Wednesday (part 2)

Back at Stetsen, Derek marshaled his forces. "Guys. Guys. Can I have your attention please. I need some help." We all looked up, and gathered as he beckoned: Meredith and I; Zach and Christa; Sajel; and even Jane, for whatever reason. Maybe she and Sajel had shared a 5th-period class. (I was close; it's Christa who's in AP Chemistry with Jane in 5th period.) We sat in the customary ring: Derek at the head, with Sajel at the next station around; directly across from Derek, Zach leaned against the wall with Christa between his legs and taking his chest as her headrest; then Jane, cross-legged in shorts and pale legs; and then Meredith, leaning against me, both of us across from Sajel and with Derek at our left. He seemed palely determined to have our counsel, and we knew better than to balk.

Derek ran through the situation quickly for Jane's sake: "Okay. My sister Jenny has a boyfriend named Trevor. They've been dating for just over two years and they have sex on a pretty regular basis. On Monday my sister told me she's pregnant, because of a series of mishaps concerning birth control. Basically, she thought he was safe so she stopped using hers, and he thought she was safe so he stopped using his. At least, that's what she and I figured; he doesn't know she's pregnant, she refuses to tell him.

"Brandon and I just went to talk to him. (No, Jane, let me finish, then you can ask questions.) He's helping them test The Male Pill" ("That was going to be my question," Jane said) "and evidently that thing has a zero-percent failure rate. Either it totally works all the time, or it doesn't work at all." Jane, a little to my surprise, didn't seem startled at the idea that a medication might not be 100% effective for 100% of people. "We already know he's one of the people it works for—that's part of the beta-testing process; they screened out everybody for whom it didn't work—so the only possible answer is that he wasn't taking it."

"And he wasn't?" Sajel asked.

Derek blew out breath. "He said, and I quote, 'It makes me feel funny.' "

We all sat silent for a moment, absorbing this oddity.

Then Sajel said, "Did he elaborate on that?"

"Is it supposed to make him feel funny," Christa asked.

"He said it— Okay, quick run-down, everybody knows how the Female Pill works, right?" He got our confirming nods. "Alters hormonal balance every month, prevents ovulation, whatever. Well, the Male Pill works every day. It alters the man's hormonal balance in a similar way, preventing him from releasing any sperm. But, like I said, it works every day."

"No sugar pills," Christa said.

"Right," Derek said. "And Trevor says..." He ran a hand through his hair. "Trevor says that he doesn't like whacking around with his body's chemistry like that. He figures he should just let it take care of itself and not mess with it. That's why it makes him feel 'funny'."

"Are there side effects?" Christa asked.

"No," Derek said, "at least not according to the website. Seriously, though, you'd never be able to market a contraceptive that made people feel funny."

"Unless it was a condom with cocaine on the inside of it," Zach joked.

Meredith stiffened slightly, and I gave her a slight squeeze to reassure her.

Christa moved her hands up and down, as if she was holding something invisible and shaking it. Then she squinted at the non-existent object. "Totally inappropriate," she said.

Sajel gave Christa a side-long look. "Right, Christa, what've you been smoking?"

"It's my Zach's Joke Magic Eight-Ball," Christa explained. "Whenever Zach makes a bad joke, I let it chew him out."

"Oh!" Sajel said. "Can I have one? I've been waiting for someone to stomp on his bad jokes for ages."

"I'll bring one tomorrow," Christa promised.

"So it doesn't actually make him feel funny," Jane said, pushing the conversation back on track.

Meredith spoke up. "Well, it could be psychosomatic."

("Is that the right word?" I asked her.

("I don't know," she said to me.) Raising her voice to the rest of the group: "He might be just imagining it, but the mind is a powerful thing. If he believed strongly enough that he was suffering side effects, he might actually start developing symptoms. A slight fever or something, maybe."

"But it'd still be something he was creating," Derek said.

"Yes," Meredith said. "It has real-life effects, but that doesn't mean he's any less the cause of it than before."

