The Stud

As the hyperliberal breakaway Republic of Western Australia faces a catastrophic birthrate collapse, the state rewrites the rules of intimacy. Its boldest policy: "mother-leader-father-labourer" households, where multiple women employ a single man to father and raise their children. Martina, a high-achieving Perth lawyer, has everything except the family she once imagined. Drawn to the promise of motherhood without sacrifice, she joins three other ambitious women - Eloise, Ynes, and Sophia - in a shared home centered around Luke, their designated father-labourer. At first, this works. Then it doesn't. What begins as a tale of administrative girlboss empowerment slowly becomes a study of desire, power, jealousy, and emotional dependency. The Stud reveals that no political system, however progressive or rational, can eliminate the unpredictability of human relationships. The Stud is a cool work of post-transgressive fiction that combines the clinical banalities of Bret Easton Ellis with the wry pathos of Michel Houellebecq, probing the societal death throes of our present-future age of anxiety and uncertainty.