6. Don

   “Will next Monday work for you,” Don asked Colin.

   “S-so soon?”

   “I would think a man of your age would want to know as quickly as possible.”

   Insufferable little prick, Colin thought. What does he know?

   Don was more than Dr. Randi Manners' receptionist; he was the doctor’s latest boy toy. Only twenty years of age, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Don was slim, athletic, and perfectly tanned. He wore a skin-tight body suit of crisp white cotton that exposed his muscular bronze legs and arm and conformed intimately to his enormous testicles.

   Colin couldn’t stand Don, but derived some comfort in knowing that Don’s tenure at the clinic was dependent solely on the lusty caprice of his employer, Dr. Manners. When the doctor had tired of having her way with the receptionist, she would let him go, his AQ depleted considerably, and hire someone younger and more virile. Colin had seen it happen more times than he could remember.

   “I can have it pushed back a week, if you like,” Don offered.

   “No, no. Monday will be fine,” Colin surrendered.

   “Don, would you clear my afternoon of all appointments,” Dr. Manners called out from her office.

   “Yes, doctor.”

   “And double up on your Niagara!”

   Don’s face turned beet red. Niagarra® was a drug, marketed by the Johnson & GlaxoSmithKlinePfizer brobdingnago, which, unlike its forerunner Viagara, not only improved both libido and the durations of erections, but also caused those who took it to ejaculate copiously.

   “If possible,” Colin said to the receptionist, “make it Monday morning. Better to get it done with before I change my mind.”

   “Y-y-yes,” Don answered, his blue eyes averted. “Monday morning.”

   As Colin was leaving the clinic, he could hear the doctor say to Don, “Get your cute little ass in here! Who’s yo’ Mama?”

5. AQ

   Colin was not alone: every man dreaded learning what his Adam Quotient was.

   Named after the Nobel-prize winning Dr. Johannes Adam, the AQ, as it was commonly called, was a brutally accurate estimate of how many ejaculations a man had left before anejaculation, or the inability to emit semen, set in. As anejaculation was predominately anorgasmic, that is lacking the ability to climax, it robbed males not only of their reproductive capacity, but their enjoyment of coitus, as well.

   And though some men retained for a time the ability to have an erection after anejaculation set in, they often found “having a stiffy” more of an insult than encouraging. And, without sexual release to look forward to, men found that even these residual boners soon waned.

   Like Colin, the typical man might spot the alarming signs of mascupause—decreased ejaculate, less satisfying climaxes, and less turgidity in their erections—at about the age of forty, a more sexually active man or an ardent masturbator might spot the signs as early as thirty.

   Dr. Johannes Adam, a German cellular biologist with the Max Planck Society of Germany, coined the term “mascupause” to differentiate the syndrome from andropause, which had been the gradual reduction of male hormones seen in aging males in generations past. Mascupause, on the other hand, was the complete and permanent shut-down of the male reproductive system, like menopause in women, yet vastly different in that the sex organ no longer had any function except for being what Dr. Adam called “eine nutzlose Pissröhre”, that is, a useless piss tube.

   The first to recognize that something was gravely amiss in the virility of modern man, Dr. Adam would go on to pioneer the method for determining how many ejaculations a man had left before his penis was fated to become eine nutzlose Pissröhre. He would by and by win the Nobel Prize in Physiology, selected unanimously by men who had yet to come to grips with their impotency.

   How accurate was the Adam Quotient? It had a margin of error of plus or minus four ejaculations. A man with, for example, an AQ of 10 could expect to enjoy between six and fourteen more orgasms before mascupause set in.

4. S Colin Ampersand

   S. Colin Ampersand lay face down on the examination table, his feet in cold stirrups, as his physician examined his prostate with her finger. It was a humiliation the doctor made him endure every single visit. Colin wanted to ask if such invasive exams were truly necessary, but not today: he was having grave concerns about his plumbing.

   At forty-one years of age, Colin, wasn’t the finest specimen of manhood: whey-faced, balding, short and fat, his dismal figure resembled an old gym sock stuffed with chestnuts.

   “Nothing out of the ordinary down there,” Doctor Randi Manners said, removing her rubber gloves. She then goosed Colin’s sizable buttocks.

   “Ouch!”

   “You can put your clothes back on.”

   Grumbling under his breath, Colin slid off the examination table, and bent over to pick his boxer shorts off of the floor.

