Future Sex (25 page)

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Today, one in five American adults is childless, compared with one in ten in the 1970s. Between 2007 and 2011, the fertility rate in the United States declined by 9 percent. The average number of babies per woman reached a record low in 2013. Babies are increasingly thought of as choices. I am approaching the age now where if I don’t have a baby I will have chosen not to have a baby. I think:
Did I make a choice?

One sweltering August night in Manhattan in 2015, I accompanied a friend into her bedroom, leaving my boyfriend and her male roommate in the living room, where they were watching an arm-wrestling tournament on ESPN. I read out the instructions while she prepared an injection, then I sat back on her neatly made bed and watched her across the room. She had her back to a mirror,
jeans shorts pulled down. She frowned as she looked over her shoulder to find the right angle. The injection had to be intramuscular. She had learned at a three-hour workshop how to check for air bubbles, how not to hit a vein. She had drawn a dot with a marker on the right spot, where the rivet on the back pocket of her jeans would normally be. She gave herself the shot. Then she sat down on
the bed. She was very pale.

Her fertility doctors called this massive dose of hormones the “trigger shot.” After days of preparation this shot catalyzed her ovaries to release several eggs at once. The injection would be successful if a pregnancy test the next day showed up positive, a pseudo-pregnancy that indicated the flood of synthetic hormones now coursing through her veins. Thirty-six hours
after her shot, I accompanied my friend to a clinic in Manhattan, where her eggs were “harvested” and cryogenically frozen. The nurse had warned her about the “sad faces” in the waiting room, of people whose fertility treatments were unsuccessful. The people trying to prolong their fertility and those attempting to revive it went to the same doctors.

All of this was so new. The FDA had removed
the “experimental” label from egg freezing only in 2012. In 2013, 5,000 women froze their eggs. By 2018, that number was expected to be as many as 76,000 per year. Also in 2014, Facebook and Google announced they would cover the cost for employees to freeze their eggs. My wealthier friends started doing it in 2015, paying out of pocket. A cycle of egg freezing cost as much as $10,000, plus a $500
annual fee for the cryogenic storage. Sometimes it took more than one round to successfully produce and collect the eggs. Then, if the woman later opted to try to get pregnant with her frozen eggs, she would have to spend many thousands of dollars more for in vitro fertilization. As with all in vitro fertilization, the majority of attempts to get pregnant do not result in live births.

It was
as if we had made something very simple incredibly complicated. Here were these bodies, ready to reproduce, controlled against reproduction, then stimulated for an eventual reproduction that was put on ice. My friends who wanted to prolong their fertility did so, now that they were in their thirties and professionally successful, because circumstances in their lives had not lined up as planned. They
had excelled at their jobs. They had nice apartments and enough money to comfortably start a family, but they lacked a domestic companion who would provide the necessary genetic material, lifelong support, and love. They wanted to be the parents they had grown up under, but love couldn’t be engineered, and ovaries could.

Hanging over all of this was an idea of choice, an arbitrary linking of
goals and outcomes, which reduced structural economic, technological, and social change to an individual decision. “The right to choose”—the right to birth control and abortion services—is different from the idea of choice I mean here. I mean that the baby question justified a fiction that one had to conform one’s life to a uniform box by a certain deadline. If the choice were only to have a baby
or not, then anybody who wanted a baby and was physically able would simply have one (as many people did), but what I saw with my friends was that it wasn’t actually about the choice of having a baby but of setting up a nuclear family, which unfortunately could not, unlike making a baby, happen more or less by fiat.

I would have daydreams about a doctor shaking her head and telling me that there
was no way I could ever have children, at which point I would be sad but at least freed from marriage. I could just live my life according to its drift without ever having to make a “decision” to conform back into the type of family in which I had been raised for the purpose of setting up a stable environment for a child. The question of meeting a “life partner” mattered less when I gave up on
the idea of children, because I saw no particular reason or need to set up a household with someone if I didn’t have a child. But then I would think about the next forty years, a long road, and that I had already enjoyed plenty of adventures and accomplished most of what I had wanted to do, and spending part of that time caring for a child appealed to me. There was never a moment where I felt like
if I “chose” to have a baby, what I considered the necessary precondition for having a baby—someone who wanted to have a baby with me—would have automatically appeared. Of course I could have chosen, and could still choose, to raise a child on my own. Many women do this, and to pretend they don’t pay a great penalty for doing so is to succumb to sentimentalism. I didn’t have to get married to have
a baby, but our society was set up economically and socially in ways that make it difficult to raise a child as a single person. The cost of giving birth in the United States is expensive, on average three times the cost of that in other countries. The infant mortality rate is the highest of the twenty-seven wealthiest countries in the world, and higher for black women. The United States is one
of only three countries in the world that does not guarantee paid parental leave.

Are we choosing? My friends who have frozen their eggs do not feel like they have chosen—they want to have babies. My friends who want to get pregnant but whose bodies will not cooperate do not feel like they have chosen. When we were young and in our twenties and on birth control were we really making a choice
not to start a family? It never felt like that. It felt more like a family had not chosen us.

After women have babies, they begin to lose equality. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, childless, unmarried women make 96 cents for every dollar a man makes. As women bear children, one study found that they would suffer a “wage penalty” in relation to men of 4 percent per child, a penalty
that increases on the lower end of the income spectrum. When it comes to having children, some women see this moment of resignation as noble and beautiful; many women do not. Or they simply tell themselves that they will be eager to take on such a role at some point, only to find, when their late thirties come along, that what they will sacrifice looms as great or even greater than it ever did.

