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Friday 5 December 2008

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?

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 gender-specific 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 sperm-counts aren’t inferior to testosterone-charged 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.

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