Childbearing Smarminess
I used to despise everything about childbearing, sneering at those with or expecting children as the "babymakers" (not meant in any way positive, let me tell you!)
Okay, I got over it, and now I'm one of the previously vilified "babymakers" myself, with my first son due in a month.
Still, even if I can now admit the positives to the whole thing,I also know there's a lot of idiocy around the process. For example, what the hell is it with the penchant for laboring mothers to be bare-ass naked? First, I'd like to point out that this is Seinfeldian "bad naked," and don't make me count the ways. But second, there's more than a whiff of '60s hippyishness about it, and I'd so hoped we'd finally gotten past that. But go to any childbearing class (most of which are themselves given over to a lot of the idiocy around the whole thing), and there in most of the videos are grunting, pallid, fleshy, NAKED women, with hairy heads poking out of you-know-where! AAARRRRGH!
As an aside, I find myself to be wholly un-squeamish about the blood and goo and such. So don't even lay that on me as a defense; no, it is just the barenaked ladies themselves who are so off-putting, and that should be the case for any discerning human.
But even more odious and idiotic is what is fast becoming an ironclad rule of referring to the unborn baby as "she." This seems to arise from that branch of feminism that dreams of manless world, and I shudder to think of those dopes taking control of the whole birthing process -- what with that meaning the end of mankind and such. For now, though, they seem only to control the childbearing-industrial complex, especially the publishing end. I've vowed that any information about childbearing or children that hews to this moronic language standard will be immediately discarded, unread past that first encounter with the feminine third person pronoun.
Sadly, of course, that means that I've learned next to nothing about this "magical moment" for which I'm inexorably headed. Ah well, sheer ignorance worked for our ancestors, so it'll just have to work for me.
Okay, I got over it, and now I'm one of the previously vilified "babymakers" myself, with my first son due in a month.
Still, even if I can now admit the positives to the whole thing,I also know there's a lot of idiocy around the process. For example, what the hell is it with the penchant for laboring mothers to be bare-ass naked? First, I'd like to point out that this is Seinfeldian "bad naked," and don't make me count the ways. But second, there's more than a whiff of '60s hippyishness about it, and I'd so hoped we'd finally gotten past that. But go to any childbearing class (most of which are themselves given over to a lot of the idiocy around the whole thing), and there in most of the videos are grunting, pallid, fleshy, NAKED women, with hairy heads poking out of you-know-where! AAARRRRGH!
As an aside, I find myself to be wholly un-squeamish about the blood and goo and such. So don't even lay that on me as a defense; no, it is just the barenaked ladies themselves who are so off-putting, and that should be the case for any discerning human.
But even more odious and idiotic is what is fast becoming an ironclad rule of referring to the unborn baby as "she." This seems to arise from that branch of feminism that dreams of manless world, and I shudder to think of those dopes taking control of the whole birthing process -- what with that meaning the end of mankind and such. For now, though, they seem only to control the childbearing-industrial complex, especially the publishing end. I've vowed that any information about childbearing or children that hews to this moronic language standard will be immediately discarded, unread past that first encounter with the feminine third person pronoun.
Sadly, of course, that means that I've learned next to nothing about this "magical moment" for which I'm inexorably headed. Ah well, sheer ignorance worked for our ancestors, so it'll just have to work for me.
posted by Steady Earl at 5:12 PM
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