"I don't think it's that ridiculous," Zach said. "Well, the symptoms, yes. I mean, who wants to imagine themselves into a state of syphilis or something. But... The body's a delicate thing, man. Do you really wanna tinker with it?—change things that are meant to be a certain way? Is that safe?"

"Of course it's safe, they wouldn't be beta-testing it if it wasn't safe," Sajel retorted.

"Yeah, but... I dunno, it seems like you could be playing with fire here," Zach said.

"Okay," Jane said. "So what do you say about all the women who are using The Pill? Isn't that dangerous too?"

"Well, that's different," Zach said. "You guys have the placebo pills two or three weeks a month. It's not all the time."

Sajel leaned forward. "So what you're saying is that Christa should have to alter her body chemistry because she only has to do it half the time, whereas you shouldn't have to because you'd have to do it all the time."

Zach opened his mouth, and then appeared to realize how stupid he sounded. "Well," he said. "It's a matter of minimizing risks."

Christa sat up and looked over her shoulder at him. "Then let's just stop having sex. The only truly foolproof precaution is abstinence, after all."

Zach's eyes popped open in a very satisfying manner.

"Yeah, I thought you'd see it that way," Christa said smugly.

"For that matter, since two methods are safer than one," Sajel said, "maybe you should use a condom." Zach glared. He hates condoms. "Plus," Sajel added with a wicked grin, "it might help with your endurance."

Zach said to Christa, "Give me that eight-ball."

"No," Christa said, "it only works on you."

Zach tossed his hands in annoyance.

"I think that's typical," Jane said, sounding angry.

"What's typical," Meredith asked.

"Typical of men," Jane said. "They just want to have sex, and then they don't think about the consequences any. It's not just something you do and then walk away."

"Maybe not for you," I said, smiling to take the sting out of the comment. "But men don't have babies."

"Oh, and that gives you an excuse?" Jane retorted.

"Now hold on," Meredith said. "He's got a point. Look at basic physiology. A man can have a kid at any time: he just needs to have sex with a woman who's in the right time of her cycle. He sticks it in, he pumps a few times, and boom, he's done."

"Maybe more than a few times," I said, feeling my cheeks heating.

Meredith gave me a wry smile. "A few times, Brandon."

"Heh. More like, 'Splash, and he's done, ' " Zach said.

Christa shook her invisible eight-ball. "Laaaaaaaame."

"So, if a man wants to have a lot of babies," Meredith said, continuing her previous thought, "the smartest thing for a man to do, is to have sex with a lot of women, a lot of times. The more he does it, the more chances that he'll land on somebody's fertile days, and there he goes, Mr. Caveman Junior will be out in nine months.

"Now, a woman, on the other hand. Whereas a man can just do his rumpy-pumpy thing—"

"His what!" Sajel said.

"Okay, you are so glad the eight-ball doesn't work on you right now," Christa said, wide-eyed.

"—and he's done, a woman then has nine months of pregnancy to deal with—not to mention labor, nursing, rearing, providing food, providing shelter, providing training and survival skills... For the woman, having children is a really big deal. Jane, I think this is what you were trying to get at, and I'm not disagreeing with you. While a woman is doing these things, she's somewhat incapacitated—certainly she's susceptible to predators or injury during labor, and if there are tigers around every corner, it's not exactly safe to have a two-month-old baby waking up screaming in the middle of the night. She needs protection. It would also be useful if that protection would bring home the bacon, since she may be stuck with a baby at the breast every two hours, and that kind of gets in the way of things."

"Hence, the husband," Derek said, making the obvious conclusion.

"Exactly," Meredith said. "If a woman wants to have lots of babies, what she should do is find a faithful, steadfast man who will provide for her and protect her—" Our hands knitted together where nobody could see. "—while she's having those babies. For a man, bringing a child into the world is the work of a minute. For women, it's a lifetime—ten or fifteen years of effort at the very least, if you live in a low-tech agricultural society; twenty or more if you live in a high-tech, highly-complexified world like we do. That's an enormous investment, and of course she wants that investment to survive, so that she has grandkids. She needs help to do that, and so she looks for a mate.

