The operation was a success. The testicles were removed and placed in a small glass jar on a pristine stainless steel medical table, the kind with the small metal wheels that hum silently as they roll along and have that kind of lock on the leg like wheelchairs, and then the jar was hermetically sealed. The practice of hermetically sealing is not a new one, in fact some say it goes back as far as the ancient Egyptians, those pharoas of old times in the sandy confines of desert Africa. They kind of floated at first, then sank down, before finding a place somewhere in the middle, they were slightly bloody and the veins popped out.
The nurse couldn't help but feel a bit of glee, mixed with a certain sadness for the patient, but it was like every time she was metaphorically slapped down by the man in the brief segment of time she'd known on this planet she called her life, every time a sister didn't get a promotion, every time a girl was raped in some dusty overseas apartment in Bangkok or Uzbekistan or Berlin, every time she felt the raw sting of the capillaries in her face bursting as hand met face, every time the psychological became the physical, and here, in this tiny moment she faced 10 to 15 times a day, she wanted to squeel with delight, but she settled for a small smirk of glee, which she'd follow up by gossiping about later at the water cooler over a smoke or two. And then maybe even later when she got home and put the kids down and went online. She'd cut back to about two packs a day, but she was smoking a much healthier blend of organic tobacco mixed with flavoring and spices which she found helped calm her nerves better than the straight tobacco. To make up for what she missed she usually had two martinis when she got home a few oxy and then put on a patch while she cooked dinner. She was a working gal, after all, and her days were filled with blood and the stench of trauma, that indescribable mix of fear and sweat mixed with the typical hospital antiseptic odor, and just inhaling it left her exhausted. So she took her bits of glee where she could get them. So ya, if cutting off a few sacks a day made her feel a bit better, so be it. She felt like she was being humane after all, and she always did feel a certain degree of sadness for them, anyway. But to her it was like an insult, it was more like an invitation, welcome to a world free of testosterone, you'll be more calm and more peaceful and there will be less fights. Of course she knew her catty bitchy friends, and she knew she needed the oxy to calm her nerves, I guess deep down she felt a certain uneasiness, maybe this wasn't the right way after all. But come on, they wouldn't be on her table if they weren't in some way inferior specimens, if they were studs they'd be out, well, you know, doing what studs do. That wasn't her fault. So she was conflicted. And she was having trouble meeting a man of her own. And her puppy had the shits. She had three cats and one dog, and two kids to boot. Boy and a girl, both by the same guy, they stayed together for a while but never made it official. They split right after the war. The kids were love children from a previous generation, the war changed everything. Kids born and raised a bit before had this very confused look upon their face, things weren't ever really explained to them. One day things were one way and another the next. Anybody old enough to have been say a teen before was already marched off and in all likely hood either still there or in a body bag. Which left her with two very small fragile children who were very confused, no man, a lot of bills, three cats who pretty much fended for themselves, which she respected on a certain level, even if there wasn't the warmth there she'd prefer, and one very sick dog.
After the young boy got up, he got sea sick before he found his legs, he stumbled around a bit, then he saw the jar and got sick again, nearly puked but the meds kicked in just in time. She saw this so much she just felt this great big burst of pity swell up inside her. But she also had learned it wasn't a great idea to get too attached to her boys, and that they'd eventually adjust and in most cases be happier for it. They were so loaded up with meds the first few weeks it was hard to tell the difference. But they had their choice, they could have signed up and gone to fight. There was no draft per se with the war, but I guess you could say it was draft by default, you pretty much had to have the operation, as it became very clinically known, or else sign up. There were certain exceptions, those with IQ's over 140 were generally placed low on either list, and there was always time for things to happen while their name moved up the list. If they came back on three successive days to the same hospital and were waitlisted or a doctor wasn't available they generally also got pushed back to the back of the list to wait again, there were ways. It is unpleasant to talk about, but there are always ways and money always helps grease the wheels. Naturally politician's sons got preferential treatment, and a certain degree of lenency was afforded those in the medical community itself, since they take care of their own, but basically if you were either loaded or well connected, say part of the mafia, you knew there were ways to get out of it.
