After the Peace by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

A Reason For Everything

[Writers’ Huddle: ‘Do we really want all this next stuff, Gwinny? Sounds a bit obsessional. As if you’re trying to prove that it’s unprotected sex makes women irresponsible. Isn’t it enough to wear them down with all your patronising anti-Millennial blather – for that’s what it amounts to.’]

Xandra, reflected Gwinny, ordered doctors and nurses around with no problem but when it came to her husband it was a different matter. It could only be a matter of too much unprotected sex. The male ejaculate, so Marco had told her (and in Gwinny’s reading of the New Scientist she saw the theory repeated), contains a cocktail of tranquillising and bonding hormones – serotonin, oxytocin (the ‘love hormone’, making a girl snuggly and affectionate), endorphins, oestrone, prolactin, etc. – a mere 3 per cent of it being actual sperm.

It is unprotected sex that makes women love so unreservedly. It’s why battered women – be it sexual or emotional battering – keep coming back for more: all the serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, oestrone, prolactin, etc. that addict her to her testosterone-ridden partner. Can’t wait, can’t wait! It’s why there’s love at first sight (or rather, first fuck), why the arranged marriage so often works (ditto), why the longer you’re married the worse your divorce feels, why the use of condoms is advisable in any relationship if a woman wants to keep a level head.

Xandra hadn’t been using condoms. She’d been trying for years to have a baby. She had all the symptoms of an ejaculate-addicted woman: ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.’ Some men’s ejaculate is particularly potent, some men’s less so, being too weak to lead to addiction, but pleasurable enough in its own right at least until the morning, when she’ll want to get busy with more important matters.

Meantime, while the old-fashioned girl through the ages (it may be rather different for Millennials, this being the Digital-Anthropocene Age) waited for true love to descend from the heavens in some variety or other of the male prehistoric anthropoidal ape, and for the insensate urge to procreate seize her, there’s always other survival work that must be done! From the Palaeolithic Age, grubbing for insects, to the Iron Age, digging for metals, to the Digital-Anthropocene Age, tapping away on the computer, there’s always work to be done. And forget your duty to procreation: a day’s work can wear you out!

And certainly Xandra’s unnatural frequent night shifts wore her out, and might have caused a few fertility issues, while still addicting her to what turned out to be Clive’s spermless but super-oxytocined, serotonin-friendly embraces.

How lucky, then, the super-oxytocined, testosterone-rich men, whose addicted loved ones are in and out of women’s refuges like yo-yos. Girls will always cluster round them while friends and family despair. Clive never hit, and his emotional abuse was subtle, but on a bad day Gwinny would see him as just such a brute, only, like Xandra, to go into forgive-understand-forget mode pretty quickly.

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