"That's why you see almost always the same herd behavior in animals. You have an alpha male, who has sex with all the females because he's the, you know, the studliest manliest fellow around—or at least the best at surviving and taking care of himself, which is a highly favorable trait and explains why everybody wants his babies—and then you have a lot of females, having kids, whom he protects. That's also where courting behavior comes from. You see it in peacocks the most because it's just so obvious, but deer and their antlers are the same. The peacock with the best feathers, the deer with the biggest antlers: they're the ones who have lived the longest, who have managed to get the most food and so on. They're the equivalent of, I dunno, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bill Gates."

"Now hold on," Zach said, grinning. "There's a big difference between Schwarzenegger and Bill Gates."

"No there isn't," Sajel said. "Bill Gates is totally a studly bodybuilder with a political career. Pay attention, dumbass."

"Yeah, they're not the same, but they still both excelled in their fields," Meredith said. "In nature, you survive on wits and strength and toughness. But in our society, you can also make it on brainpower or business smarts or whatever, and there's no arguing that Bill Gates has those. It's a matter of what attractive feature you're looking for. Bill Gates's peacock feathers are his huge house and his corporate empire and his billions of dollars. Any children he has will have his genes, including, hopefully, the ones responsible for making him smart enough or clever enough to make a fortune. And then there's the monetary inheritance, the money his descendents will get when he dies, which in some ways is just the same idea carried out through a different method."

"So what you're saying is that animals basically trade food and shelter for sexual favors," Jane said.

"Basically," Meredith said. "Biologically, the only reason we exist is to reproduce. That's why salmon just... disintegrate after they mate. Nobody cares what happens to them after they spawn."

"And you're saying that it's okay for men to be careless about sex," Jane said, "because they basically can't lose. It's not their business if the woman gets pregnant."

"Biologically that's true," Meredith said. "Societally? Emotionally? That's a different story. I mean, the reason we have civilization is so that women could reproduce with higher chances of success. There's a reason we measure cultures by child mortality rates. I'm just saying, This is what drives us, this is why men are careless about sex. And then, after that, there are the things we've done about men's carelessness."

"So you're saying it's okay for men to be careless about sex," Jane repeated.

"No," Meredith said. "Nonsense."

"Uh, guys," Zach said. "You're forgetting just one thing."

"Which is," Derek said.

"Men don't get pregnant, " Zach said. "Sure, men act like women sometimes, some of us cross-dress and there's that whole metro thing and I swear Brandon gets PMS sometimes, but there's still this little factor called biology that separates us from the proceedings. It doesn't affect us."

"That's ridiculous," Meredith said, "of course it affects you. Look at this whole mess with Trevor and Jenny."

"Which is what we're here for," Derek added.

"If Christa were to get pregnant with your child," Sajel said to Zach, pinning him with a glance, "it totally wouldn't matter to you."

Christa sat up again, looking back at him over her shoulder. I could see both of their faces: the way Zach's eyebrows climbed, the anger dissolving on Christa's face, the way their eyes locked. The strange, dawning light on their faces. It was like they had both seen each other for the first time.

"No," said Zach in a distant voice. "Of course it would matter. I'd be..." His hand rose, almost unconsciously, to brush hair from her face. "I'd be worried for her."

I couldn't hear Christa's voice, but I could see her smile, read the words on her lips: I'd be thrilled.

Meredith was smiling at them, a great brilliant grin of love. Beyond her, Jane looked... Strangely downcast, as if seeing something she longed for. And Derek... Derek looked down at the ground, and I saw how hard it was for him to be without Arie. Sajel reached over and gave his shoulder a squeeze.

"And whatever decisions you two made about the accident," I said, my voice sounding loud and out-of-place, "you'd make them together."

Zach and Christa nodded without looking away from each other.

"Well, Zach," Meredith said, picking up on my direction. "It sounds as though you'd be involved in the pregnancy. Even if you weren't yourself pregnant."

He didn't answer. I wondered if they had ever stared into each other's eyes before.

