Vasectomy Parties! Bring Your Bros!

I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I live a somewhat sheltered life in comparison to the upper-middle class bourgeoisie—you know, those almost-millionaires with more money than they know what to do with, but not enough time on their hands to spend it in any meaningful way.  Or maybe it’s because I’m so neck deep in studying and running a business that I don’t have time to contemplate the eccentric lives of the not-so-rich and the not-so-famous.  Or it’s because I simply don’t have the kind of superfluous cash that burns holes in my pocket and my imagination, demanding I find newer and ever more outrageous ways to blow it.  In any case, The Wall Street Journal ran a small piece in Monday’s paper that was pretty stunning.  Apparently, there’s a hot new trend on the contraceptive block: brosectomies, where you and your open-office-desk-sharing pal go to a clinic shaped like a gentlemen’s lounge, get smashed on single malts, and have a doctor tie your tubes.

No, I’m not making this up.

It’s no surprise, when you study some of the recent history of the social mores and legislation surrounding family and medical standards of the last hundred years, to discover that birthrates across the West are in decline.  The United States has remained somewhat above that fray, but that’s been due in large part to the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the consequences of which have led to an upsurge in minorities from third world countries that typically have significantly higher birthrates than Americans do.  Meanwhile, feminism, the wanton embrace of materialism, legalization of abortion, the top-down proliferation of sexual “freedom” into younger and younger social strata, and the wholesale embrace of contraceptives under the guise of safer parenting have led to exactly what anyone could have predicted if they’d had their head on straight: fewer kids for the portion of America that buys into all this nonsense.

If you don’t believe me, just check the numbers—even today, as abortion rates have declined slightly in the last ten years, the rate is still up around one in five.  For every four infants you see wiggling around in the maternity ward, one more was already sucked through a tube and probably had its body parts sold to pharmaceutical companies or skin care manufacturers for research purposes.  If you’ve ever wondered why there haven’t been very many good dystopian novels in the vein of Brave New World released in the past generation, it’s because we’ve been living in one without realizing it.

However, there comes a point in any badly-written horror story when the absurdity of the premise plunges headlong into the farcical.  I think that’s about where we are now.  It wasn’t the commonality of orgies and hook-up culture among college students that did that, nor was it the harrowing degree to which young, hormone-addled teenagers are becoming addicted to pornography instead of pursuing the real thing, nor was it when it became possible to turn unwanted fetuses into jewelry.  This stuff has certainly approached Cronenberg-levels of body horror and ambivalence, but it hadn’t quite lapsed into the territory of farce.

But that tipping point has come.  Vasectomies, apparently, became the excuse for brodates, turning an already farcical concept into a black hole of dada-level absurdism.  Bored on a Friday night?  Hit up your drinking pal and go make yourselves infertile.  In the old days, this sort of thing took a game of one-upmanship on the farm that got a little out of hand, sometimes involving various pieces of farm equipment, a lot of booze, and a lot of gauze.  Now, apparently, a couple of bromancing dudes can walk into a clinic to get their balls rendered useless about as easily as a gaggle of girls can walk into a salon to get their nails done.  Do the guys get little cucumbers to put over their eyes while the doctor snips away?  I don’t want to find out.

So, as we steadily depopulate ourselves out of convenience, we’ll dress it up in bizarre rituals and fetishes that future civilizations—assuming there will be any—will look back as curiously at us as we did at the late-Roman decadence.  They lopped each other’s heads off in arenas for sport.  We’ll one-up ya, Rome: we go straight to the source and lop off our genitals in the service of bored amusement.  Have kids?  How droll.  What incentive have we got to pump out the next generation when there’s top-shelf scotch calling our names from the barrooms of hip new vasectomy clinics?  We’ll even have an excuse to watch the game all weekend since our legs will hurt too much to move.  Meanwhile, parts of our country are speaking different languages and the rest of them are listening to the elitist idiots who gleefully advocate civil insurrection.

It’s hard to turn around that birthrate when so much of the modern culture sees children as either fashionable paraphernalia or little monsters to be dumped on the state at the earliest possible convenience.  We’ll be bred out of relevancy soon enough—at this rate, within the next century.  And meanwhile, the inhabitants of this country that haven’t fallen for that particular liberal-style meme are, in general, the last people we would want deciding our national policy.  But at this rate, they will be soon.

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