About fifteen minutes later she was lighting up for the third time in a row at the cooler, the girls were talking about the new intern, they thought he was just adorable, one remarked she'd love to get her paws on his balls, they all snickered, someone said watch out, she replied oh not like that you know what I mean. A black girl commented ya but still bet they'd need an extra large jar for his if you did. They all laughed, one guffawed. She saw her bewildered boy staggering down the hallway, spinning she imagined, her heart went out to him but she was in the water cooler circle what could she do, she at least hushed the other girls up while he walked by. Then as soon as he passed, the black girl said, he look like he lost wonder what he lookin for. And another predictably replied, it ain't between his legs, to which the black girl added, no more HA!. And then they all spit out large gulps of laughter. As if the HA! had been a call and response signal in the great church of Oprah. But she laughed too, pity or no, she knew funny.
HA!
The future is never what we think it will be like. We evolved, but for the most part it was cultural. A whole new field of study opened up showing that people had been evolving for millenia culturally, and that there were certain classes of genes which responded to environmental factors which were handed down from generation to generation and that they had an interplay with everything from nationality to favorite sports teams and that as we were evolving culturally it had slowed our genetic evolution. There was more similarity in the cross cultural gene pool world wide than at any point since a small group of hardy travellers left sub saharan africa 50,000 years ago. So we were all now artists. Not artisans, in the sense of a small Italian village circa 1500, nor in the sense of say the East Village circa 1985. No it was like there was some grand awakening. Silly thing though no one could have predicted. We got rid of all the museums. Well it wasn't like we got rid of them. At first, after the second great depression, or SGD as it became short handed, the market sky rocketed, sotheby's and Christy's were doing record business, but then predictably, like the oil market, like the credit crunch, like the housing bubble and the tech sector, it got too hot and collapsed. But people had stopped going to museums much earlier. Museums on the other hand had ever larger storehouses of priceless art. The museums theoretically kept going up in value, so people kept building them. And then people got very interested in architecture, much more so than art work, so the art museums themselves became much more popular than the museums, meaning the interior and the artwork inside. Neighboorhood values skyrocketed with a museum and people liked looking at them from the outside, they tended to draw an artsy crowd and people who run things like having artsy folk around for creative decision making. The only problem was no one was actually going inside to look at the art anymore. Well, except for the same homeless people going to libraries. So they started charging money to attract a better demographic, one more to their liking. They charged more and more. They found by very simple mathematical equations they could just charge much much more and have fewer and fewer attendees which eventually became very select and then were known as patrons. Now the subtle difference between attendees and patrons is this, while you're kissing the ass of the attendee, bending over backwards, first adding air conditioning, then water fountains, then filtered water, then starbucks and personal foot massage, you're still in charge. The patron's demands might be very simple, perpahs even simpler than some of the extravagances you'd choose to lavish, but they are individual, they aren't mass marketed, and they can not only be obtuse, they are tied to very large donations. Piss off one attendee, no matter how high the rate of entrance, another sucker will line up, piss off one patron and it is your job, perhaps your head.
When the real estate market went, it had a certain perverse math on certain sectors of the real estate market, while most tanked, it made investment in those that hadn't tanked even more valuable. Certain downtown real estate didn't lose value as quickly and was thus thought more valuable and worthy of investment. So that while all the markets around the world were crumbling and small children were being reminded to finish off their veggies so a small boy growing up in indochina or africa wouldn't starve, and the real estate bubble was in a long slow decline that would last two decades, something unheard of before or after, art museums were still hot properties. Even though no one was going to them anymore, not even the patrons. The patrons were still buying art though, and had actually driven up prices further in speculation. When the bubble burst on that market though, it tanked and hit hard and then the museums weren't just ignored they were reviled. Same thing as the french revolution without the storming of the bastille nor the bloodloss and head trimming.
