I envision a new superhero for our fertility-obsessed age. He’s Virile Man. A modern-day Zeus, whose rapacious manliness could impregnate even the “barren” (what a word) with triplets, though today we use in vitro fertilization for that.

But Virile Man is no mamby-pamby obstetrician in a lab coat. No! He’s more like the picture on cover of a trashy romance novel. Except they’re all doped up on anabolic steroids, which reduce fertility. Hmm.

Virile Man, then, can come in many sizes and shapes. He can work under cover of darkness, like Batman. I should hope so, in fact. And if he wants to expand his portfolio by fighting a few crimes in between stops, well, whatever.

The main requirement for Virile Man is that he leave a trail of pregnancies in his wake.

My husband can be a candidate. Underneath his slightly nerdy, glasses-wearing, engineer-in-a-cubicle façade there seethes a virility that is downright dangerous. All he has to do is look my way while thinking a dirty thought, and I get pregnant. I worry that he might have this same effect on other women.

This theory of how babies are made is not far off from the one I harbored as a child. I grew up ignorant of the notable anatomical difference between genders. Though I lived on a farm, I knew nothing about the birds and the bees. “Dad! Dad! Make that mean old rooster get off the hens! He’s hurting them!” My father, however, would not interfere with the old cock. Men stick together in these matters.

I knew that marriage was connected to babies. I believed the woman’s body sensed the presence of a wedding ring and knew it was time to start making children. Something about heavy metals in the bloodstream. When an elementary school classmate proclaimed that she “didn’t have a father, and never had,” I figured her mother’s body must have been confused. Mysteries of science do happen.

When I was around 11, my mother, who was born in 1600, gave me my initiation to the facts of life as follows:

She handed me a paper grocery sack full, and I mean full, of flimsy, shapeless, slightly yellowed trainer bras used by all five of my older sisters, and told me to choose a couple. Goody goody.

Then she sat me at the kitchen table and, with a magic marker, drew a surprisingly accurate and aesthetic illustration of the female reproductive system. She was authoritative and eloquent in explaining the purpose of uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries; the function of hormones; the buildup of the protective lining; the monthly shedding of that lining.

And, she said, drawing a little tadpole, “When the man’s sperm comes in contact with the egg, that’s how a baby begins.”

I asked a logical question: “How does a man’s sperm reach the egg?”

“It’s what happens,” she said primly, “when a married couple shares a bed.”

The look on her face made it clear that conversation was over. The image I was left with was of some amphibious, maggoty thing wiggling its way out of the man’s body, squirming across the sheets toward the woman as she slept, and invading her in some way. I decided it must be through the belly button, since I couldn’t think of any other route to the lower abdomen.

Fortunately now I know that babies are made telepathically, via dirty thoughts, so I don’t have to be afraid of tadpoles. There were lots of them in the pond on the farm, and after our talk on the facts of life I was leery of wading in the shallows.

Maybe we should draw our Virile Man as more of a fairy godmother of fertility – he hovers over the sleeping forms of two people wishing for a baby and points a ConceptoBeam in their direction. Presto! Pregnancy. With none of this tangled paternity confusion that snarls up the courts or interferes with fatherly bonding. No costly, invasive, or awkward procedures or surrogates needed.

To some, Virile Man will be a hero. But he’d better steer clear of me, because (whip off my glasses, let down my hair, spin around . . . ) I’m his nemesis: Contracepta Girl! My magic bracelets can deflect his ConceptoBeam. At least, they can now, thanks to my mamby-pamby, lab-coat wearing obstetrician, God bless him.

© 2005, Julianna Berry.