"I don't think men are exempt from caring just because they don't get pregnant," Jane said, tactfully giving us an excuse to look away from the loving couple over there.

"Clearly Trevor doesn't agree," Sajel said. "I guess I can see the argument. Intellectually."

"It's sort of the converse of being 'responsible for our bodies, ourselves, ' " Meredith said, quoting the slogan that had been drummed into us in Sex Ed since sixth grade. True, it's an age of cheap birth control and easily-countered STDs, but we still have go out and get those things. "If you're responsible for yourself, nobody else needs to be."

"Yeah, and it's easy to say, 'Well, she's the one who'd get pregnant, so I don't have to worry, ' " Derek said.

"Intellectually I can understand it," Sajel said. "But... As the one whose life could get really fucked over if my boyfriend is careless... I don't believe it."

"That's still the way society works, though," Meredith said. "Go to any drugstore and look at the contraceptives section. For men, there are some boxes of condoms, and maybe soon there's going to be The Male Pill, and then that's it. For women you have diaphragms, you have spermicidal foam, you have The Pill, you have the morning-after pill, you have... Well, there's condoms for us too, actually... And then you go to the hospital, where can get your tubes tied, which either men or women can do, but that's it for men. Women can get the Year-Long Shot or the Month-Long Shot, or an IUD or of those other implants... You know, the one that goes under the skin? And then finally you have abortions, which men definitely can't have. Almost all the different contraceptives are for women."

"That's just because of the way it works," I said. "The trouble doesn't start when men spurt, it starts when they spurt inside the woman."

"Which is also why lots of porn involves men spurting just about everywhere else on the woman," Zach said, prompting me to notice that he and Christa had returned to our conversation. They sat as before, as though they had never left, but Christa was smiling brightly, and Zach seemed more cheerful than before. I wonder what had passed between them.

"Eew," said Jane, making a face.

"Look, we've all experienced condoms," Derek said. "I think we can agree that they kind of suck."

"Except for the whole 'pump a few times' thing," Meredith said with a secret smile. I gave her an ostentatious eye-roll.

"I haven't," Jane said. "I haven't experienced them."

"Then hush up and let the rest of us talk," Zach said with a gaudy grin.

Christa's eight-ball said: "Loser."

"There are two basic methods of contraception," Derek said, "barrier and chemical. The barriers put something between the man and the woman so that the sperm can't get to the egg. The chemical methods prevent eggs—or sperm, now, with the Male Pill—from being released. Barrier methods can be applied to either gender, but they're not very effective, and they just suck in any case. All that installation. And the chemical methods mostly involve the woman's body because of the cyclical nature of her reproductive system."

"Yeah," Zach said, shaking a finger at Christa. "This is all your fault!"

Christa checked her eight-ball. With an enigmatic smile, she pronounced: "You know you love it." Sajel cackled.

"I mean, it took them like thirty years to perfect a male hormone-based contraceptive," I said. "I think that just hints at how difficult it was."

"So, it may be more convenient for women to take care of the contraception," Meredith said. "But that doesn't mean men don't have to care at all."

"No, of course not," Zach said. "I mean, it's not like y'all could have babies without men. There wouldn't be any men if that could happen."

"But at the same time..." Derek said. "I trust Arie to take The Pill because there are certain things I just can't affect. I can't take The Pill and keep her from getting pregnant... Well, now I can, but I can't keep her from ovulating."

"No one can," Meredith said. "Except herself."

"But look at how we're saying this," Jane said. "We're talking about ovulation as if it's the whole problem. How come we take it that way? How come sperm production isn't the problem? It seems to me that if men are the ones who always want to have sex, they should remove their risks."

"That's an interesting point..." Meredith murmured.

"It's not only men who want to have sex," Sajel remarked.

"We assume it's the women's responsibility," Jane said. "Why? A man comes to her and says, 'Here, I want you to risk getting pregnant to have sex with me, or risk loss of public respect for you when people find out you're having sex with me, not to mention the trouble you might get into with your parents, and you get nothing in return. Oh, and, you're going to need to somehow prevent pregnancy yourself, I'm not going to help.' How fair is that?"

