Women outnumber men three to one in some NYC neighborhoods. Of course, Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village are full of men, but they are all gay. Part of the reason is that women exceed male college enrollment. Silently, they are taking over highly educated and professional positions. Manhattan has a very educated and professional workforce. The many years of study and long hours in the office keep them from starting families. That also keeps them somewhat out of shape and gives them a serious demeanor. Think of a finance VP or surgeon pulling 80+ hour weeks. She's not going to look as girly as a woman who spends her days on manicures and pilates while being silly.
Any given day when you look around on the subway, a common sight is an entire row - door to door - of women with one man in between. Of course, there'll be one college gal with fun boots, a tiny skirt, and nipple piercings showing through her no-bra crop top. There'll also be a fitness instructor in Alo yoga pants rock heart abs, arm definition that can make you cry for days, and such exciting, thrilling, and adoring makeup like she walked off a movie set. The majority will be in the middle of their career - sad-faced from grueling office politics, flabby everywhere from sitting in a chair all day, and demurely dressed to fit into office culture. They are good women, smart women, and responsible women - women who make a difference in this world with sometimes planet-size impact in their fields, but from a romantic dating prospect, they are not sexually alluring sirens.
When their oocytes near their expiration date, panic sets in. They try dating. They visit fertility doctors to discuss artificial insemination and egg freezing. Discreetly tucked away, expensive facilities promise high-end results while charging tens of thousands of dollars the way that a camel drinks water after crossing the Saharan desert. Of course, I had heard about women asking their friends and neighbors for sperm donation, often as a humorous comedy skit or a heartfelt story. However, then I got an invitation for a special kind of meetup.
Friday night, I had gone out with my deskmate Ankur from the trading desk. He's way more into drinking than I am. He's not even particularly close to me. I seem to pay much more mind to him than he does to me. However, he's also the kind of party animal who pulls anyone in sight to the next bar. So we had gone to an Irish bar that was very packed the bouncers kept pushing people back towards the tables so that the dance troupe would have space to do their performance in the center. Due to the bouncers pressing, I was squeezed between three people carefully holding my beer in front of my face so that I could take sips every minute or so to pass the boredom of being completely squeezed in, unable to move or talk to anyone.
After an hour of that, Ankur gathered the most drunk people and dragged us down the street to a fancy lounge. Someone in the group had a habit of dropping thousands of dollars there. So we walked right in and past the line. I wouldn't get into places like that. Everything was really fancy. Every piece of lighting was an artwork of a lamp. The couches were covered in luxurious satin. The women had deeply cut dresses with bare backs and flowing material that made them seem like thousand-dollar dresses. Guys were dressed conservatively and buying exotic-looking bottles for the tables like it was a game to get as many as possible. I ended up on a couch that made me sink in deeply - nearly impossible to get up out of, but I was fine with that. I liked being there and watching but didn't really know what to do.
This black scrawny fella with a fancy fedora hat was with me on the couch. He had one arm around me and was tapping me with the other arm on the chest. He seemed too old to still go out drinking. His body was too hard and sinewy to be a man of leisure. He seemed like a man of the nightlife, a professional socialite who only had his outfit as a personal asset and an enigmatic aura to pull people in and somehow profit from them. I'm sure that stories he could tell from his nightly debaucheries for decades were beyond my imagination. He kept talking to me about the surge and energy that was moving through a crowd. He probed to see if I reacted to girls by telling me about a stunningly hot girl who had a fetish for my kind while making a vague promise that he might introduce us if I motivated him enough. When I didn't bite, he kind of gave up and went to rambling about his day and how he was keeping in shape. His arm that didn't hug me was rubbing my chest and slapping my thighs.
When he had almost lost interest in me and was speaking without guard or aim to lure me into something, he mentioned some good folks out in Bushwick. They were running a humanitarian thing to help women find sperm donors without paying outrageous fees. Way out in Bushwick where the streets are so run down that nobody looks at what's happening, they are running a monthly meetup for sperm producers and eager oocyte owners to arrange what was needed to bring a new life to the planet. Those good folks were trying to keep it under the radar because they had no medical license and people exchanged the necessary baby materials on the spot in a natural way. Because he found it so funny, he blurted out the Instagram handle. Then he finally made up his mind that he needed to look for a spender to finance his night and left.
The Instagram account was full of adorable little bunnies - big full cheeks, floppy ears, curiously sniffing mouths. The front was perfect unless you knew what it was about you couldn't tell. I slipped into their DMs and asked about the next meetup. It was the next Wednesday. They gave me an address.
Next Wednesday, I dressed neatly after work. I polished my brown leather shoes with the aged color gradation. I pulled a neatly pressed vest over my office shirt. I slicked my brown hair back with the comb in the office restroom to get ready. I didn't really want a baby. However, I sensed the chance to get laid. Some gal would run off with my sperm, but I would never see her again. She'd probably be super happy about it. I was going to give it a go.
When the subway left Manhattan, it crossed the East River over the Williamsburg Bridge. The whole thing is rattling really loudly, but the view over the water onto the skyline on both sides always takes my breath. My spirit gets filled with awe. Seeing the tall, sleek skyscrapers lit up with beautiful lighting makes me imagine all the top-tier business, research, and development that happens all around here. I'm only a little speck among the see of chumps at the bottom of the hierarchy, but being so close to feeling the magic of the metropolitan at the center of the world in business, culture, and education... Wow! There I am I'm not a world-class chess champion or dancer. I can't afford the exclusive places, not even to look inside. We little specks are masses in this city, at the feet of the skyscrapers. We bond together to help each other. There is so much entrepreneurship that fills every crack of need that could be filled by someone eager to make a living and perhaps glory. A sperm trading party would fit right in. Where there were eager sperm wishers and sperm producers, someone would facilitate the transaction.
