Male Babyhunger

I want a baby. A fat one. With great big dimples, pillow-soft cheeks and an infectious, gurgling laugh. Beyond that, the details don’t matter. Don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl. My own or adopted. As long as it provides an excuse to leave parties early, walk around with vomit stains on my blazer and bore singletons half to death at dinner parties with talk of schools, dance lessons and Gina Ford.

I’ve felt like this for a couple of years now, although if I’ve kept quiet about it, have mentioned it only to my closest friends, it’s because single, straight, 33-year-old men aren’t allowed to confess to broodiness.

Women, of course, talk of little else. Indeed, book publishers (producing titles such as Baby Hunger: the New Battle for Motherhood, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett), women’s magazines (obsessed with the biological deadline of women’s early forties), and the Daily Mail (keen on printing anything that suggests feminism has failed) won’t let women forget about it.

But straight single men do not want babies. They drift into becoming a dad. They get saddled with babies, when they’d rather be out drinking and shagging. They are duped into fatherhood by women secretly coming off the Pill, or scraping semen from bed sheets – it has been said that, for blokes, family planning is more a case of “family plotting”. But they do not actively and willingly desire children, any more than women actively and willingly watch back-to-back episodes of Ice Road Truckers…

Read atTimes Online