I)

More than 400 years before the invention of Viagra, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne had a clever solution for his friend’s embarrassing impotence. On the night of his wedding, the groom got it into his head that an enemy at the wedding feast wished him harm and perhaps had even put a hex on him. When it was time to consummate his marriage, his manhood failed him, and he was humiliated. Sensing that this flaccidity was a function of his imagination rather than some real biological malady, Montaigne spontaneously invented an elaborate magical ritual to “counteract” the “hex”:

“[My instructions] were that…he should retire to make water, repeat certain prayers three times and go through certain motions. On each of these three occasions, he must tie round his waist the ribbon that I put in his hands and very carefully place the medal [talisman] which was attached to it over his kidneys with the figure in a certain position. After that, having made the ribbon quite tight so that it could not get untied or fall out of place, he should return to the business in hand, and not forget to throw my robe on the bed, so that it covered them both.”

The deception worked as intended, Montaigne explains, because of certain liabilities of human psychology: “These monkey-tricks play the main part in the matter, for we cannot get it out of our minds that such strange practices must be based on some occult knowledge. Their absurdity lends them weight and gains them respect.”

But erectile dysfunction is not the only problem to befall couples in the bedroom. Some families despair because they have a bushel of boys and no girls, or, vice versa, a gaggle of girls without a boy. And they are desperate, and willing to try anything, to fill the XX- or XY- shaped hole in their hearts (although, I note in passing, XX and XY are not the only chromosomal possibilities for humans). And these couples, like Montaigne’s credulous friend, are turning to magical solutions.

My wife and I count ourselves among these couples. When we faced our own challenges in family planning, we too ventured into the realm of magical solutions.

II)

Enter Kathryn Taylor and her “Babydust Method.” Taylor, who moderates a closed Facebook group with tens of thousands of followers, purports in her book, The Babydust Method: A Guide to Conceiving a Boy or a Girl, to show how you can “dramatically increase your chances of conceiving the sex of your choice.” Taylor claims an astonishing 87% success rate.

The Babydust Method focuses on the timing and frequency of intercourse in relation to ovulation. Taylor suggests monitoring luteinizing hormone (LH) levels using basic test strips twice a day for three menstrual cycles before attempting to conceive. By identifying a surge in LH levels, typically occurring around 24 hours before ovulation, one can better predict the timing of the next ovulation.

For those aiming to conceive a girl, Taylor recommends having intercourse once two-to-three days before ovulation. Alternatively, for those desiring a boy, having sex twice — once on the day of ovulation and a second time approximately 24 hours later — is the proposed method.

This timing allows the right sperm to reach its target at the right time. “Studies have shown that male sperm mature first, then die off, and then the female sperm mature and die off,” says Taylor.  “So having sex before ovulation allows the male sperm to mature and die before the egg is released, leaving mostly female sperm to mature and fertilize the egg.” And vice versa: having sex on the day of ovulation allows the mature male sperm the best chance to win the race.

Experts are skeptical. Speaking to Newsweek, Antoine Abu Musa, chief medical officer at online IVF clinic NOW-fertility, said of Babydust, “There is no scientific objective evidence that it works.” Dr. Evangelia Elenis, a gynecologist, agreed: “As far as I know, there is no conclusive scientific proof for the Babydust method.”

But Taylor is not a witch doctor or charlatan. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from UCLA. Except for her winking talk of “Babydust,” which conjures magical associations like pixie dust or fairy dust, her book is otherwise unapologetically scientific, chock-full of charts and talk of hormones and cervical mucus. Taylor strives for scientific objectivity, even if she might make overconfident claims unsupported by the current research.

But despite her attempts at scientific objectivity, what’s most fascinating to me, as someone who teaches about religion, is that Taylor’s social media followers have added all manner of superstitions and magical rituals to the Babydust regimen.

The Babydust Facebook group page, where Taylor is a moderator and admin, is full of women describing the magical measures they’ve added on top of the Babydust regimen to ensure their desired sex: women paint their nails blue or pink, put a blue or pink onesie under their mattress or on their door knob, eat blue or pink foods, wear pink rose quartz bracelets, or put blue or pink ribbons in their hair. It is not a few women who do this, but scores of women, pursuing even the wackiest solutions. Many of these women acknowledge that they feel silly engaging in these magic rituals, but also admit that they just can’t help themselves.

“I also did some other little things like wore a pink hair tie only and tried not to wear any blue,” one woman writes. “I felt crazy doing all this, but I am so happy it paid off! I know I probably didn’t need to do all of this, but I wanted to try everything.”

