Would It Hurt If I Called You a Big Pussy?

I'm sure it is very unfortunate if some men are no longer attracted to their wives after seeing them give birth, but at the same time...get over it, dude.

And not every man gets over it. Several men have confessed to me that they never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children.

"They ended up having to cut her open to get the baby," one patient told me. "I saw it. I mean, how am I supposed to get that out of my head? Every time I look at the scar, it's like I'm seeing it again."

In the most striking cases, the symptoms that men experience come close to post-traumatic stress disorder, with its roots in the witnessing of an event that involves a threat to the physical integrity of self or others and responding with intense fear, helplessness or horror.

Boo-fucking-hoo. How do you think it feels to actually be the person getting cut open? How about having a miniature human being come out of your vagina, how are you liking that? 10 centimeters is full dilation. I know I'm not the only woman who contemplated the 10-centimeter top of a can of coffee and thought, "there is no way in hell." Maybe all these women should get vaginal plastic surgery to help ease the pain for their husbands. Hymen restoration, even!!

The fact that the subject is taboo also means that a man who is traumatized by the experience may be retraumatized again and again, with each child born to him....

I myself recall feeling as if the clinical focus on childbirth during prenatal classes, including the detailed descriptions of the placenta and the meconium, took away from the wonder of the process, rather than adding to it.

I don't know what is gained by showing the cross-sectional anatomy of a woman's torso to her lover.

Oh, I don't know...maybe an understanding of the physical processes involved in pregnancy? Most Annoying Guy Ever: "I think all that mysterious female stuff should just remain unknown, so I don't have to think about creepy womb-stuff." God, just don't go down to the bottom of the bed, no one's making you! You might have thought that of all things in life the experience of childbirth would be incontestably and solely about the woman giving birth. You'd be wrong.

Whether the father is present in the delivery room is a couple's personal decision, of course.

But it is a decision that involves potential gains and potential losses, and too few couples realize that fact or are willing to talk about it.

Women may want to consider the risks as they invite their partners to watch them bring new life into the world. For some of the passion that binds them together may leave their lives at the very same time.

Wow, so against my desire to have the guy who knocked me up actually help me out as I go through the most intense, painful experience of my life, I have to set his oddly-easily-quenched future sexual desires. Luckily for me, I didn't marry a total asshole, so I didn't have this problem.

UPDATE: welcome Slate readers! Please see my follow-up post above.

Comments

[Atrios]

People are entitled to their squeamishness and entitled to be mocked for it.

[Matt]

A friend of mine was informed at one of the London hospitals that the "birthing pool" no longer allowed partners to be present because they tended to get too "overexcited".

[Geoffrey F. Green]

Mocking I get. Calling us "assholes" seems a bit excessive.

[LizardBreath]

I'm not sure what I would have gained as far as "not being an asshole" by watching the baby come out instead of standing next to my wife holding her hand. (Actually, I'm not sure why not wanting to watch makes me an asshole.)

Geoffrey-

No one, I believe, meant to call you or anyone else an asshole for not wanting to watch the actual emergence of the baby. Squeamishness is fine -- I'm squeamish myself. The mockery was for men who were so traumatized by what they did see that they lost sexual desire for their wives. It's a different issue.

[Tim]

Shamhat:
thanks for the reality check. As a first-time expectant father, the stories so far in this thread have been fairly uniformly terrifying, either to justify how "tough" dads should be, or to justify why squeamishness is fine.

[Ralph Luker]

I was there for the birth of both daughters. It's an awesome experience. It confirmed my respect for womanhood and my gratitude for having been born a male. I couldn't do it.

[theorajones]

OMG, could there be, like, ONE THING that we did as women did that we didn't have to worry about how it would affect our sex appeal?

This is beyond ridiculous.

Women don't get PTSD treatment for childbirth, which, I'm sorry is a HELL of a lot more traumatic than watching childbirth. If the pussy is too scary, then stay up at the other end, ya moron. Make it about something OTHER than your emotional needs for, like, a day. Can ya do that?

Had I ever once seen the NY Times write an op-ed about how men are worried that their wives no longer find them sexually attractive because sex with them resulted in 9 months of increasing discomfort, culminating in 24 hours of screaming agony and a month's recovery, I might feel differently. But this is ludicrous. Men should be taught that their proper role in childbirth is to support their wives in whatever way the wife needs, and not about wives needing to focus on helping their emotionally stunted man-child face the unpleasantries of life.

[MQ]

These guys were in therapy, which means they get to talk about WHATEVER their crap is, whether it's bullshit or not. We don't completely control what sorts of things have power over us emotionally. Everyone has some junk in there. Not too surprising that watching childbirth could be wrenching in various ways, and that watching physical agony, blood, and trauma could cause you to cross your wires sexually at least temporarily. Most of us do not find those things to be turn ons. It's not like these guys were writing newspaper articles saying that people SHOULD react this way, or that it was somehow their wives fault that they did, or that their wives should change in any way. They were confessing to a psychologist in (what should have been) complete privacy that they did feel this way.

