A woman is having a baby. It is a mean baby that has a gun. The doctor advises the woman to “pull”, because then the baby will shoot her uterus instead of the doctor. The doctor is doing this not because he is afraid of babies, but because he is afraid of guns.
As we have seen in previous issues, the Author has a somewhat adversarial opinion of women’s role in reproduction. This opinion is fairly representative of the young male psyche, which craves female attention (e.g., sex, submission, etc.) but fears any sort of sincere human connection or compromise. The child and its “stickup” represents the Author’s fear of obligation and compromise; he cannot maintain his self-deception of being a good and well-adjusted person without raising a child and being faithful to a woman. But, this places the Author in a position of nearly intolerable compromise and obligation. His possessions, free time, and energy must all be devoted to his new child. This effectively robs him of his youth.
While many men experience some passing feelings of resentment to women who bear their young, to someone like the Author that confrontation would be too direct. He may hate the woman for robbing him of the rest of his life, but he fears confronting her because she may revoke his sole sexual outlet. Instead, the child becomes a thief who’s very existence will steal time that could have been spent having sex and then blogging about it, making Lego Mindstorms, programming a new Python SMTP library, or posting on Hacker News. The loss of these familiar activities represents an unbearable degree of change in a life that has been locked in an almost perfect stasis since college.