The news is full of information about a crisis of fertility, of many women “waiting until the last minute” to have babies, although what’s certain is that with every technological advancement that allows an increase in female childbearing age the longer women will want to wait. Think of the calculation: on the one hand you have the life that you have known, and the sexual experience you have accrued.
On the other you have the assertion of a love that outperforms all other forms of love, and of an instinctual response that will allow for an easy conformation to the reduction in professional status a woman will experience by becoming a parent. As with marriage, the promise of emotional fulfillment is based on an almost religious faith in a future different from one’s experience to date.
Also like marriage, raising a child is a process that’s purported to have escaped history, such that all interest in sexual freedom will suddenly cease for the purpose of having a baby.

Futurism, when it comes to reproduction, is not only about cryogenics. The infinite prolongation of fertility is a false future; a future that truly reconciles family and sexual freedom would be one more supportive
of single parents, not just materially but ideologically. As a line of inquiry, this futurism would recognize that marriage and babies have no necessary link. It would consider how to ungender reproduction and child care but ensure that children have masculine and feminine influences in their lives; how to make workplaces and schedules more amenable to caretaking; how to legally establish co-parenting
commitments outside the framework of marriage. This experiment is already under way: 40 percent of births in the United States are to unwed parents. This happened because most people have separated their sex lives from marriage, but the thinking about the subject has yet to flip. When people cite the research about the advantages of raising a child in a two-parent home, it tends to be an
argument for marriage, not for improving the experience of raising a child outside of it. And this has meant that many women, unmarried but also pragmatic about the challenges of single parenthood, feel the “choice” they have made not to have a child is not much of a choice at all.

From a personal standpoint, the sacrifices it would take for me to have a child by myself, using genetic material
from a friend or a sperm donor, outweigh my desire to have a child. I can, however, picture an arrangement with a man I love and care about but don’t want to marry, someone who also wants to have a child, organizing from birth the custodial arrangements that divorced and never-married people have been honing for decades to raise children. For the first year, perhaps, we would commit to living in
the same house together, but then agree that the shared project of raising a child does not have to come with a committed love for each other.

Or I just won’t have a baby at all. To be religious is often associated with a certain idea of family, but most religions have allowed for the declaration of a vocation based on one’s sexual practices. Married life was one such vocation, one way of being
in the world. There were also the figures of the hermit, the monk, the ascetic, the nun. Celibacy was traditionally required to follow these roles, which were defined by either severe introspection and isolation or an equally radical commitment of one’s life to the public, to serving the community. Their roles outside family were respected by society, because of collective acknowledgment that presenting
to the world as an individual allowed for orders of connection unavailable to people busy raising and providing for their offspring. Now there is a new kind of person, perhaps in a similar position, whose place apart from the householder is assured not by celibacy but by contraception. Is this not also a vocation?

FUTURE SEX

Five years passed, and my life saw few structural changes. I was, however, changed. I now understood the fabrication of my sexuality. I saw the seams of its construction and the arbitrary nature of its myths. I came to understand that sexuality had very little to do with the sex you actually had. A straight woman who hooked up with people she met online in her search for a boyfriend
was not different, in behavior, from the gay man who made a public declaration about looking for noncommittal sex. The man who cheated on his wife was no different, in action, from the polyamorist who slept with someone outside of his primary relationship. It was the ideation and expression of intent that differentiated sexualities, not the actual sex. A futuristic sex was not going to be a new
kind of historically unrecognizable sex, just a different way of talking about it.

I came to have a heightened perception of the power the traditional story had over the sense of my standing in the world, especially when I traveled to places where the old social order was intact, where small talk began with “Are you married?” or “Do you have children?” I wondered if I would be happier if I could
answer yes. I liked my life, but I knew I would also like the ease with which having a family could be explained, the universal approval with which it was met.

To declare that I would organize my sexuality around the principle of free love seemed at times like a pointless statement. I was unsure a declaration of pursuit had any effect on lived experience. Just as wanting to fall in love did not
manifest love, proclaiming myself “sexually free” would not liberate me from inhibition. A life lived with the goal of having a wide range of non-exclusive erotic friendships would still have long stretches of monogamy. I would still have to respect the preferences of my sexual partners. I could not override feelings with a claim to freedom. I knew, however, that naming sexual freedom as an ideal
put the story I told myself about my life in greater alignment with the choices I had already made. It offered continuity between my past and the future. It gave value to experiences that I had viewed with frustration or regret. Without such a declaration of purpose we were living a double standard. We could talk about coregasms, but we believed in the nobility of abstinence. We wanted gender equality,
but we wanted the man to pick up the check. We wanted babies, but we thought we needed to get married to have them. These contradictions resulted in a greater duplicity, where what was good or bad in sex was not about the sex at all, but rather where the sex would land us in the social order. I had disliked my freedom because I didn’t want to see myself landing on the outside of normal.

I had
always preferred success through recognized channels: getting good grades, going to the right college. I experienced satisfaction in obeying rules, and I had greater affirmation from my family when we acted as if I hadn’t chosen to be alone, when we spoke as if I was simply waiting (maybe for decades) for the right person to come along. It was easier to see my circumstances as the result of unluckiness,
rather than deliberate sabotage from a willful declaration not to pursue lifelong partnership. And then there was always the possibility that I was just an undesirable woman trying to cast a more flattering light on my circumstances, or that I was naive and would learn another lesson about the pursuit of sexual freedom being emotionally destructive. I began to ignore these arguments, or at
least I had now absorbed a powerful lesson about resistance to change: that it manifests less by institutional imposition and more by the subtle suggestions of the people who love you.