Why Didn’t Mick Jagger and James Brown Get Vasectomies?

When the gin wears off, that’s when the sheer, oily reality of showbiz sex starts looking like a crime scene. We are living in a climate of high-octane revisionism. A hundred movie skanks crawling out of the woodwork to dump buckets of #MeToo bile on the doorstep of history, feigning a sudden, holy remorse for their wild, sweaty promiscuities of past decades, for renewed relevancy and a couple of bucks.

But look at the Rock Stars. The gods of the stage. The leather-clad satyrs. They remain untouched. Why? Because you can’t hang a man for being a force of nature. When a thin, lizard-eyed man in skin-tight cowhide points a finger at you from the center of a 10,000-watt spotlight—while you’re in the front row, half-naked and eating a banana—that’s not “abuse.” That’s a religious experience. It’s a belt-notch. It’s a story you tell your therapist twenty years later when the thrill of the mundane finally starts to itch.

The movie business is a different kind of swamp. Harvey Weinstein is rotting in a cage because of “Buyer’s Remorse.” Eighty starlets ratted him out because the roles dried up and the Oscars went to someone else. In the music racket, there’s only one high-profile casualty: Sean “Puffy” Combs. He didn’t get busted for the sex; he got busted for failing to turn his “hoe” into a star after she’d already mainlined ten gallons of baby oil and endured a weekend of “Freak Offs” with a character called The Punisher.

The numbers don’t lie, even if the lawyers do. The Betty Ford Clinic—the ultimate scoreboard for the degenerately famous—calculates that music and movie stars have a 4,345% higher probability of women competing to enter their orbit than any poor bastard working in “Facilities Support” or “Agriculture.”

Take Gene Simmons. The Demon. A man who claims 5,000 conquests between ‘73 and the final curtain. He’s got one paternity claim. One. A 0.02% failure rate. That’s the kind of ruthless efficiency you only get from an Israeli education and a deep, abiding respect for the barrier method. Meanwhile, the internet is flooded with complaints that Trojan moved their factories to China and now their condoms are about as reliable as a screen door on a submarine.

With a batting average of 99.98%, The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame Board of Directors had planned on instituting a GENE SIMMON MERITORIOUS SERVICE AWARD but abandoned the idea after ten years because they couldn’t find another statistically qualified rock star, even though Rod Stewart’s fan club consistently lobbied with over 1,500 sworn affidavits.

Then you have the breeders. The prolific spawners. Mick Jagger and James Brown. Between them, they’ve fathered 17 recognized souls. Why didn’t they just get the “snip-snip”? A simple outpatient procedure that would have saved them $40 million in assets. Is it a Christian fear of the void? Or are they just terrified chickens who won’t let anything touch their “pee-pee” unless it’s warm human flesh?

Jagger’s payout to Jerry Hall was $40 million. That is, by any clinical definition, the most expensive vasectomy in human history.

I’ve seen the studies. Dr. Mike Hunt and Max Hyman—men of science, surely—published a report in the Journal of Penile Performance Enhancement proving that Rock Stars have nine times the “sperm quality” of Movie Stars, though the actors lead in “volume,” pumping out 12cc’s of pure, useless filler. It’s the dancing. Jagger and Brown, those frantic, rhythmic dervishes, have shaken their DNA into a state of high-velocity excellence.

But the world is changing. The “No-Scalpel” method arrived in ’74, and the fear should be gone. Even an Indiana reform school inmate in 1899 found “sunny disposition” and “intellectual brightness” after he was fixed for excessive masturbation.

If you’re a Tech Bro worth $100 million dating a Ukrainian bikini model, or if you caught your housekeeper spiking your protein shake with Cialis, the message is clear: Get the snip. As Keith Richards told Johnny Depp while surveying the wreckage of a century: “I don’t encourage sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll for everyone, but it worked for me.” He neglected to mention that for the rest of us, the bill eventually comes due, and it’s usually paid in credit card debt, chapter 7 filings, child support and rehab detox.