Vasectomy parties? You’ve got to be kidding

You know that when a run-of-the-mill birthday party has been trumped by men getting the snip something has gone seriously wrong in our society, writes Darren Levin.

Did you really have a vasectomy if someone didn’t bake you a cake covered in sperm?

Not literal sperm, of course, but icing made to look like sperm and a piped pun message that reads: “Snip snip hooray.”

And you probably didn’t have a vasectomy if your kids — the ones that made the cut — didn’t wear custom printed T-shirts reading, “Swim team survivor”, next to their respective birth dates after said procedure.

Oh no, you simply couldn’t have just had a vasectomy in 2019 and kept it to yourself.

It’s important for the world to know every intimate detail of your life — from the za’atar bruschetta you had for breakfast the other morning to the fact your tube ride is permanently closed and there won’t be any further additions to your family — er, I mean #squad.

Yep, that’s right folks. Vasectomy parties are a thing people are throwing now.

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But unlike gender reveal extravaganzas — now featuring blue and pink lasagne sheets and forest-destroying pyrotechnics — there seems to be a purpose behind this social media trend. One beyond, “Let’s get all our friends together and eat cocktail frankfurts and all of the foods that look like male genitalia”, anyway.

If you had a vasectomy and kept it to yourself, did it really happen? Picture: iStock

For Kimberly Hemperly — who chucked what’s believed to be the first vasectomy soiree in 2017 (well, the first one to go viral) — it was about showing support for her husband doing something nice for her.

“I really just wanted to show my appreciation to my husband for doing what he did, because not many men offer to go under the knife,” she said of her surprise “balls voyage” bash that featured extra tender beef jerky and more puns than your drunk uncle at Christmas.

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Another more recent vasectomy party thrower said she’d been through two C-sections with “rough recoveries” and this was about honouring her husband for going through a 30-minute procedure with a post-operative recovery that requires little more than Panadol and a pack of frozen peas.

“The procedure is much harder for the woman,” she said, referring to tubal ligation, which involves multiple scalpel incisions, a general anaesthetic, and a bunch of fun side effects including shoulder pain, bloating, a sore throat, and — that old chestnut — vaginal bleeding.

“He took one for the team. It’s pretty cool of him to do something like this for me,” she added.

Forget gender reveal burnouts, it’s all about the snip celebration now. Picture: Katrina Bridgeford

Not to diminish the brave heroes that go through these procedures, but do male contraceptive responsibilities really need to be incentivised by a phallic food table featuring meatballs, carrot sticks, and a packet of prunes laid out decoratively?

You don’t see any husbands putting on hysterectomy hoedowns while yelling, “hail caesarean!”

And what about the long-term hormonal effects of the contraceptive pill, or the scarring — both physical and emotional — of pushing watermelon-sized progeny out of a birth canal?

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Sorry to get all snippy there for a second, but it seems unfair that men are feted for something on the same level as an ingrown toenail operation while women are just expected to endure a lifetime of reproductive procedures and pain.

In the US, there’s even a thing called a “bro-sectomy”, where two bros get together and, like, totally bro out after back-to-back vasectomies. Instead of going home to their families, they’re relieved of their domestic responsibilities for 24 hours, often heading off to nice hotels to watch The Godfather trilogy, down some craft IPAs, and take turns filling up the ice bucket.

Snip me up Scotty. That actually sounds kinda great.

Darren Levin is a columnist for RendezView. @darren_levin