Thomas Disch - 334

Boz knitted a kind of blanket.

The days grew longer and the nights shorter. Then vice versa. Peanut (which was her name whenever they couldn’t decide what her name really would be) was scheduled to be decanted the night before Xmas, 2025.

But the important thing, beyond the microchemistry of where babies come from, was the problem of psychological adjustment to parenthood, by no means a simple thing.

This is the way McGonagall put it to Boz and Milly during their last private counseling session:

“The way we work, the way we talk, the way we watch television or walk down the street, even the way we fuck, or maybe that especially—each of those is part of the problem of identity. We can’t do any of those things authentically until we find out who we really are and be that person, inside and out, instead of the person other people want us to be. Usually those other people, if they want us to be something we aren’t, are using us as a laboratory for working out their own identity problems.

“Now Boz, we’ve seen how you’re expected, a hundred tiny times a day, to seem to be one kind of person in personal relationships and a completely different kind of person at other times. Or to use your own words—you’re ‘just a husband.’ This particular way of sawing a person in two got started in the last century, with automation. First jobs became easier, and then scarcer—especially the kinds of jobs that came under the heading of a ‘man’s work.’ In every field men were working side by side with women. For some men the only way to project a virile image was to wear Levi’s on the weekends and to smoke the right brand of cigarette. Marlboros, usually.” His lips tightened and his fingers flexed delicately, as again, in his mouth and in his lungs, desire contested with will in the endless, ancient battle: with just such a gesture would a stylite have spoken of the temptations of the flesh, rehearsing the old pleasures only to reject them.

“What this meant, in psychological terms, was that men no longer needed the same kind of uptight, aggressive character structure, any more than they needed the bulky, Greek-wrestler physiques that went along with that kind of character. Even as sexual plumage that kind of body became unfashionable. Girls began to prefer slender, short ectomorphs. The ideal couples were those, like the two of you as a matter of fact, who mirrored each other. It was a kind of movement inward from the poles of sexuality.

“Today, for the first time in human history, men are free to express the essentially feminine component in their personality. In fact, from the economic point of view, it’s almost required of them. Of course, I’m not talking about homosexuality. A man can be feminized well beyond the point of transvestism without losing his preference for cunt, a preference which is an inescapable consequence of having a cock.”

He paused to appreciate his own searing honesty—a Republican speaking at a testimonial dinner for Adlai Stevenson!

“Well, this is pretty much what you must have heard all through high school, but it’s one thing to understand something intellectually and quite another to feel it in your body. What most men felt then—the ones who allowed themselves to go along with the feminizing tendencies of the age—was simply a crushing, horrible, total guilt a guilt that became, eventually, a much worse burden than the initial repression. And so the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties was followed by the dreary Counter-revolution of the Seventies and Eighties, when I grew up. Let me tell you, though I’m sure you’ve been told many times, that it was simply awful. All the men dressed in black or gray or possibly, the adventuresome ones, a muddy brown. They had short haircuts and walked—you can see it in the movies they made then—like early-model robots. They had made such an effort to deny what was happening that they’d become frozen from the waist down. It got so bad that at one point there were four teevee series about zombies.

“I wouldn’t be going over this ancient history except that I don’t think young people your age realize how lucky you are having missed that. Life still has problems—or I’d be out of work—but at least people today who want to solve them have a chance.

“To get back to the decision you’re facing, Boz. It was in that same period, the early Eighties (in Japan, of course, since it would surely have been illegal in the States then), that the research was done that allowed feminization to be more than a mere cosmetic process. Even so, it was years before these techniques became at all widespread. Only in the last two decades, really. Before our time, every man had been obliged, for simple biological reasons, to deny his own deep-rooted maternal instincts. Motherhood is basically a psychosocial, and not a sexual, phenomenon. Every child, be he boy or girl, grows up by learning to emulate his mother. He (or she) plays with dolls and cooks mud pies—if he lives somewhere where mud is available. He rides the shopping cart through the supermarket, like a little kangaroo. And so on. It’s only natural for men, when they grow up, to wish to be mothers themselves, if their social and economic circumstances allow it—that is to say, if they have the leisure, since the rest can now be taken care of.

“In short, Milly, Boz needs more than your love, or any woman’s love, or any man’s love, for that matter. Like you, he needs another kind of fulfillment. He needs, as you do, a child. He needs, even more than you do, the experience of motherhood.”

In November, at Mount Sinai, Boz had the operation—and Milly too, of course, since she had to be the donor. Already he’d undergone the series of implantations of plastic “dummies” to prepare the skin of his chest for the new glands that would be living there—and to prepare Boz himself spiritually for his new condition. Simultaneously a course of hormone treatments created a new chemical balance in his body so that the mammaries would be incorporated into its working order and yield from the first a nourishing milk.

Motherhood (as McGonagall had often explained) to be a truly meaningful and liberating experience had to be entered into whole-heartedly. It had to become part of the structure of nerve and tissue, not just a process or a habit or a social role.

Every hour of that first month was an identity crisis. A moment in front of a mirror could send Boz off into fits of painful laughter or precipitate him into hours of gloom. Twice, returning from her job, Milly was convinced that her husband had buckled under the strain, but each time her tenderness and patience through the night saw Boz over the hump. In the morning they would go to the hospital to see Peanut floating in her bottle of brown glass, pretty as a waterlily. She was completely formed now and a human being just like her mother and father. At those moments Boz couldn’t understand what all this agonizing had been about. If anyone ought to have been upset, it should have been Milly, for there she stood, on the threshold of parenthood, slim-bellied, with tubes of liquid silicone for breasts, robbed by the hospital and her husband of the actual experience of maternity. Yet she seemed to possess only reverence for this new life they had created between them. It was as though Milly, rather than Boz, were Peanut’s father, and birth were a mystery she might admire from a distance but never wholly, never intimately, share.

Then, precisely as scheduled, at seven o’clock of the evening of December 24, Peanut (who was stuck with this name now for good and forever, since they’d never been able to agree on any other) was released from the brown glass womb, tilted topsy-turvy, tapped on the back. With a fine, full-throated yell (which was to be played back for her every birthday till she was twenty-one years old, the year she rebelled and threw the tape in an incinerator), Peanut Hanson joined the human race.