[dsquared]

Mocking I get. Calling us "assholes" seems a bit excessive

If it's any consolation, if you'd been in the room, you would have got called a lot worse than an "asshole" when the serious business started.

These guys were in therapy, which means they get to talk about WHATEVER their crap is

No they weren't mate, they were in the New York Times, which means we get to talk about them as if they weren't real people, which they almost certainly weren't.

[MQ]

Yeah, perhaps the ire should be directed more at the rather sententious psychologist who wrote the article, seems like he's bucking for a guest shot on daytime TV. Leave his poor patients alone, I'm sure they would have had the good grace to leave this particular new "syndrome" in privacy where it belongs. That's where people toughen up their unfortunate but understandable weaknesses, in private.

[Doctor Slack]

Quoth Atrios: "People are entitled to their squeamishness and entitled to be mocked for it."

And in the Great Chain of Snark, the mockers are entitled to be called out in turn.

Luckily, there's nothing the mockers need to be mocked for. Nothing at all! I mean come on -- we all know how well "suck it up and be a man" has worked as an approach to dealing with male emotional problems over the years, don't we? Study after study has demonstrated it, following on Dr. Laura's ground-breaking "quit your whining and learn to be a real woman, you spineless little wench" approach to pop psychology for women. I for one am encouraged to see Belle take a hard line view on re-establishing the Shame & Mockery approach to male communication; hopefully we can put all the distasteful feminist nonsense about how men should "communicate" their "feelings" behind us once and for all. With any luck it can become a regrettable and best-forgotten chapter in modern history, just like Vanilla Ice's musical career or the final season of Dallas.

Picture it if you will: suppose that therapist in the NYT article hadn't been a weak-kneed liberal do-gooder worried about "talking" to his patients and "helping" them? After all, real men aren't patients -- what kind of wuss tries to "talk" to people about icky things like "feelings"? I wish that therapist had had the guts to just call them "emotionally-stunted man-children" and chase them out of his office... preferably right into a major street, shouting "limp-dick!" repeatedly at their retreating backs while brandishing a nine-iron. I'm sure they'd have arrived home better, stronger, manlier men and their wives and children would have been grateful.

Heart-warming, really. Hats off to you, Belle!

[julia]

um, Dr. Slack?

WADR, I was in labor for 36 hours. Some of it was astonishingly painful. If someone wants to make the case that watching such a thing is going to make them go all limp and stuff, they can of course do so.

Everyone else has an equal right to point out that their revulsion suggests a less-than-thorough understanding of what's involved in reproduction.

Newsflash: boys are involved in the babymaking process. If they can't cope with that fact past the point where they start wanting to go to sleep, they should be big enough grownups to stay at the head of the bed.

[Gary]

I am a 49 year old male. Most people would describe me as "masculine." My 4 younger sisters (and I) would say that the vast majority of males are pussies AND assholes, in one degree or another. If someone has a male in their life that does not exhibit one or both of these qualities in some form, that person is lucky indeed. And yes, regrettably, I exhibit both qualities at times.

[joe o]

Suck it up, doctor slack. Repression is underated. You can still "communicate" your "feelings", without being an "asshole".

[joe o]

"link"

[Doctor Slack]

Everyone else has an equal right to point out that their revulsion suggests a less-than-thorough understanding of what's involved in reproduction.

Hey, I'm totally with you guys! What greater crime can a person commit than having a less-than-thorough understanding of reproduction? It's not like half your country has young men growing up in the grip of fundamentalist sects with fucked-up attitudes toward the body, right?

These people have no excuse. They should magically have acquired exactly the emotional and bodily reactions that your education dictates they should have, and if they don't, they must be mocked mercilessly lest they start actually trying to get educated, thereby inflicting their paltry ignorance on the more fortunate! It's bad taste, I tell you! It's un-manliness! It's much, much better that these poor, gormless bastards to whom we are all comfortably superior should bottle up their feelings, turn to drink or start running around on their wives, like in the old days when men used to "suck it up and deal with it." It was good enough for my grand-pappy, and dammit, it's good enough for me.

[Tom Stearns]

Oh good grief.

That shrink should just give those wimps a white feather and tell them to be a man about it.

Same same to the wimps who say warfare is too much to stomach and it distresses them. What did you expect, a picnic?

[Timothy Burke]

These guys are entitled to go to therapy.

That's very different from the o-so-fucking sensitive NY Times article suggesting that their reactions represent a form of social problem that requires some kind of generalized social understanding or sympathy.

