One foundational thing about being committed to another person is that there is intimacy. Intimacy is not always gooey and soft and warm. Often the most intimate times I have shared were in clarifying a misunderstanding or balancing the books so to speak where engagement and communication were at their peek as well as honesty. The deepening of the relationship after going through a difficult time usually meant enhancement in other areas as well.

If looking at a birth ruins the ability to view a person as a lover there is a lot more happening in that relationship than simply post partum lunacy. I am glad the guys are getting therapy, it is sorry that they should use the woman as the source of their issue, I hope they are big enough to tell them over and over and over that it is not the mom, the baby or the process, it is baggage and deal with it. Blessings.

The author is more concerned with what the man goes through *watching* labor and childbirth than with what the woman goes through *feeling* it

Yep, that’s the problem right there. That and all the commenters who can’t believe us nasty feminists expect men to repress their feelings and get turned on to order and call them nasty names for going to therapy and a thousand other things that completely miss the point.

I’ve got more sympathy for the men in the article than some, because at least they did show up to support their partners, even if they had issues with it later. My baby’s father has no intention of being present, so my attitude is something like “sod it. I’d rather be alone than be worrying the whole time how my birth partner is reacting.”

Snarl.

Anyway, the idea of saying to wife when our second child was born, “Honey, watching you suffer labor for 48 hours and get cut open was just too tramatic for me, so you better go it alone this time,” is enough to make me laugh out loud. I was there and our sex life has never been better.

What is it with my sex? We brag about our ability to lift a couple of hundred pounds over our heads and our willingness to rush into oncoming gunfire, but ask us to watch a live birth or share a pup tent with a gay guy and we just go to peices we can’t handle the trama. Men make no sense at all.

On one hand, as women, it’s our duty to “maintain our culture through reproduction.” It’s only the nasty, immoral women who want to regulate their uteruses with abortion, or even contraception. So women, have babies. Be comfortable with your social role.

But wait… you know, come to think of it… having babies isn’t a miracle at all. Certainly nothing to be proud of. In fact, it’s kind of gross. Eeew. Vaginas.

Maybe the Times should just bite the bullet and report on the real story here: “Once Again, the Patriarchy of America Maintains Itself By Employing Another Insidious Method of Making Women Feel Worthless and Uncomfortable Simply Because They Are Women.”

If you’re a woman, whether you have babies or not, our society will always be looking for ways to make you hate yourself, so that the partriarchy, has to expend less energy *putting* us back in our places. Much less annoying and economical to just foster a society that encourages us to keep ourselves down.

I think it’s worth pointing out that the topic wasn’t exactly men who willfully abandon their partners during the birth: it was about men who were present for the birth and later sought therapy for their reactions to it. The only suggestion of abanonment is in the idea that women are being unreasonable for expecting their partners to be present and should consider if the benefit of the support they receive is worth the harm to their partners’ fragile psyches.

I hear commentary like that and want to become one of those old ladies that spit on the ground in response to show just how unsympathetic and condemning I am of that particular horseshit pov.

One of the men in the article voluntarily took a peep and now regrets it.

There are lots of common-sense solutions to the problem of men not wanting to support their partners during labour, but most of them are based on the idea that two people having a baby are adults who are into compromise, rather than a woman who wants nothing more than TWO helpless baby-type things to care for at once, which is what the writer’s closing advice seems to imply.