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Consider the possibilities. If men were the ones who had to worry about their best-before date, pity parties would be held in sports bars and the self-help aisle at the bookstore would stock titles like How to Close the Deal (And Be a Dad Before It's Too Late). There would probably be a magazine called CosmoMan, and its cover story would be "Get your Gal Knocked up! (in 10 Easy Steps)."

Men would be the sad ones at singles bars, and instead of tubs of Haagen-Dazs and The Way we Were on DVD, a night of post-breakup indulgence would involve crying over Platoon while eating from a lukewarm tin of Hungry Man chili.

And Sex and the City would be less about Blahniks and more about baseball. And it would star Owen Wilson as "Sam," Ashton Kutcher as "Charlie," Vince Vaughn as "Randall," and Heath Ledger as the sex columnist, "Harry."

If you think this is all just fantasy, mull over this news: The latest research from the field indicates that it's no longer just women who should be listening for the tick of their biological clock.

According to a study released last month in the Archives of General Psychiatry, men over 40 are nearly six times as likely to father an autistic child as those under 30. "We believe that our study provides the first convincing evidence that advanced paternal age is a risk factor for autism spectrum disorder," said Abraham Reichenberg, an epidemiologist with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who led the study that tracked the medical records of more than 318,000 Israelis born in the 1980s (women, who've been running against a ticking clock since the story of Abraham and Sarah, will no doubt experience a touch of schadenfreude to hear that the study found no such link with maternal age).

In support of these findings, and the general perception of a rise in the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, are the plain numbers (as cited in The Male Biological Clock: The Startling News About Aging, Sexuality and Fertility in Men, a 2005 book by Harry Fisch). As births to fathers older than 35 years doubled from 1970 to 1999, autism spectrum disorder has grown from a condition affecting just five in 10,000 children 20 years ago to one that now affects about 50 in every 10,000 children.

Add to this a flurry of recent research in the field and now it seems that old dads like Saul Bellow, who fathered a reportedly healthy child at 85, and Tony Randall, who performed the same feat at 72, are exceptions to the rules of nature (which turn out to be gender-neutral). And wrinkled pops Michael Douglas, the late Pierre Trudeau, Paul McCartney and Larry King are looking more and more like the freakish anomalies we all suspected they were in the first place.

Paternal age has also been linked in various studies to Down syndrome, Apert syndrome, syndactyly, cleft palate, prostate cancer (affecting the child), cancer of the nervous system, even, down the road, with Alzheimer's. According to a Johns Hopkins University study, men over 45 are twice as likely -- and men over 50 are three times as likely -- to father a child with schizophrenia as those under 25. And then there's the problem -- hitherto understood as exclusively a "women's problem" -- of trying to conceive over 40 in the first place. In the June issue of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine's Fertility& Sterility, it was reported that it takes five times longer for a man over 45 to get a woman pregnant than if he were in his 20s.

Says Reichenberg, in typical medical understatement, "For many years we knew that females had biological clocks. . . . This study and other studies suggest that there may be biological clocks for men as well."

For guys, who must have always drawn some comfort as they age believing in the myth of their eternal virility, it may come as a blow below the belt to discover that, as a result of all of these new findings, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has decided to set the cutoff age for semen donors at 40.

What this will mean for all of us is still unclear. Will men who once took pride in their approaching gravitas and the sex appeal of their increased earning power start dyeing their greying hair and applying expensive nightly moisturizers to stave off the "appearance of fine lines and wrinkles?" Will we start reading heartfelt exposés in men's magazines about the symptoms of "manopause?"

Will a new generation turn away from casual dating and "friends with benefits" and revert to settling down and starting families in their 20s the way their grandfathers did? Or will a small miracle happen, and this knowledge open all of our eyes to a whole new understanding between the sexes? Like I said, consider the possibilities.

kvonhahn@globeandmail.com