   “You’ve really let yourself go,” Manners said, jabbing at a generous fold of skin around Colin’s waist.

   “Tell me about it,” Colin said and pulled his boxers up to around his waist.

   He had tried every imaginable diet out there, but to no effect. Everything he ate ended up going straight his belly and arse.

   The problem with Colin was that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he had not been a designer, genetically enhanced, and scrupulously scheduled test-tube baby. He was, to the eternal embarrassment of his parents, the product of a frisky roll in the hay after too much wine one evening. His older sister, Guillemet, on the other hand, was everything his parents could have desired: a lithe beauty who was a good fifteen centimeters taller and ten points smarter than her younger brother. And whereas Guillemet was a successful marketing consultant today, munificently paid to bullshit as it were, Colin earned a modest salary pining away in a windowless basement office of the municipal government.

   “Have you had your AQ checked?” the doctor asked.

   “No,” Colin replied, swallowing hard.

   “Well, Colin, you’re no spring cock anymore, and a guy your age really should have these things checked regularly.”

   “I know,” he said. “I know.”

   Colin had been putting off the inevitable for years, hoping against hope that all the medical data and research had been wrong. But that was like hoping the tide wouldn’t recede. It always did. It always did.

   “Oh, Colin, you really shouldn’t let it get you down,” Manners said, softening her tone, and added: “Mascupause isn’t the end of the world, you know. Most men go on to live full and productive lives long after they’ve stopped being reproductive.”

   Colin might have felt heartened by his doctor’s advice, if she had not merely been repeating a line from a commercial for Herculis, a popular line vitamin and mineral supplements marketed at men for whom virility has become a memory.

   “I’ll have Don schedule you for the AQ, okay?”

   Colin sighed heavily, then gave a defeated nod.

   “Atta boy!” she said, and lit up a stogie.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2011-12. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Aonghas Crowe's works are available at Amazon.

3. In the Nuts

   Every man believed in his heart of hearts that the human race had strayed too far from its roots, having gone from hunters and gathers to living lives of sedentary consumers of processed foods with ingredients nobody could understand, let alone pronounce, in less than ten thousand years. What else but the crap men had been stuffing themselves with—day in, day out—for decades on end could account for the alarming changes they were witnessing in their virility?

   This suspicion had initially driven a trend in back-to-basics living, where men attempted to “kill their own meat”, which had disastrous consequences: record numbers of men succumbing to the elements or starving to death in the nation’s forests.

   Others opted more sensibly for healthy eating, a move towards simpler, organic foods. People rediscovered their designer kitchens with the poured concrete countertops and cabinets made of reclaimed wood which had until then seldom, if ever, been used for actual cooking. Farmer’s markets featuring organic vegetables and fruits became the norm. Even supermarket chains got into the act, and those which first catered to the new demand flourished. As people prepared more of their own meals, chain restaurants suffered, many going belly up before they could conform to the changing needs of their customers. McDonald’s, once maligned as the epitome of so many lifestyle failings, completely transformed itself and was now the largest seller of vegan burgers. It’s free-range chicken McNuggets served with homemade teriyaki sauce made from non-GM soybeans was also a hit.

   Unfortunately, diet wasn’t the whole story.

   To be sure, the overuse of genetically modified foods, growth hormone, antibiotics, herbicides and pesticides around the turn of the century deserved blame, but the troubling phenomenon was even being observed in cultures where those modern scourges were less pervasive.

   Others pointed at the ubiquity of petrochemicals in the modern world. Plastic had conquered the globe by the end of the twentieth century. There wasn’t anywhere you could go, from the highest mountains in the Himalayas to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and not find bits of plastic waste. Ingested by animals, they were, by and by, consumed by humans. Despite intense lobbying by the North Atlantic Alliance of Petrochemical Corporations (NAACP), the production of plastics for short-term and/or one-off use—such as in shopping bags, toothbrushes, shipping material, and so on—was banned in the 74 member states of the OECD. Though a major coup for environmentalists, the tide of masculinity continued to recede at a distressing rate.

   If environmental concerns did not fully account for what was happening, then perhaps the answer lay in over-population. Indeed, the worst affected countries appeared to be those with the greatest population densities, countries like India and Japan. It was as if Mother Nature was saying in not so unsubtle ways: “ENOUGH!”

