人民日报官方微博80后:是时候该注意到男性生物钟啦！

是时候该注意到男性生物钟啦！

Here’s a preview of what’s to come has Quirkyalone expands to become a group blog. This piece is written by my fantastic, quirkytogether poet friend Elline Lipkin. It’s cross-posted on girlwpen.com.

这篇文章是一篇文章的概述，该文章在Quirkyalone发展为一个博客圈。这个概述是由我在Quirky网上结识的一位非常了不起的诗人朋友Elline Lipkin所写，被girlwpen.com网站转载。

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine piece to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight; although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Lisa Belkin是研究婚恋家庭方面的专家，她在《纽约时报》杂志周日刊发文说到了一项新研究。这个研究肯定会令（至少一些）男人不爽，而女人，照她所说，高兴地“哈哈大笑”。尽管事实上这个消息对所有想要孩子的人来说，都是值得深思的。

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well. Not so anymore. Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation). Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too”. Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.

从各方面来讲，女性在何时要小孩这个问题上通常承受着巨大的压力，而男性，由于被告知他们的生理条件是没有时间限制的，因此他们做父亲的机会则一直良好。但现在看来不再是这样子了。她指出，过去几年里，越来越多的证据开始表明，父亲生育的年龄和精神分裂症、孤独症和躁郁症之间存在着关联（然而母亲怀孕的年龄则没有这样的关联）。两年前《纽约时报》曾刊登一篇名为“生育能力的生物钟对男性来说似乎也是在走动的”的文章。如今，Belkin引用澳大利亚的一个研究，研究表明“父亲年龄大的小孩，平均来讲，在智商测试上得分比父亲年龄小的小孩要低。”

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more. But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple’s conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.” Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, “It turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.” Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

有人会对这项研究提出异议，声称没有办法调节环境、父亲的智商、父母的照顾等因素的影响。但是有两条线使我注意，并喊出“有的！”：“去年法国研究者汇报，一对夫妇怀孕的几率在丈夫超过35岁时，就开始下降；而当他超过40岁时，则急剧下降。”不久，Belkin引用Dolores Malaspina博士，纽约大学医学中心的一位精神病学教授的话，他说，“事实证明，男人做父亲的最佳年龄和女人做母亲的最佳年龄事一样的。”哈哈！我读到这里的时候，当时只想对着屏幕大笑！

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family. Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring. My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

事实上，我真正想做的事是对所有50岁左右的男性大喊。在我35岁的时候进入交友网站，他们不顾自己的年龄来联系我，主要因为他们觉得他们“最终准备好了”有足够的时间来组成一个家庭了。大部分人供认不讳地承认，一定程度上他们是想找一个在他们突然想要孩子时，有能力给他们生儿育女的女人。在我看来，联系我而只是想找一个生育的工具替他们生儿育女，这是一种极具侮辱性的做法，而通常我这样的回应从来都是对牛弹琴。

But what Belkin gets to at the end of her article –- and what I think bears far more exploration — is how scientific evidence that men too have a ticking biological clock could undermine what is a commonly socially accepted timeline. For women, shelf life and expiration date with fertility are fixed, while for men, well, they can always Tony Randall it, and procreate as he did in his 77th year. (Nevermind that in this New York Times article, “He’s Not My Grandpa. He’s My Dad,” Randall’s widow, left with two children under age 10, questions if her own long-range planning was all that wise and admits she’d tell her daughter not to marry an “older man.”

但是，Belkin在文章结尾却提到——这也是我认为值得再深入探索的地方——证明男人也有生育生物钟的科学证据，如何能够推翻社会上人们已接受的时间表呢？对于女人而言，生育能力的有效期是固定的，而对于男人而言，他们总能举出Tony Randall在77岁还生子的例子。 （请留意在《纽约时报》的文章《他不是我爷爷，他是我父亲》里，Randall的遗孀，被留下两个不到十岁的孩子，质疑自己长期的计划是不是明智，并且承认她会告诉女儿，不要嫁给“老男人”。）

While women have been tying themselves in knots over the message (given freely from everyone ranging from their OB/GYNs to their grandmothers) that they’d better not wait too long to have a child or their time will run out, most men seem to blithely assume there’s never an end point, an assumption social convention has largely supported. 

不管是妇产科的医生，还是她们的奶奶，每个人都在劝说女人最好不要太晚才要孩子，否则她们就没时间了。当女人们总是纠结着这样的信息时，大部分男人则安之若素，认为自己从来不会有终结点，而这样的观点也被社会普遍支持。

One past wannabe suitor even told me he thought it was great that his retirement would coincide neatly with his imagined child’s toddler years. When I asked him how much of his child’s life he expected to experience (did he think he’d ever be a grandfather if his child waited till his 50s to reproduce as well?) he admitted that just wasn’t something he had thought much about.

