Granted, there were some clingy child brides I managed to lose in the festering bowels of Calcutta, so there’s a few question marks. Nevertheless, I am fairly certain that each and every one of the billions of protozoic spermatozoa I have produced in a lifelong career of fluid expenditure have died a mass genocide. Metaphorically, an entire race of theoretical Brownlee heirs has been loaded into a purple veiny cannon and then fired into the inhospitable vacuum of outer space, where they are more often than not eaten by a gigantic space sock. Not one has become a Kubrickian Starchild. That’s probably for the best. I do not think I would make a very good father.

Let’s follow the life of my hypothetical child from birth to sexual awakening. I think that would be the best way to make my point.

The Miracle of Birth

First of all, there is no miracle of birth. It’s disgusting. A mewling, purple-faced goblin covered in offal chews its way out of my wife’s genitals while she thoughtfully evacuates her bowels into a pool on the birthing table. I will not be present.

I realize that the entire birthing ordeal is agonizing for women and they like to have a man around to blame while their uterus is being ripped apart by a cannibalistic parasite, but that’s why we hire obstetricians. My feelings towards watching my wife give birth are much like my feelings towards internal cum shot pregger porn. In quick succession, “God, pregnant women are repulsive!” followed by “Bitch, I put that in there for a reason: so I don’t have to watch you squirt it back out.”

No, Mrs. Brownlee. If you need me, I will be in the waiting room, doing what fathers have been doing since time immemorial: I will be playing Trauma Center on the Nintendo DS and cranking up my iPod to drown out the screams of labor echoing down the hospital hallways. And I will remain there until the baby is mopped up, the meconium is squeezed out of it, my wife puts on some make-up and the placenta is incinerated to guarantee that there is no chance someone will suggest to me that I should eat it. Then and only then will I be willing to enter the hospital room, rest my hand upon my son’s brow and lay my paternal blessing upon it.

Caring For My Baby

The idea that I would be expected to actually care for this fragile mewling thing is absurd. I have all the grace of Cosmo Kramer. Wherever I go, I’m followed with the tintinnabulation of squealing car brakes, shattering glass, metal pots falling over, exploding engine blocks and the sound of doors bursting off their hinges. Any baby inserted into such a life would need to be able to survive even after most of its soft ligaments and rubbery bones had been replaced with steel wire and super glue. If my wife really feels love for the small, pink monkey she crapped out, she would do well to keep it away from me.

Even if I could take care of the baby, though, I’m skeptical I’d want to. Babies are boring. Sure, they’re cute, like miniature Winston Churchills, but thanks to millennia of inbreeding, the amazing genetic science of neotony and the wonders of the Internet, I can get my daily dose of cute just by YouTubing up the puppy tag. That’s without having to deal with all the vomiting and excreting. And on that subject, babies are one-noted: if I wanted to interact on a daily basis with people whose sole joie de vivre was puking and crapping, I wouldn’t have made one, I would just have stayed in touch with my friends from high school. At least the guys at Malden High didn’t spend hours giggling over a spoon. Babies, quite frankly, are just little idiots. They don’t even know any tricks.

Raising A Toddler

On the other hand, I think I’ll end up enjoying fatherhood once my offspring is old enough to be useful. I think that period starts when he’s about two years old, which is the age when he can stand steadily enough to balance my beer on his head, thus saving me the expense of both an end table and a coaster. This is also the age he’s old enough to help out with chores: for example, if I spill my beer, he can mop it up by rolling around on the floor. At age three, he’ll be the perfect size to worm his way through some of the crawlspaces and start killing some of the rats that have infested them, which he’ll have to do anyway if he wants to sleep anywhere besides a pile of wet newspapers on the back porch. At age four, he can be attached to a long stick and shoved up the chimney to dislodge the dead pigeons, and should still be small enough to crawl under my car and drain the oil pan. And at age five, he’ll hopefully be a good enough accordion player to start panhandling; if not, he goes into kindergarten, then a court-ordered after school program. Either way, he’s out of my hair.

Disciplining The Surly Pre-Pubescent Punk

Another problem would be in how to approach discipline. Sometimes I’ll see a small, obnoxious child at the mall in the throes of a tantrum. Letting out a genital-curdling wail, the filthy ape will lash wildly around the floor, his spine an unmanned fire hose gushing adrenaline into his greedy little brain. And, like you, I enjoy slugging such children as hard as I can. Not just because it’s hilarious, but because I have read Hillary Clinton’s It Takes A Village To Raise A Child. I have grokked it. As Mrs. Clinton so eloquently informs us all, is our sworn duty as responsible citizens to inflict crippling physical violence on the tiny, stupid, misbehaving monkeys who are, in essence, our repulsive larval forms.

