You are either born impotent, made impotent, or choose to become impotent. Each represents a branching in the sex. Each informs the worldview of the subject. Even in powerlessness, it’s all about that dick.

To be born impotent, you must discover your sudden inability. We do not like to realize our limitations for they are markers of the borders of our mortality. Our body will fail us. It’s just a matter of when and where and most debilitatingly how.

But to suddenly realize you cannot procreate. You cannot continue the species. If you were the last man on earth, your unique calling to repopulate would result k utter failure by no other fault than a freak accident in the genetic code.

To be made impotent is worse. It has a denial of agency. Some accident, some side effect, some catastrophe had to deny you your ability. It might be as random as an error of your genetic code,but it might have far more complicity. What if you needed to choose a medical treatment that made you sterile? What if a car accident drove a hunk of steel and plasticized leather where it counts? What if some moralistic government who just discovered the joys of chemical warfare decided to castrate you for the greater good? To be made impotent invites someone to blame.

We spend our lives coming to terms with the nihilistic whimsy of the universe. Each lesson learned in life is a fundamental reminder of its impermancy. Every morale is a punchline pointing to death. The grasshopper starves. The frog drowns. The scorpion does what’s in its nature and ours is to come to a terminal end.

There is a drive to continue. That’s where the tragedy of involuntary impotence comes in. We all seek to resist death and live on in some way. Some create art, but we got here as a species by those who chose to make life. And to steal away that ability to create must cause some deep anger in the eunuchs.

That leaves those who chose to not continue on the generation. I’d group those who biologically could but who socially cannot in with the involuntarily impotent because I want to zero on those people like me who actively chose to castrate themselves.

And before you go all, “it’s reversible,” know that it only kind of sort of is. The urologists make it a point to underscore how restoring the vans differens is an expensive, full surgery with a 60 to 70% percent success rate. There’s that heavy buyers remorse and the fact that you are awake and lucid and trying desperately to count the ceiling tiles as some dude solders your balls.

So why actively choose to deny yourself the ability to create life? While our part in the process is momentary at best, we still hang a great deal of our self image on the role of a father. We all have the same fantasies of what kinds of fathers we would be. We view ourselves in shades of difference from our own fathers. We use our differences as fathoming rods to measure our depths. Why we would deny ourselves the ability to prove we that were right, that we were better.

For the sex, of course. You mean to tell me there is an outpatient procedure to ensure that I can have an uninhibited sex life free of the terror of a whole new lifetimes worth of commitment? Sign me up. As long as I can piss standing up and masturbate, slice the motherfuckers like tangled fishing line. STDs are bad enough. While most are curable, there’s a few scary ones and the big one that at best results in a lifetime of medication and side effects and really awkward conversations.

Sure, we get to help our partners by finally evening the playing field a little bit. It might not be equal pay, but at least you don’t need to fuck with your hormones anymore. It’s a lot cheaper to get the cut and the only real side effect is an aversion to frozen peas.

As for the whole need to procreate thing, I am not sure if you have noticed, but the world is on fire. Good on you inseminating optimists for having a rosy outlook. We got enough going on in the world that we don’t need my dodgy dice rolls making it worse. I’ll just bet on the fact that the world is better off without me having direct responsibility over another human being. I can enjoy my harmless little evolutionary culdesac and ponder the cool new scar I have on my scrotum.