我过去的一个狂热的追求者甚至告诉我，如果当他退休时孩子刚蹒跚学步，他将会非常高兴。我问他，你期望陪你的孩子走过他生命中的多少时间？（他有没有想过，如果他的小孩也等到50多岁才要孩子，他还能不能做个爷爷？）他承认，他从来没有考虑过这个问题。

Beneath the social mating dance I experienced was the baseline assumption that male biology justified when men can start families – whenever they want – and their ageist attitudes toward women’s viability in this domain also went unquestioned, a mindset that smacks of patriarchal privilege. Belkin rightly points out how if this attitude was questioned, based on science, the mating priorities of both sexes could be upended, and changing that assumption is likely a good thing.

在社交相亲舞会上，我接触到了这样的基本假设，认为当男人可以组成家庭时，男人的生理条件都是可以的——不管什么时候，只要他们想——他们在这个范围内对女性生育的年龄歧视也是毫无疑问的，一套典型的男性特权的思维模式。Belkin公正地指出，基于科学来质疑这样的态度，将会如何推翻两性择偶优先考虑的条件，改变那样的假设很可能是好事一桩。

What if, Belkin asks, the dynamic I found myself in was reversed, and women now saw men as “too old” to procreate with? Men might have to date women in their own age bracket, or, more shockingly be forced to admit that they too can be aged out of the window in which they can procreate, maybe not as much for biological reasons, as for social ones, if younger women refuse them, now using scientific evidence as to why they’re not good genetic material – a neat reversal to what men have been doing for years.

Belkin问道，如果我们置身其中的机制完全颠倒了，女人开始觉得男人“太老了”，不能生育了，会出现什么情况呢？男人可能不得不找年龄相当的女人来约会，或者，更令人震惊地被迫承认他们也可能因年龄而从生育的可能中出局，或许主要不是因为生理的原因，而是社会原因，如果年轻的女性们用科学的证据来证明老男人不具备好基因，因此而拒绝和他们的话。

Larger than this, I think, is questioning how social structures could reform if 35-year-old men didn’t want to climb up the ladder singlemindedly anymore, because they knew their chances at fatherhood would decline if they waited – and then shear off a cliff at age 40. Would childcare finally be a priority in the workplace, or paternity leave? Some of this speaks to who’s still mainly responsible for childcare once a child is present – but if men and women were biologically on the same timetable, as science more and more strongly suggests they are – could there be a reach towards a more equitable view of balancing work and family, instead of mostly women spending many an angsty moment in their 30s wondering just how this is all going to work out.

我想，影响可能还不止于此。如果35岁的男人们不想再一心一意地在职场上不断攀升，因为他们知道如果他们一直等下去，他们做父亲的机会将会下降——而到40岁的时候急剧跌落——社会结构将会发生怎样的变化呢？在职场中有没有可能把儿童保育作为一个优先考虑的因素，或者产生父亲假呢？这可能会牵涉到当孩子来临时，谁对儿童保育负主要责任的问题。但既然科学越来越强烈地证明，男人和女人在生理上的时间表是一致的，那么人们对于平衡工作和家庭会不会有一个更合理的观念，而非大部分女人们在30多岁时不断忧心忡忡地考虑怎样处理这个问题。

If a new understanding of blending career trajectory with family hits a man at 27, rather than 47 (the magic number, I found when it seemed to dawn on unmarried men ‘hmmm better get on this wife and kids thing’), how could this change social expectations as they cross with biological imperatives? Yet, I take to heart Belkin’s comment that this might just be another thing that women will worry about – rather than men.

如果当一个男人在27岁，而非在47岁（这个神奇的数字，是未婚男人开始考虑“最好还是娶个老婆养个孩子吧”的年龄）时才想到把事业的轨迹和家庭放在一块儿，那么，当他们达到了生理上的年龄期限时，社会期望将会怎样改变呢？我也极其赞同Belkin的评论，这是女人们将会担心的另一个问题，而非男人们。

And I’m sure the press will never blow up this story (lonely 50something man faces the fact he’ll never have kids!) the way this narrative comes around every few years as a cautionary tale meant for younger women not to wait too long or be too picky. Also galling is the propensity to hear humorous smirking at “late fatherhood” stories but the vilification of “older women,” who conceive using donor eggs, as ridiculously selfish in starting a late-in-life family. “But it would be a satisfying start if men had to pause and see age as part of their biological equation, too,” says Belkin.

我敢肯定，媒体不会宣传这个消息的（50多岁的独身男人面临着永远没有孩子的可能）。每过几年这种警戒性的故事都是讲述给年轻女性听的，别等太久，别太挑剔了。而且，人们很少听到戏谑地嘲笑晚做父亲的人的声音，却总是听到对“老女人”的诽谤，她们认为为了晚一些才组成家庭而用捐赠的卵子是极其可笑、自私的事情。“但是，男人们不得不停下来考虑年龄的问题，这将是一个令人满意的开始。”Belkin说。

I couldn’t agree more.

我是再同意不过了。