At the same time, cultural evolved and we all became artists. But since everyone was an artist it wasn't so special anymore. Sort of like a child with rudimentary math skills would have been a genius 50,000 years ago, when we all possess the ability it isn't so special. The real artists these days were designing running shoes. Did you see that new one by Nike? We also stopped painting our walls. Or rather painted everything white, bright white, gleaming even. People wore white a lot more too, come to think of it. Maybe people wanted to stand out less. Who knows. But maybe it was all the fembots and the trend towards feminization, perhaps Picasso had it right and there was something primal and male about painting, like finding your own inner minataur. Gaughan had to travel the world over to find the other, to find the primitive. Thoureau knew it was right in the next village, if only he could seperate noise from channel, clear out the static in his head long enough to realize the truth right there in New England.
Certainly all the nuetered men and boys had contributed to the slow feminizing of society. Estrogen in the water along with flouride didn't hurt either. But in a bizarre twist of fate, due to the war effort, ESPN was still just as in demand as ever, a hot black market had opened up for juice (roids, steroids or testosterone, from ape and chicken testosterone to artifical and chemically altered HGH) and the glass ceiling was just as thick, as ever, if not thicker. The old boys network gave up their own but they circled the wagons and declared war themselves. Sure when Hillary put the same level of testing for the Olympics into high schools, no one thought much of it, good for her, you go girl. Then when they started adding chemicals to the water in NY State, people figured it wasn't any worse than the run off from cow manure. Of course it was too late when the reality was revealed.
But the real truth was that, regardless of all the big satan rhetoric coming out of the middle east about MTV and NY City, that slave boys had for thousands of years volunteered to have their nuts crushed or chopped off to become unics in the harem, or rather guarding it. Of course the decision was always made when one had one's sack, and probably a bit drunk, probably after talking to a bunch of older retired unics getting paid handsomely to recruit you, and after you'd been laid by fifteen of the harems ugliest girls, which were by your standards the hottest peices of ass you'd ever even gotten close to.
Now just to clarify, the traditional unic if you're thinking of the big fat guy guarding the door to the bedroom, kind of similar to a bouncer at a bar, kind of soft spoken, grunts a bit, the muscle behind the little guy, he has one ball. He was born with two, but had one chopped off, after he reached puberty. The other traditional kind of unic, what we might think of as a unisex or asexual fembot, an android as in androgenous droid, he has had two nuts, both of 'em chopped off before puberty. There is a form of pre-pubescent testosterone, a form of what you might think of as tween testosterone, the sort of superman testostone produced at 18 or so and then at least three more forms of testosterone. The prostate produces testosterone, the balls produce cum, or semen, but if you chop off the balls, something happens in the process. All men have estrogen also, at about a one third ratio. When you start taking roids, your body eventually shuts down your testostone production, and estrogen still kicks in, which often produces the gorgeous george effect. However, to get around some tests, some baseball players and football players now also take estrogen, not much different than the pill, in order to try and fool those looking for a ratio that is out of wack. At first if you were on roids, the first few cycles, your ratio would be too high for testosterone, but later, if you stopped taking it, and your body had already grown accustomed to the shots and stopped producing it naturally, then you would have a higher ratio of estrogen. Estrogen acts like a bus driver. Estrogen is the bus driver to the bus of the testosterone. The much smaller quantity of estrogen regulates the testosterone in a feedback loop. Some studies have shown that for several factors controlled, if you increase the amount of estrogen naturally without the pill in a healthy male, you can increase his testosterone, since it is a feedback loop. But similarly, take away the estrogen source or source of the increase, and the feedback loop can way drop off production of testosterone, and like someone taking roids, the body can eventually get accustomed to the external source of estrogen and stop producing it thereby removing the feedback loop and lowering testosterone levels. True, if the feedback loop were effected and estrogen levels dropped off, you might still have a proper ratio of testosterone even if there were less than healthy and the ratio might be higher, but it would be with nasty side effects