Headline from twenty years hence:
Woman Conceives: Father Admits to Lying About Birth Control.
I guess that male chemical contraception - by pill or injection - isn't far away.
You can picture it now: A couple arrive at her apartment in a cab, all bra-straps and breathless. They can't take their hands off each other. On the ride up in the elevator, they grind in the corner. Inside, they pause for a moment on the threshold, kissing deeply. She takes him by the hand to her bedroom. Clothes come off, then she stops:
"You are firing blanks, aren't you?" She asks.
He smiles smugly. "Of course. I had my HeroShot last week. I'm good 'til June."
"In that case....c'mere and fuck me" she growls.
Fortunes can be made if you can predict headlines from the future. The difficult ones will make you the most, easier ones not so much. Even I can predict those, like the one I opened with. The trend of women adopting male behaviour is well entrenched. Rates of binge drinking, violence and infidelity among women are heading towards those of men, presumably a consequence of the move to "gender equality", although quite what women gain from equality in these areas escapes me.
The other social elephant in the room is the fact of declining birthrates. Now that's been a kind of under-the-fold headline for a decade or so, but I predict that too will change. (Making my opening headline even more prescient, BTW.) Western countries face huge problems with declining populations starting about now. Asian countries will follow, and only the continent of Africa will be growing by mid-century.
No-one remembers a man called Paul Ehrlich. He wrote a book in the 1970s, The Population Bomb, in which he posited the decline of humans because we were too numerous. In fact, time will show that he was 180 degrees out with his predictions, that our biggest problems will come simply from there being too few of us.
I'm going to counter his Population Bomb idiocy with a theory of my own. By 2050, the most valuable event on earth will be a natural pregnancy. We might live to regret that male pill.
Bottoms Up, Conceptors.
