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I tend to watch daytime talk shows at night en masse. Sometimes they make me feel so normal. Sometimes they give me good ideas for writing. And sometimes they just freak me out. Like the show I saw recently (I think it was Oprah) where a father of teenaged kids admitted he couldn't give his wife oral sex because he'd watched the birth of his first daughter.
Um.
I admit I was a little worried about that, so I commanded my husband to stand at my head when my daughter was delivered vaginally. Honestly, I was more worried about pooping on the delivery room table, having heard horror stories of such things happening. The whole business of having the world see my girly parts was traumatizing enough to ME, let alone him.
Rebecca Odes and Ceridwen Morris of Babble had an interesting perspective:
But do consider how this reflects on your partner's ability to see you both ways conceptually as well. You might be able to protect him from the crotchy conflict, but you can't protect him from the conflict at the heart of the matter: his lover has become the mother of his children.
While there's some truth to the need for fathers to man up to the gore of babies and childbirth in general, I think they're a little hard on the manfolk. I am not sure I'd like to watch something come out of my husband's genitals. It's a shock.
JerZ in the comments of a BabyCenter thread writes:
I actually can see the men's side to this. We women have "gory" goings-on in the area for many years, usually, before having children, and this often includes pain and sometimes other issues, so we're a little desensitized to "gross" gynecological stuff by the time we're adults. But men don't have any of that. Then all of a sudden they're thrown into, "Would you help me massage the perineum, Mr. Smith?"
Which brings up a good point. Whether or not we realize it, we chicks are subjected to quite a bit of gore from a pretty early age what with menstruation and all. I know I've grown quite desensitized to menstrual blood and have to remind myself that I and only I should probably empty the garbage at certain times. We go to the doctor and have things inserted that men never do. Pregnancy hurts at times, so we're aware there is pressure DOWN THERE and what that will soon mean for us. The guys -- who knows what they think?
In an extremely well written if dated (2005) Slate article, Meghan O'Rourke wrote:
In fact, these men were getting at a more distinct and elusive problem that Firestone alluded to: their psychological discomfort with the violent erosion of that sexual/reproductive boundary. Sexual attraction is highly variable and individualistic: Some relationships are grounded in hippie-ish holistic celebration of bodily plumbing (the kind of couples who don't close the bathroom door) and others thrive on a sharper separation between sex and the everyday framed in more ritualistic terms.
I admit myself to having trouble separating the erotic from the maternal, so how could I expect my husband to feel any differently? (I might add in ten years of togetherness and seven years of marriage, I've also never left the bathroom door open.) Some of us are ... well ... boundary-needers. I absolutely support a woman's wish to have her partner in crime there in the delivery room with her -- I know I needed my man -- but I would never insist that he watch. I know how hard it is to get a distracting visual out of your head, and I guess, in my case, I didn't see any need to insert one unless he wanted to see it. Do I think that part of my body is amazing and wonderful? Yes! Does it do great things for me, for us? Yes! Did it grow to 10 cm then shrink back down amidst blood, gore and fluid? YES! Is that both a miracle and totally gross? Yes.
I'm a feminist. I don't believe in hiding the miracle of birth. But I do think we should respect our partners' emotional boundaries when asked. I say if he wants to stay at your head, by all means, think nothing of it.
There's a great discussion on video of this over at Momversation.