Another woman, hoping for a girl, exclusively used lavender shampoo, lavender detergent, lavender dish soap, lavender candles, lavender incense, lavender oil diffusers, lavender body scrub, lavender lotion, lavender cleaning products, lavender progesterone cream, lavender body spray, and lavender deodorant.

One woman’s “spiritual approaches” included making a “manifestation board”; engaging in visualization exercises; burning a lavender candle the week of intercourse; and wearing a rose quartz pendant.

III)

Students of religion and anthropology will recognize these practices as modern forms of “sympathetic magic.” Historian Will Durant gives several examples of how various peoples across the world have engaged in similar practices:

“The methods by which the spirits, and later the gods, were suborned to human purposes were for the most part “sympathetic magic” —  a desired action was suggested to the deities by a partial or imitative performance of the action by men. To make rain fall, some primitive magicians poured water out upon the ground, preferably from a tree. The Kaffirs, threatened by drought, asked a missionary to go into the fields with an open umbrella. In Sumatra a barren woman made an image of a child and held it in her lap, hoping thereby to become pregnant. In the Babar Archipelago, the would-be mother fashioned a doll out of red cotton, pretended to suckle it, and repeated a magic formula; then she sent word through the village that she was pregnant, and her friends came to congratulate her; only a very obstinate reality could refuse to emulate this imagination…”

The Biblical Patriarch Jacob engages in sympathetic magic. When Jacob cuts a deal with his cunning father-in-law Laban that he will only take the part of the flock that is spotted and speckled, Laban thinks he has gotten the better part of the deal, until Jacob ingeniously causes the she-goats to birth spotted kids by placing a speckled rod in front of the goats when they mate. The visual stimulus of the spotted rod magically inspired a sympathetic imitation by the embryo.

In the same spirit, one woman writes on the Babydust Facebook group that after intercourse she gave her undivided attention to a baby girl onesie, all while holding her legs straight up in the air. “This stuff doesn’t actually work but can’t hurt, right?” she writes. And then immediately shying away from her momentary skepticism, “Can I please have pink baby dust?” (On the Facebook group, women “send” pink or blue baby dust to one another— a kind of blessing or prayer that the sway be successful.)

Sometimes these rituals suggest an uncomfortable origin in regressive gender norms. For example, women in the Facebook group often claim that, to conceive a baby girl, it is best that the mother lie passively in the missionary position, and that she does not orgasm. A wooden spoon (a domestic implement of the kitchen) should be hung on the door. Historically, ideas about conception and gender were also sometimes bound up in patriarchal notions of gendered hierarchies. For example, “The Romans believed that a male child was produced with sperm from the right testicle, as this was higher than the left, befitting the male status in life compared to the female, who, it was believed, was conceived with sperm from the lower left testicle. To avoid having a female child a man was advised to tie a cord round his left testicle during intercourse.”

One of the most common magical rituals shared on the Facebook group, the practice of sleeping on a blue or pink baby outfit, also likely has historical precedent. When I visited the Museum of Magic, Fortune-telling & Witchcraft in Edinburgh this summer, I saw on display several small amulets and figurines that, according to the museum curators, were to be placed under the beds or mattresses of a woman hoping to conceive. Similarly, in his City of God, St. Augustine complained that Roman maidens would sit on (rather than sleep on) the erect member of the statue of the god Priapus as a means of getting pregnant.

In our age of gender-neutral toys and gender-neutral parenting, all the pink-and-blue pageantry on the Babydust Facebook group might rankle some people, for whom this color dichotomy is symbolic of harmful gender stereotypes and caricature. So, it is perhaps surprising that Taylor dedicates the foreword of her Babydust book to interrogating the misguided reasons readers might desire one sex more than another, and cautioning her readers against conflating gender and sex:

“Before we begin to discuss sex-selection, I encourage you now to think about why you want a girl or a boy. Do you want to dress your daughter up in cute outfits and bows and play dolls with her? Do you want to watch football with your son and wrestle with him? I can’t promise your child will do any of that. My daughter pulls the bows out of her hair one minute after I put them in. My son has no interest in even catching a ball, let alone sitting down to watch a football game. We’re only talking about the sex here, not the gender. The sex of your baby only pertains to which sex organs your baby will have and how your baby will procreate one day.”

Some critics might argue that Taylor’s framework remains too simplistic, especially as it assumes the existence of only two biological sexes. In any case, and notwithstanding Taylor’s explicit warnings, it is common to see successful girl “sways” celebrated in the Facebook group by feminine emojis (pink bows 🎀 or pink flowers 🌸), or successful boy “sways” celebrated with masculine emojis (blue ball caps 🧢, airplanes ✈️, shirts and ties 👔, or cars 🚙). It seems that for most people in the Facebook group, it is a deeply entrenched idea that sex=gender.