That said, I want to assure both you and the Social Service workers of the future who have Googled up my name that I would never hit my child. No matter how much he lips off to me, I will not karate chop him in the throat, even if it does build character. No matter how disgusting the noises he makes when he eats, I will not smash my fist into his insouciant kisser. Indisputably, a healthy beating doled out at the least provocation does help raise a better child. But by the time my son is five and starts getting really obnoxious, he will represent to me an investment of several dozens of dollars in food and clothing expenses. As much as I might like to jump up and down on his spine like Dr. Jekyll for a minor infraction of my megalomaniacal dictatorship, it would be like taking a baseball bat to a Cadillac. Unfortunately, I don’t think my wife will be able to understand such a failure, and the resulting lenience in discipline, I think, will cause my son to grow up to be an oafish moron and possibly a contestant on American Idol.

Accepting A Child’s Sex Life

You might have noticed that I’ve been assuming that the fruit of my loins would be a son. That’s because the thought of having a baby girl is too horrible to contemplate. To make things clear, I find nothing in life more delightful than the great unconscious gravity of a girl. If I had a daughter, I would dote upon her, dress her in pretty dresses and give her an entire room filled with baby kittens, which she could roll around in. Yet what fills my soul with horror is the idea of her sexual awakening.

I know men. I’m occasionally mistaken for one. We are beasts. If you are a woman over the age of 15—and this is especially true for Joel’s girlfriend—I have lasciviously fantasized about plumbing your every gooey orifice until we are both twitching, breathless and raw. If my sexual lust could be externalized, it would resemble the hundred foot long prehensile erection of a gigantic dolphin. As I walked down the street, any girl in shouting distance would suddenly find my sexual desire coiled around her neck. The dripping tip would pry open the lips. Then it would then slither down her throat, exit her genitals from the inside and make its way to the next pretty young thing a few feet away, still sheathed in the girl it had just violated.

It fills me with horror to think of my pretty hypothetical daughter being accosted by billions of serpentine dolphin penises. Not just because she would be something precious to me, but because she is of my flesh, and that would make me gay by proxy.

So picture, if you will, my daughter’s prom night. She comes down the steps: her body has lithened into that of a sylph. She is a woman now. She looks beautiful: she has spent the evening in front of the mirror, practicing succulent lip pursing and the swishing of flirtatious lashes like the great emerald feathers on the light wings of a fluttering bird. So lovely and lithe. Meanwhile, I pace downstairs, when outside, I hear the growl of an engine. The nervous shuffling of plodding feet make their way up my walk – ah yes, I remind myself, lighting my pipe. Her prom date. I’m looking forward to meeting the lad.

The doorbell rings and I answer it for the lanky, gawking teenager shuffling awkwardly on the front step. He gulps nervously, a pale skeleton in his father’s suit. Obviously, he has been dreading meeting me. I smile at him kindly and welcome into my house with an arm around his shoulder: oh yes, I know how terrifying it can be to meet your girlfriend’s father for the first time. I invite him into the study with comforting words, laugh heartily as he gains his confidence and jokes with me on the way. Closing the door behind him and tipping him a sly wink, I ask him if he wants a drink of scotch. He refuses, at first, but I prevail upon him, insisting that every man needs a belly full of fire before they take out a beautiful girl for the first time. Finally, his mouth twists into a sheepish grin and he nods his assent. I walk over to the roll-top liquor cabinet, throw it open and begin pouring a couple of scotches, then ask him to come over and get his drink.

And then, when he stands up and walks towards me, I suddenly wheel around and fire a .38 slug right into his belly, and when he’s twisted on the ground in agony, blood pooling slimily away from his writhing body, trying to hold in the intestines pulsing out of holes on both side of his gut, I calmly take a hammer from a desk drawer and use it to break every single one of his teeth out of his leering pretty-boy mug. When his skull resembles a stepped-upon snail, I take a slug of scotch.

Sorry, pervert. Your date’s been canceled.

Conclusion

I think I have made my point. Yes, I love children. Yes, I have excellent ideas about parenting. Yes, every woman realizes that, in me, they have discovered a fountain of nearly infinite and godlike sperm. Yet, paradoxically, all of the excellent qualities, when added together, would make me an extremely poor father.

John Brownlee is editor of Table of Malcontents, Wired’s fringe art and culture blog. He wants to assure the Social Workers investigating him in the future that he would never abuse his children, unless they turn out to be robots.