The gender ratio (and a few other things)

Sitting on the couch with the strange phone in hand, Josh considered how he wanted the world to change. At first, he drafted, edited, and rewrote a number of increasingly specific statements about standards of physical appearance. Then, mid-bathroom break, he got a much better idea.

Returning to the phone, Josh erased his previous statements and wrote: “Beauty standards for physical appearance tend to conform to what I, Josh West, find attractive.” This was, in Josh’s opinion, an incredibly elegant solution that left enough wiggle room for a pleasant bit of variety, and could adapt if his tastes changed as he got older.

Josh kicked his feet up and considered what to do next. He decided to change one of the existing rules on the document to “On average, one boy is born for every three girls.”

Josh had very little interest in becoming king of the world or pushing sexual mores in any particularly radical direction. If, after his changes took effect, he still couldn't get a date, at least there would be a world full of beautiful women to look at. Still, another nudge or two might be in order.

Josh erased the last three words in the rule “Bisexuality and homosexuality are socially acceptable in some cultures.” That would hopefully help mitigate any negative social effects from the new gender ratio. The latter half of the rule below it was adjusted as well, so that it read “transgender identities are uncommon but socially acceptable,” because what the hell, Josh’s friend Allie was trans.

One last idea occurred to Josh, something that made him a little nervous to write down. Specifically, he hoped that “power generation via nuclear fusion can feasibly be made safe and economically viable” wouldn't somehow change the laws of physics in a way that, for example, killed everyone on Earth.

Josh’s right index finger hovered nervously over the save button before he finally committed. Immediately afterwards, a potential issue occurred to him: if there were going to be three times as many women as men, was he going to be one of the new girls? He leaped off the couch to examine himself in the mirror and started to feel a bit foolish. He looked the same as he always had. Either he was lucky, or, much more likely, a strange phone with a text document full of social and physical “rules” wasn't capable of warping reality to his bidding. He tossed the phone in a drawer and went to bed.

The next morning, nothing was different. Josh went to work and saw the same number of men and women that he usually did on his commute. A menswear blogger he followed shared some other account’s post predicting that this was going to be a “big year for skirts” with a faux-authoritative comment of “many people are saying this”.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for about nine months. Then, one day, all the hospitals in the city reported a very atypical gender ratio for new births, almost 75% baby girls. The next day, international headlines reported that this bizarre coincidence had occurred just about everywhere in the world. As the trend of extremely female-dominant births continued, scientists rushed to discover the cause, pundits rushed to coin a phrase for the phenomenon (“Generation XX” and “Generation Girl” were notable early stabs), governments rushed to commission studies on the long-term effects if this pattern continued, and Josh rushed to find the phone.

It never turned up. A few months prior, a fire in Josh’s apartment building had him to move, and the phone had either been thrown out with the rest of the irrevocably water-damaged items or lost in the shuffle. For a long time after that, Josh was sick with anxiety that an arbitrary decision he’d made almost a year ago while thinking primarily with his dick was going to irrevocably alter the course of human society.

Then he met Sarah and that anxiety went away for a while. They went on a few dates. Josh took up rock climbing to have an excuse to spend more time with her. The sex was great. They met each other’s friends, then each other's parents. They took a ten-day trip together and only argued once. They decided they’d seen enough relationships sour with cohabitation that they should at least wait until engagement to move in together, and the conversation made Josh realize that engagement and marriage seemed so natural, so inevitable, that he started ring shopping two days later. Four months after that, Josh went out for ice cream with his fiancée for the first time, and they sat on a bench and watched another couple a few years older wipe chocolate-vanilla swirl soft serve off the cheek of a fussy three-year-old with the latest Disney princess on her shirt.

While this was happening, a team of nuclear engineers reported that the Yángguāng reactor had achieved 30 days of consistent energy surplus.

Josh and Sarah's marriage was good, but life wasn't always great. The widespread adoption of clean energy and the ATMOS system headed off the worst-case scenario for climate change, but there were some nasty storm years, and a year of rationing where seeing Sarah lose so much of her hard-earned climbing muscles hurt Josh as much as the hunger pangs did. When Sarah got pregnant, they worried whether their daughter would ever be comfortable and carefree the way they were those first years of their relationship.

Thankfully, the way food and other essential resources were distributed stabilized a bit by the time Carmen Alicia West started kindergarten. Of course, once survival was a less pressing issue, the cultural tensions that had been percolating since Generation Girl was in diapers came to the fore.

As Josh and Sarah entered middle age, there was a tectonic shift in what counted as normal when it came to gender roles, romantic relationships, and parenthood. By the time Carmen graduated university, Josh and Sarah's monogamous heterosexual relationship was almost thought of as staid and old fashioned. Pop culture changed to cater to a much more female audience, then changed again when men finally retired out of top positions in Hollywood and were replaced, at least three quarters of them, by women. The changes to society and culture sparked reaction, some of it ugly, but to Josh all that change seemed as inevitable as a good morning kiss from Sarah. They became grandparents when Yuni, one of the women in Carmen’s throuple, got to the top of the sperm donor waitlist and gave birth to, surprisingly, a boy.

“This munchkin’s going to be spoiled rotten,” Sarah said, bouncing him slowly in her arms.

“Nah,” Josh said quietly, “He'll be loved.”

Josh never told anyone else about the phone. Not even Sarah.