   The first to sound the alarm was a Japanese columnist by the name of Maki Fukasawa who in the mid Naughties coined the term sôshoku danshi, (草食男子, herbivore boys), to describe Japanese men in their twenties and thirties, who were passive about women, far more interested in cultivating friendly relationships with the opposite sex rather than trying to conquer them in the bed. These herbivore boys opted for quiet, uncompetitive lifestyles, pursuing hobbies instead of careers. They were, as one reporter wrote, “Metrosexuals without the testosterone.”

   What was first observed in Japan quickly spread throughout Asia, and beyond to Europe and the Americas. Where population density was highest it seemed as if men’s libido, which had driven population and economic growth since time immemorial, had taken a kick square in the balls.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2011-12. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Aonghas Crowe's works are available at Amazon.

2. Lawless

   The handsome one in the pinstriped suit was Sue Lawless. An aggressive corporate lawyer, Lawless had earned her first one hundred million dollars by the age of thirty in the cutthroat field of Acquisitions and Mergers. The field had by and large become obsolete by then as most major companies had already been merged into brobdingnagoes, or what über-conglomerates were known as. 95% of the world’s pharmaceuticals, for example, was produced by the drugs brobdingnago Johnson & GlaxoSmithKlinePfizer; 70% of the sportswear market was dominated by a sports apparel brobdingnago of Addidas, Puma, Under Armour, Wilson, and Nike that had been cobbled together over the years. The remaining share was controlled by a Japanese brobdingnago that made everything from pencils to missiles, running shoes to jet aircraft engines.

   At thirty-eight, though, Lawless was beginning to suffer something exhibiting all the hallmarks of a mid-life’s crisis. While she had already achieved in monetary terms what any woman of her day could ever hope to achieve, something was still missing. Until she found what it was, she filled the hole by racking up a tally of sexual conquests that was the envy of her friends.

   “Did you check out the nuts on that guy?” Lawless said as Sam and Martin walked out the front door of the bar. “Oh, how I’d love to get my hands on those!”

   “They’re fake, you know,” Marcy, Lawless’s bookish assistant observed.

   “Of course, I know they’re fake! What kind of chump you take me for?”

   “I’m just saying.”

   “You’re ‘just saying’,” Lawless mocked. “The less you say, the better.”

   Her assistant slumped down in her seat and began licking the salt off the rim of her greyhound.

   “I love big nuts as much as the next gal,” the eminent game designer Pam Marker interjected, “but I once had a guy a couple of years back with the smallest testicles. Looked just like walnuts dangling there, but boy could he come! My breasts were covered in jism. Felt like I was in one of those Japanese bukake films.”

   “Sounds wonderful,” Lawless said, biting her lower lip.

   “Oh, it was,” Marker assured the other women at the table.

   “So, did you hook up again?”

   “Hell no! The dog wouldn’t return my calls. You get one of these guys so hot and hard, you think they’d appreciate it, but, no, they turn all stuffy on you and say silly things like they were always hoping to ‘save’ themselves for ‘someone special’.”

   The women all rolled their eyes in disdain.

   “And to think,” Lawless said, “they used to call us the fairer sex! Hah!”

   “I was reading an old book by the author Philip Roth called Portnoy’s Complaint. . . ,” another friend by the name of Penny Wiseman began. She was a crack literary agent with a multinational panmedia talent agency.

   “Porky’s Complaint?” Lawless asked.

   “Not Porky, Portnoy. Portnoy’s Complaint. It was so dated, I could barely finish the novel, but one thing that struck me was how the main character is just driven by lust, chasing after and seducing—seducing women if can you believe it. And, oy gevalt, the masturbation! This Portnoy is masturbating all the time. When was the last time you heard of a man masturbating?”

   Lawless’s assistant looked up from her greyhound and said with surprise, “Men masturbate?”

   “Of course, they do,” Lawless shot back. “They won’t admit it, though.

   “Speaking of books,” Marker cut in. “I’m reading a great book right now about how to pick up guys, you know, how to read their body language.”

   Wiseman said she had heard of it but hadn’t read it yet.

   “No need to,” Lawless boasted. “I can teach you everything.”

   “Oh, I’m sure you can!” Wiseman said, laughing.

   “The first thing you need to know,” Lawless said, leaning in as if to share a secret, “is that they’re all sexually frustrated as hell and just dying for the release.”

   “Even those two guys?” Lawless’s assistant asked.

   “Even those two. Especially, the prude in the harlequin codpiece,” Lawless replied, speaking of Sam. “He’s interested. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

© Aonghas Crowe, 2011-12. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.