Many years later, in what is called the post-Bridget Jones age, Ellen’s Time Lady reflects:
I am still alive, an old woman now, a relic from the past, with my naturally conceived daughter, and memories of ‘heterosexuality’, which I am frequently asked to give lectures about in halls full of shuddering, disbelieving students. I have to do it. I’ve been virtually unemployed for the past half century because, with no men around, there’s no longer any market for my journalistic speciality: ‘Carping About Men.’ I tried to scratch a living, writing about music, but with testosterone outlawed, many types of music went with it. Oasis were captured in the spring of 2010, hiding out on the moors. They were placed in Man Zoos, but had to be taken out, because they were upsetting visitors with their bravado displays of ‘Mooning’. Eminem is still at large, as are Nick Hornby, Martin Amis, Russell Crowe, Tony Blair and other male luminaries. Salman Rushdie was spotted hiding out in a Welsh cave in 2017, moaning to his companion: ‘Not again!’
I can face up to my future, but I am not entirely convinced. In Dr Sykes’s undoubtedly scientific prognosis I find the small flaw that the old Y chromosome, however diminutive, has been shown to have greater significance- and endurance-than he once thought. It could go (maybe should go), but not yet. And Barbara Ellen’s vision, though enchanting, misrepresents testosterone. Girls need it too; otherwise they suffer in both mood and sexual élan. Heterosexuality is with us for just a little longer. Bryan Sykes’s dreaded wars will endure for even more years.
So much for a scientist and a journalist looking to the future of sex. The novelist Michel Houellebecq has done so too in his book The Possibility of an Island. In it, as is his wont, he writes vividly of free and spectacular sex, of girls with no knickers and micro-skirts who do sex like moneymen in the 1980s did lunch. Automatically, unhesitatingly and without love-just like sneezing. Human beings develop generations later as isolated clones, cocooned in their solitary chambers, safe because unsullied by hormone-driven rushes that formerly made them such victims to irrational needs. Life, in this Island future, resembles that in a secluded monastery (except that you don’t see the other monks), where every day is spent looking at your screen, writing your thoughts, liberated at last from base impulses. You are free because you are no longer human.
Houellebecq’s starting point is the flaw in his vision, in my view. His dystopia follows not from sexual indulgence but from the sheer absence of anything to go with it. It is as if his humanity is made up entirely of Paris Hiltons, devoid of finer feelings and incapable of physical affection. This may be unfair to Ms Hilton (she could be acting and may grow out of it) but there are lots of us who are having a jolly nice time and will not surrender in any way to this de-sexed, disengaged, disembodied Possibility of an Island. Retreat? I thought the French knew better!
What worries me more is the fading of that essential to human society: the gay element. In my last book I argued that the only credible manifestation of intelligent design is the presence of homosexuals in society. God was very keen on this experiment, having created no fewer than 450 different animal species showing same-sex inclinations. They could not be a Darwinian example of natural selection, because their genes obviously could not have been passed on. Therefore, they must be a special part of God’s creation, giving us such supremely talented icons as Stephen Fry, k.d. lang, Leonardo da Vinci, Julian Clary, Alan Turing, Dusty Springfield, Virginia Woolf, Elton John, T.E. Lawrence, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Dr Bob Brown, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Franz Schubert, Patrick White, Gertrude Stein and a million others.
This was clearly connived at, secretly, by the Catholic Church’s insistence that contraception be eschewed. So it was that large families were commonplace and the likely cause of male homosexuality-an increasing immune reaction of the mother to her foetus-more likely. Women have often been found to have in their tissues cells XY chromosomes, leaked from their male babies, years after they gave birth to them. As the XYs accumulate with each successive boy, so is the possibility of an abreaction and therefore a gay offspring increased. This research was published in 2006 following twenty similar findings over the last ten years. Professor Anthony Bogaert, from Brock University in Canada, showed in his paper presented to the National Academy of Science in America that later boys, but not girls, are more likely to be gay.
On this basis I would expect there to be fewer male homosexuals in China, where the one-baby policy has held sway for some time. I would also expect, however, that gaiety will diminish now that family size has gone down in Western Europe and some parts of America. This could be catastrophic for the creativity of Western civilisation. Something should be done.
The future of sex will not-as you know, dear reader- have much to do with most of these science fiction fantasies. As usual, the path will be everyday and seemingly prosaic. You may agonise about the handful of ‘designer’ babies everyone from Peter Singer to Cardinal George Pell broods about, but the real worry is a billion babies who should not have been born at all.
There may be a beat-up in the media every five years or so about the demise of males, but the real worry is why half of the three billion men who do prevail treat women like muck. In Russia alone, 12,000 to 14,000 women a year are killed by their husbands; the world figure for abuse-physical violence-is three million every year (in case you had doubts). I tried to check reliable figures for the ‘honour’ killing of women-the number murdered by their families because of real or suspected relationships outside strict rules. What’s really creepy is the fact that these statistics are not readily available (though very high) because they are so willingly covered up by authorities.
Meanwhile, having children as an automatic reflex is tacitly encouraged in nearly every country. In Australia you have ‘one for him, one for her-and one for the Federal Treasurer’. (Peter Costello tells a joke about a woman who contacted him to say she’d done this, and would he like to come and collect the baby.)
Everyone under the age of 40 is continually badgered about procreation, as if making another human being and spending twenty years coping with the consequences is the easiest accomplishment on earth (not to mention the effect on global population). It isn’t. It is a responsibility requiring skills and endurance worthy of a saint.
The model Elle Macpherson is instructive on how to meet the demands of looking after young children: instead of only two daytime nannies, you should employ a night nurse as well! Hire a staff of three and you’ll be fine, she advises. Go to it.
Our age has fewer extended families. The job of bringing up kids is typically either solitary or done with just a couple of helpers. This is horrendously hard on any woman or man alone, and should be recognised as such. People must be discouraged from having children until ready, just as we are prohibited from flying jet aircraft if we are not pilots.
It is not a valid response to look at little Jack or Emma and ask how we could ever imagine a life without them. Every child, when born, is a real person. Asking for restraint is not to wish those we know out of existence. It is the infinite number of nameless ones who do not yet exist that we must reduce. Why won’t young people, especially young women, agree to wait? How sensible is it to groan, cow-like, that you are driven to procreate? You are not a cow. Unless you live in one of those slum estates in The Bill.