‘The local anaesthetic might have numbed the area, but I could still feel what was going on and it was very disturbing every bit as bad as I had feared. The operation lasted ten minutes, but it felt like a lifetime.’ No doubt most women, like my wife, will scoff at such squeamishness and point out that a few minutes of discomfort is nothing compared with the pain of childbirth. But what about the long-term psychological effects? I’ve often listened sympathetically while women of a certain age have told me just how demoralising it is to go through ‘the change’. According to them, the knowledge that you’re now biologically redundant exacts a terrible toll. Why should men volunteer to go through the same ordeal?
There’s a crucial difference between men and women when it comes to the psychological impact of a vasectomy or a hysterectomy. For a woman, all it does is accelerate a process that is already inevitable. Sooner or later she’s going to be incapable of producing children irrespective of whether she has a hysterectomy. The same is not true of men. Like hair loss, biological redundancy is a genderspecific condition and there’s no reason that both sexes should have to endure it. The psychological equivalent of ‘the snip’ for a woman would be a form of birth control that had the side effect of making her go bald.
Maybe it’s unenlightened of me to locate so much of my self-worth in my ability to reproduce. After all, men with low spermcounts aren’t inferior to testosteronecharged apes like John Prescott, are they? Well, yes, in a sense they are. Contrary to the claims of radical feminist lesbian separatists, gender is not a social construct. It’s an ineluctable biological fact. As Freud said, anatomy is destiny and just as night follows day any human being who possesses a penis will also suffer from castration anxiety. I challenge any man, however well house-trained, to contemplate a vasectomy without wincing.
In any event, why should I — or my wife, for that matter — practise birth control? Admittedly, it might make our lives a bit easier, but it seems highly irresponsible in the light of present population trends. The comparatively low birth rates of white Caucasians in Western Europe — particularly middle-class ones like me — is often described as a ‘ticking bomb’. According to Time magazine, the Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times higher than that of non-Muslims and even by the most conservative estimates the Muslim population of France will double in the next ten years. As the historian Bernard Lewis has said, ‘With current trends, Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century.’ Is this really the right time to be advocating the voluntary sterilisation of white European males?
Perhaps the real reason I’m so opposed to vasectomies, though, is because of my father’s sixth child. He was widowed at the age of 77, having already done his demographic duty by siring five children.
Nevertheless, he remarried at the age of 79 and — aged 80 — produced a daughter. He lived for another six years and throughout that time the presence of this miracle child was a source of enormous pleasure to him. (She is now ten and I’m looking forward to the day she’s old enough to babysit.) If my father had had ‘the snip’, my half-sister wouldn’t exist.
In the end, I managed to persuade my wife to postpone the discussion, at least until we’d produced a third child.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’re still having a vasectomy.’ Toby Young will be discussing ‘the snip’ on Radio 4’s Off the Page at 11.30 p.m. on 19 November.
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