"That's a very interesting point..." Meredith murmured.

"She doesn't get nothing in return," Zach protested.

"Jane, not everybody assumes they're going to lose public face if it's discovered they let their boyfriend have sex with them." Sajel shook her head. "And not everybody gets in trouble with their parents."

"I would," Jane said.

"And that's why you're not having sex," Christa said mildly.

"Jane, things that are true about you aren't necessarily true about us," Zach said, for once not bombastic. "We are all different people, you know."

"I think Jane's attitudes are a little different from ours," Meredith said, wisely forestalling an angry outburst from Jane, "but I also think she has a point. We may be a much more sexually-permissive culture than we were, say, ten or twenty years ago, but there's still a stigma on girls who give it up. Those who let it happen are called 'loose' or even 'slutty;' those who don't are 'prudes' or 'repressed' or something. Whereas a boy who has sex is just... Normal. He doesn't have any labels. Heck, if anything, it's abnormal for a guy to not be getting any. For a girl to have sex is still more of a big deal than if a boy does.

"I think personally it has to do with risk and with vulnerability. A boy can have sex at little risk to himself because he's used to putting himself out on the line, to taking risks, to... To sticking things out, if you will. Whereas a girl, to have sex, has to let him in, has to open herself to him—in more ways than one. I think to some extent boys's private parts are less... private... than girls's, because with guys it's just, you know, hanging out there, everything's on display." ("Stand up, Derek, show us your wares," Zach grinned.) "Whereas girls just have this..." She gestured to her own self. "... Thing. Not to mention the whole pregnancy thing. For men, sex can just be about fun. But women always have to think about getting pregnant. Even with birth control nowadays being as good as it is. What's the failure rate, one in ten thousand? A woman releases like three hundred eggs in her whole lifetime. That's why failed birth control almost always makes the news nowadays, because it only happens to like one woman in thirty. But even taking The Pill, every time Brandon and I... You know... I always catch myself thinking: This could be it. This could be when our firstborn is conceived."

"What?" I said, concerned. "Do you seriously worry about that?" I hadn't had any idea at all.

"I think about it," she said, giving me a sweet smile. "I didn't say I worried about it." My heart melted and we stared into one another's eyes for a moment. In her eyes I could see a future for us: the two of us, together, doing whatever it was we'd do to make money, but living for the hours when we'd come home, to be with each other, to be with... What would a child of ours look like? If she's half as beautiful as her mother, she'll be the center of attention just about anywhere she goes—

"Awwwwww, " said Zach loudly, rolling his eyes in exasperation, prompting a rush of nervous laughter from all parties and a chance for us to compose ourselves. Meredith and I turned our attention back to the conversation—but our hands, between us, remained linked.

"The point is," Jane said. "How come, if a boy is asking his girlfriend to compromise herself like that, he doesn't offer something in return?"

"Besides sexual pleasure," Sajel interjected.

Jane rolled on (I don't think she's aware that there is such thing as sexual pleasure). "He should say, 'Okay, since you're making sacrifices, I'll make one too. I'll make sure you don't get pregnant.' It's a compromise."

"Should there be that kind of bargaining?" Christa asked. "I don't think sex is a marketplace transaction that you're supposed to haggle over. It's done because you love the other person, and you want to make them happy, and share with them something really special."

"Shouldn't there be?" Meredith asked. "Just because you're doing it as an expression of feeling, doesn't mean you should take unnecessary risks. Maybe haggling isn't necessary, but you should at least agree to these things. And besides, someone who isn't willing to agree to some form of contraception with you, is probably not someone you should be having sex with."

"I agree with the love thing," Jane said. "That's why I'm waiting until marriage."

"That doesn't solve your problem," Sajel said. "Jane, married or not, there will eventually come a point where you want to have sex but don't want to get pregnant."

"I don't think you should have sex unless you're prepared for a pregnancy," Jane maintained.

"You'll change your mind about that," Sajel said confidently. "Assuming you ever find a good lover, of course."