Another interesting pattern within the world of Babydust followers is the wry and winking playfulness with which the women engage in their magical rituals. When describing their magical regimens, they often use an ironic, self-deprecatory tone — and tease themselves for engaging in practices they “know” are foolish. It might be tempting to think, then, that the women are not engaging in authentic religious or magical practices — that these women are merely playing or being silly. But this assumes that all religious practices must be done in absolute credulity and earnestness.

But as Johan Huizinga argues in his classic 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, there has always been an element of “half-belief” or willful credulity inherent in religious rituals and practices. This half-belief or make-belief is rooted in the human instinct towards play; it’s this “ludic impulse” that is the root of all religious rituals. Huizinga writes that “a certain element of ‘make-believe’ is operative in all primitive [sic] religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is always knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe. [There is a] partial consciousness of things ‘not being real’ in magic and supernatural phenomena generally…” But if Huizinga believed that this is true of only “primitive” religions (to use his infelicitous terminology) — those ancient, extinct religions or aboriginal religions supposedly “frozen in time” — my observations lead me to believe the same observation holds today, in our modern, “civilized” age. The modern women on the Facebook Babydust group both believe and disbelieve in the magic rituals they perform. But they always perform the rituals in a spirit of sheer playfulness. As one woman writes, “I also decided to do everything spiritual to make it fun!”

What are we to make of these modern magical practices or these modern adaptations of ancient ways of magical thinking? One takeaway might be an obvious one: We moderns have not outgrown magic. When we are desperate enough, we are willing to resort to any magical or superstitious solution. Even the cool-headed and dispassionate Joan Didion, in the aftermath of her husband’s death, indulged in her “Year of Magical Thinking.” In one of the most poignant moments in her memoir by that name, Didion struggles to give away her dead husband’s possessions. “I could not give away the rest of his shoes,” she writes. “I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return. The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.” It’s at the beginnings of life and the end of life — those thresholds where we are most clueless and impotent — where magical thinking has an almost irresistible appeal for all of us.

IV)

For our pregnancies, my wife and I had taken the Carrie Underwood approach: we went to bed and let, “Jesus, take the wheel!”

This had resulted in three very blond boys, back-to-back-to-back, and my wife wanted a daughter to dote on. Hence, we turned to The Babydust method.

Skeptically, but with the resignation that comes with desperation, we took the leap of faith.

The burden of close adherence to the method — the daily tracking of her ovulation and hormones, would fall on my wife. Still, I skimmed The Babydust Method for myself.

A glance at the bibliography did not inspire confidence. The first thing I noticed is that there seem to be many more studies about sex selection in animals than there are studies about sex selection in human beings. A quick skim might give one the impression they are looking at a zoology or veterinary textbook:

-“Litter sex ratios in the golden hamster vary with time of mating and litter size and are not binomially distributed.”

-“The effects of altering the pH of seminal fluid on the sex ratio of rabbit off-spring.”

-“Comparative motility of X and Y chromosome-bearing bovine sperm separated on the basis of DNA content by flow sorting.”

-“Changes in electrical resistance of the vagina during estrus in heifers.”

-“Sex ratio of white-tailed deer and the estrus cycle.”

-“Efficiency of the OVATEC unit for estrus detection and calf sex control in beef cows.”

If, based on the bibliography, you have a sneaking suspicion that getting pregnant through the Babydust method might be as uncomfortable, complicated, and aromantic as the artificial insemination of a cow by syringe at the hands of some rough-handed Midwestern farmer— well, you might not be that far off.

But we had fun with it anyway. We purchased an adorable little purple and pink dress and laid it out delicately under the mattress. For several weeks, we slept, like the Princess and the Pea, on top of that little dress. We festooned a wooden spoon with purple and pink ribbons and hung it on the doorknob. We made Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” our baby-making soundtrack. I only failed to subject myself to a grueling regimen of all sorts of pink potions and poultices. I did not drink lavender liquids, paint my nails pink, or use a Himalayan salt lamp. Only time would tell if there would be consequences for these failures of my faith.

Finally, the gender reveal. In the doctor’s office, the static-y picture of my wife’s womb. And there, where the little acorn penis had been in three previous sonograms, there was — a fourth.

Corey Landon Wozniak lives with his wife and three (soon to be four) sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public high school.