Masculinity and Fertility

Masculinity and Fertility is a recurring pressure in Peter’s life: his difficulty fathering a child with Eva becomes, in his own mind and in the language around him, evidence about whether he is a man at all. The novel sets that verdict against the qualities he otherwise possesses and against the physical and emotional costs Eva bears. Fertility is therefore both a medical problem and a contested measure of identity, intimacy, and responsibility.

A medical condition made personal

Peter and Eva begin trying for a child with hope and near-daily sex, imagining a baby after each attempt. A year later, their general practitioner initially counsels patience: he considers their health and age reassuring and recommends tracking Eva’s temperature to help time intercourse. The advice turns sex into a schedule. Eva records her temperature each morning, and a rise of 0.2 degrees Celsius signals a likely ovulation; intercourse is then organized around conception rather than desire.

After another six months, they return to the doctor amid disagreement about entering fertility treatment. Peter wants a child with Eva but resists the prospect of conception through medical procedures, and he misses the intimacy they had before sex became concentrated into a few fertile days. Eva, whose longing for a child has become consuming, fears giving up and argues that testing might uncover a treatable problem. Her body will undergo the examinations and procedures, while Peter’s hesitation concerns both the prospect of treatment and what the process is doing to their relationship.

The investigations first find no apparent physical cause in Eva: her cycle indicates monthly ovulation, and an ultrasound shows no blockages, cysts, or inflammation in her uterus or ovaries. Peter provides semen samples after periods of abstinence, returning for a second test. Both analyses show too few sperm and poor movement among those present. The diagnosis gives a physical explanation for their difficulty, but it does not stay merely physical in Peter’s thinking. He describes himself as the problem and his semen as weak, turning a result about fertility into a judgment on his whole person.

The measure of manhood

That judgment is reinforced by an older man’s distinction between male and female grief. He tells Peter that losing a child is especially difficult for Eva because of a deep maternal feeling, while a man, he suggests, could father another child even at eighty. The remark treats reproductive capacity as an asymmetrical resource: the woman’s attachment is imagined as profound, while the man’s ability to make another child is assumed to be readily available. Peter is left positioned as someone who should be able to father children, even as his tests have established that he cannot easily do so.

In a session with Hetty Vos, Peter calls himself a man with infertile semen and asks whether his failure could be more hopeless. Hetty answers by naming parts of his life that his self-condemnation excludes: he is strong and healthy, has made a beautiful home for himself and Eva, holds a management position at a newspaper, and is loved by Eva, who has been with him for fifteen years. Her intervention challenges a narrow, reproductive definition of masculinity with evidence of care, work, and lasting attachment. Yet Peter counters that impregnating a wife may be the only thing men are still needed for, because women can manage everything else without them. His argument exposes the fragility of the standard even as he continues to measure himself by it.

Peter’s account of his inner life makes that standard painfully explicit. He compares his weakness, sterility, and failure with Eva’s strength, fertility, success, and determination, and concludes that she does not need him. The comparison turns their different bodily capacities into a hierarchy of worth. It also sits uneasily beside the qualities Hetty has just identified: Peter’s care and commitment are real, but he struggles to recognize them as evidence of manhood when he cannot father a child.

Treatment, loss, and fatherhood

The scale of treatment eventually gives Peter’s resistance a history beyond abstract fear of medical intervention. During a later confrontation, he recalls nine IVF attempts, four ICSI treatments, and five rounds of donor insemination. Eva endured the medical procedures and the pain and grief of their losses; Peter says that he could no longer watch her healthy body pay for his infertility. Their daughter Lieve was conceived with donor sperm, and Peter describes the donor as an unknown man he hated. When Lieve died, he felt that burying her also meant burying their shared dream of a child.

This history complicates any simple account of Peter as merely unwilling to become a father. He wants a child with Eva, but he also sees a limit in the suffering their pursuit has required of her. At the same time, the donor conception unsettles the link between fatherhood and genetic paternity: Peter became Lieve’s father in the context of their family, although she was not genetically his. His resentment toward the donor and his grief for Lieve reveal how difficult that distinction remains for him, not that emotional fatherhood is absent.

Masculine scripts and reproductive control

Other men offer Peter different, but still restrictive, scripts. Steef mocks the idea that Peter’s decision to sell his motorcycle was truly his own, asking whether it was required by the wife. The exchange assumes that a man who yields to a shared decision has surrendered masculine independence. Elsewhere, Steef urges Peter and Eva not to remain locked in a relationship that is making them miserable, and declares sex to be life, opposing Peter’s quieter insistence that sex cannot be the only thing that matters. Steef invokes having seen death, but his forceful language still makes sexual activity a test of vitality.

The association between masculinity and sexual potency appears more crudely when men admire a Ruger Super Redhawk and joke that handling it will produce an erection. Peter, holding a pistol for the first time, is present as the joke connects a weapon with male arousal and power. The moment does not resolve his infertility; it places him inside another performance of masculinity, one organized around hardness and force rather than the capacity to conceive or care.

Reproductive control becomes more consequential when Eva and Rebecca propose using partner-swapping to try to get Eva pregnant by Steef. Rebecca describes the plan as soft coercion, timed to Eva’s ovulation, and raises the possibility that a condom could leak. The scheme makes conception a matter of deliberate planning while withholding meaningful agreement from the men involved. After a condom accident, Steef brings Eva a morning-after pill and explains that he wants no more children. He says that Sem came against his will, that he is trying to be a good father, and that he considers himself too unstable and too attached to freedom. His words connect fatherhood not with a simple claim to masculine virility but with consent, capacity, and the obligations of care.

When Steef later learns that his semen was used without his knowledge and with his wife’s involvement, he calls it theft and a crime. He asserts that he does not want the child and that children need a father, while accusing the women of treating him as someone whose reproductive contribution could be decided for him. His anger exposes the consequences of separating male fertility from male consent: the ability to father a child does not itself settle whether a man wants, accepts, or is prepared for fatherhood.

Significance

The novel repeatedly stages the gap between biological capacity and human worth. Peter’s infertility damages his sense of himself, but his life with Eva, his endurance through treatment, and his grief for Lieve resist the idea that masculinity can be reduced to successful conception. Meanwhile, the contrasting claims made by the older man, Hetty Vos, Steef, and Peter show how unstable the standard is: men are expected to father children, to remain independent, to be sexually potent, and to welcome fatherhood, even when those expectations conflict with bodily reality, personal choice, or care for a partner. The resulting struggle is not only over who can produce a child, but over who has the right to decide what fatherhood means and who must bear its costs.