"What's that supposed to mean," Jane flared.

I spoke up before Sajel could. An angry Jane is difficult to deal with. "What it means, Jane, is that you're attracted to a certain kind of person, and that kind of person simply isn't that concerned with sexual pleasure. He may not be a very skilled lover. There are things about your body and about his that the two of you may never discover throughout your entire marriage."

I could see Jane didn't believe me—not about herself and her future husband, but rather that there was anything to discover. And that, as far as I was concerned, was part of the whole problem.

"All this raises a question," Zach said, forestalling an argument. "Jane's right, she seriously is. You'd think men would be offering birth control as a sort of a peace offering." ("Or maybe just a bribe," Christa laughed.) "How come they don't? Why did it become the woman's job to handle contraception? It's really one-sided. You get people like Mark Spencer who just walk up to the lady, you know, wham-bam-thankyouma'am. Pumps, shoots and leaves. And she's all lying there feeling frustrated, and she's like, 'What the hell was all that about, and why am I taking The Pill if that's all there is to it?' It's lopsided. How'd it get there?"

"Well, for a while, there was no such thing as contraception," Derek said. "There are herbs and plants that you can take to cause miscarriages, but as to preventing conception... They invented the condom in, what, the early 20th century?"

"Actually, I think they first started in the 19th century," Meredith said. "They used sheep intestine or something."

"Ew," said Zach. "That's awful. You know, the next time I see somebody buying a box of condoms, I'm going to tell them, 'You know, that used to be sheep gut.' "

Christa's magic eight-ball pronounced: "Hmm, intriguing."

"So, back then, Jane's concerns were really valid," Derek said, "especially if you were in a time where you didn't know why people got pregnant, just that it was somehow correlated with sex."

"But then they developed The Pill," Meredith said. "Back in the Sixties. And things changed a bit."

"I think it's jealousy," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"What do you mean by that," Meredith said finally.

"Well, look at what we've been saying," I said. "Women have kids. Men can't."

"And men are jealous," Zach asked, bewildered.

"I don't think any of them would be if they had to go through labor," Sajel said, a wry smile on her face.

"Or monthly cramping," Christa added, her face wrinkling in displeasure.

"Look at the way human society works," I said. "Look at how many societies there are that restrict women's movement. Back in ancient Athens, women weren't allowed out of the house. There are still places in the Middle East where they aren't."

"And this is because of jealousy," Sajel said, bewildered.

"Sure," I said. "If the wife has a child at the breast and the husband dies, the entire community takes pity and it's not too hard for her to find a new one. But if the wife has a child at the breast and she dies... Then what? You can't just shuttle in a new woman because she might not be lactating at the moment. It's a little bit different.

"No matter how you look at it, men are the expendable ones. That's why we go off to war. That's why we do all the dangerous jobs. Because we just aren't integral to reproduction the way women are. I mean, we help, we plant the seed and we bring home the bacon, but we don't do anything another man can't do."

"That's really fatalistic," Meredith said, squinting at me.

"I can't do anything another woman can't do," Christa remarked.

"All right, maybe it's not that," I said, "but the fact still remains that women can bring forth life out of their own bodies, and men cannot. That's pretty clearly shaped a lot of human policy over the past ten thousand or so years."

"Then how do you explain all the patriarchal societies that have developed," Jane challenged. "Ones that are highly restrictive to women."

"Like I said." I shrugged. "Jealousy."

There was some silence.

"Just look at how the Garden of Eden story goes. Adam and Eve live in a state of innocence. Serpent, apple, blablablah. God says to Adam, 'You sinned, so you'll have to work for your bread from now on.' God says to serpent, 'You suck, so I'm making you crawl on your belly from now on. God says to Eve... 'You sinned, so not only will you have to help Adam work for his bread from now on, you'll also have to bear children.' Reproduction is a curse that was placed on her for being impure! I think that says a lot about the attitudes of the people who established that version of the Bible."

"They didn't like women," Derek said.

"And you think it's because they were jealous?" Sajel said.