Doug Wilson’s foreward to “Eggs are Expensive, Sperm is Cheap”

Canon+ recently added the audio version of Eggs are Expensive, Sperm is Cheap to their library. Along with that, Doug Wilson wrote the following foreward for the book.

I regularly get books sent to me in the mail, and lots of them look good to me. That means that I am glad that I now own them, and look forward to the time when I might read them. But occasionally a book is sent to me that I just have to read right away. Maybe it is because it looks fantastic, or maybe it is because I need to find out why on earth someone would have written something like that. The book you are holding falls in this last category.

A few years ago — 2019 it was — I received in the mail — free, gratis, pro bono — a copy of this book on life between the sexes, swanking around with the title Eggs Are Expensive, Sperm Is Cheap. The subtitle is “50 Politically Incorrect Thoughts for Men,” and I have to say that this was a book that fully delivered on the implied promise.

I enjoyed the book thoroughly, chose it as my book of the month selection, and went on my way, having made the world a better place. And then, just recently, I found out that Canon Press had picked up the title, and was going to include it as part of their fine catalog of books. This delighted me no end, and it turns out that I was asked to write the foreword to this new edition, and so here I am, dutifully typing away.

Before getting to my words of high praise, let me get my one gripe out of the way, right at the front end. The author, Greg Krehbiel, exhibits evolutionary assumptions throughout the book in a way that is frankly a nuisance to people like me. Now he is plainly an affable fellow, and says that he is just sharing his opinions, so don’t get all heated up, and he would be happy to sit down with any of his readers in order to have a beer with them, and discuss whatever it is. He emphasizes that kind of thing repeatedly. So I need to go on the record in order to say that if I ever have a chance to have such a beer with Greg, I intend to talk with him about evolution. I shall be quite stern about it. I shall use my firm voice.

I say this so that you, a conservative Christian reader, who trustingly purchases books from a conservative Christian publisher, that being us, needs to know and understand that we as a publisher are not going soft in our conviction that Charles Darwin was a fifth columnist for our reptilian overlords (WCF 4.1).

But with that point registered, I would urge you to overlook all of that and just luxuriate in the rest of the book. Embrace the joy of reading and saying obvious stuff out loud again. Greg is really good at saying obvious things, and he does it in a way that signals that he knows how outrageous the obvious sounds to the natives of these, our demented times.

So we have come to realize that we live in a time when the obvious is outrageous. And in this respect, Greg really delivers. Consider the outrageousness of his project and the cogency of his observations.

“Remember the fundamental lesson: eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap. A society can afford to lose a lot of its men. It can’t afford to lose many of its women or children. So societies that sacrifice men to protect women and children are more likely to survive. That’s why men fight the wars and go downstairs in their underpants to check out the weird sound in the basement” (p. 10).

Greg argues (persuasively, in my view) that egalitarianism is nonsensical and contradictory, and that male obligations have been somewhat arbitrarily rebranded as privileges, so that feminists could complain that women need to be given access to these “privileges.” But many of the so-called privileges were actually obligations and responsibilities, and they had a certain reciprocity built into them.

“The male obligation to go out into the world and earn a living — usually away from his wife and children — was cast as some sort of male privilege . . . Men are the providers, so suck it up and go dig some coal” ( p. 20).

Is anybody offended yet?

The issues surrounding the laws of sexual attraction have been a particular stumbling block for Christians. For a generation or so, we have been taught that the beta male was a walking paragon of Sermon on the Mount living. But when we look at the world (the way God actually made it), and when we let Scripture inform us about that world, we find that men and women are attracted to completely different things. As they ought to be.

“The truth nobody wants to face is that women are at the top of their game when they’re in their 20s. At that point they are the rock stars of the sexual marketplace and they have their best chance of finding a mate. They are also more fertile and more likely to bear healthy children” (p. 25).

So instead of younger women marrying and having kids, as some apostle once encouraged (1 Tim. 5:14), feminists have been busy urging women to find their groove somewhere else, somewhere boring and fruitless, some career that is kind of dead-endy, eking out life in a cubicle, trying to climb the corporate ladder while filling your days making multiple copies of some contract to be reviewed by your pointy-haired boss.

This is a book that is simply crammed with horse sense.

“If you want the men in your society to be anything more than lazy bums, you need a system where sex is rare, and where women are choosy about the right things” (p. 34).

Why don’t we know this? Our great grandmothers knew it.

This book is short, is a very quick read, and is full of common sense, at soon-to-be-illegal levels. You have picked it up, and have read this far. Walk it over to the counter and buy it. In fact, I don’t even mind if you obtain it in order to read it guiltily. The first step is often the hardest.