People have all sorts of things going on inside their heads. Not everything going on inside someone's head is occasion for the suggestion that there is a generalized social issue represented by the thing inside the head that all of us must somehow sensitively negotiate. The general social expectation should be that men be there with partners and that they don't get their experience of birth confused with their experience of sexual desire. If they can't live up to that expectation, then therapy awaits. Should I happen to have a friend who is in therapy for said issue, I will be loving and sensitive to him. Should I be exhorted to be generically loving and sensitive to the entire class of men having said problem, I will say, "Get over it, girlfriends". The general social expectation than men under 50 will not confuse sexual desire with seeing the delivery of their child is a perfectly reasonable one. I feel no uneasiness that it is and should be the norm.

[Doctor Slack]

In a slightly more serious vein:

Not everything going on inside someone's head is occasion for the suggestion that there is a generalized social issue represented by the thing inside the head that all of us must somehow sensitively negotiate. . . Should I happen to have a friend who is in therapy for said issue, I will be loving and sensitive to him.

You would be loving and sensitive to someone you knew who had such an issue, but couldn't be bothered to show a minimal degree of courtesy to any larger group of people with said issue, because they are not "the norm"? Sorry, but that seems kind of small and mean-spirited to me.

Now, I don't remember the NYT article suggesting a "generalized social problem" that we must all "sensitively negotiate" -- I remember it suggesting a fairly small-scale problem about which it might be nice if men would speak frankly. Maybe I'm misremembering the article? (It's behind a pay wall now, so I can't check it.) If I'm not misremembering it, I don't see what was in it that would make to "Boo-fucking-hoo" reaction look at all impressive.

[Timothy Burke]

Yeah, I can't be bothered to feel a structured sympathy, because that suggests there is a coherent social legitimacy to the problem. It is a reasonable expectation that men will not have this confusion: those that don't have a problem. Individuals who have problems whom I know draw my sympathy; classes of individuals who want to claim a structured space that justifies or legitimizes their problem do not.

[Russell Arben Fox]

"Not everything going on inside someone's head is occasion for the suggestion that there is a generalized social issue represented by the thing inside the head that all of us must somehow sensitively negotiate."

As usual, Tim nails it. Of course sex and the body and pain and fear and guilt and sympathy and curiosity--all of which are mashed up together when a loving couple go through childbirth--can play havok with a person's equilibrium. There's no good reason for them to do so, but lots of things happen in our minds without any good reason, and the fact they happen isn't cause to believe someone has just failed the essential test of "manliness," or whatever. But the human pysche is not human society. Society is a product of norms: admittedly, shaped many numerous sometimes contradictory forces, but norms just the same. And the norms of childbirth today pretty clearly suggest that a healthy sexual life is not incompatible with a sharing of that most intimate and wrenching of physical functions, namely a woman giving birth to a child. I've no intention of shoving that norm down everyone's psychic throat, but neither do I care to be moved in the slightest by a bullshit article in the New York Times about the deep, complex problem posed by a norm which has easily embraced by practically every segment of our society. As Joe O. suggested above, repression is often underrated, apportioning one's sympathies in accordance with societal expectations is not always unreasonable, and "get over it" is not always a marginalizing answer.

[Doctor Slack]

Yeah, I can't be bothered to feel a structured sympathy, because that suggests there is a coherent social legitimacy to the problem.

Sorry, I'm not following you, or maybe we're talking about different things. I'm talking about showing common courtesy, not "feeling a structured sympathy." I don't need to feel "structured sympathy" for people with depression, or any other emotional problem or disorder, to know that it might just be a little rude and counterproductive to publicly mock them. I can show that minimal courtesy without fearing that any "coherent social legitimacy" conferred thereby might somehow undermine "the norm." I certainly don't see why a problem affecting a handful of guys and eliciting a mild article in the NYT Health section should pose such a threat to you.

[carter]

For most of human history men would not go anywhere near women when they were giving birth, the bizarre and pointless practice of the man watching the process is a recent ‘innovation’. So what is the origin of this innovation? My research suggests that the notion originated with and was propagated by a KGB psy-op during the Cold War, with the intent of causing exactly the type of trauma to the male psyche as described by the poor bastards in the NYTimes article.

And while it may be irrational for certain men to have “never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children,” romance is not terribly rational in the first place, is it? It is also irrational to risk damaging the romantic bond in order to do something that has no benefit or purpose.

I think it is also worth noting that I find myself in agreement with my old nemesis, Dr. Slack.

[Doctor Slack]

I'm someone's nemesis?

Cool!

I've changed my mind. I now find myself in complete disagreement with carter. Boo-frickin'-hoo, morons! You'd better watch that birth and have permanent wood within 24 hours! The Power of the Left compels you!

[joe o]

More ablow fun.