logansrogue | Apr. 19th, 2009

I had a dream that I was able to switch my body at will. I was a gorgeous, lithe, dark-haired man or my regular womanly self, and when I was a guy, for some reason I was gay. I don't know why it would be like that since I like women as much as I like men. The funny thing was I was totally and utterly comfortable in the male body. In fact, I felt SUCH freedom! It was like a shell that protected me from the world. Nobody bothered me, nobody questioned me. But I remember in the dream that at one point, I just wanted to switch back into myself again. My female body was home.

One thing occurred to me when looking back on the dream. Clearly, I'm terrified of being who I really am - a vulnerable woman.

So when I'm in moments of extreme and unremitting boredom, I look for shit on the net to peruse. Sometimes I peruse Cracked.com. I don't know why, I suppose it's a guilty pleasure of mine - juvenile man-boy humour. I read enough to know when they're mistaken about something and I'm never so credulous than to take them at face value because, dude - they're in the business of making you laugh or want to crawl into your own anus (it seems).

They'll talk about men fighting bears, super concept cars, tanks, blood, gore, destruction! Video games! So presumeably when I stumbled upon their article "6 Terrifying Things They Don't Tell You About Childbirth", I thought I was going to be in for a gorefest and was immediately a little worried.

Then I realised this is a humour website written by men that have barely had much sex, let alone witnessed the horrors of childbirth. So I needn't have worried.

First thing up? The placenta. That's right. The afterbirth! That sac of skin and blood and meat that some mothers look upon with dewy-eyed tenderness as the thing that bound them to their bundles of joy while they were in situ in the belly. And really, the placenta is the most basic thing in a birth, right? I mean - we're PLACENTAL mammals! It's core to our classification in the animal kingdom! And these guys are surprised that they pop out somewhere in the birth process?

Then they freak out at the very common and incredibly horribly painful episiotomy. Yeah. It's fucking horror-movie stuff, but boy do they get hysterical about it. And guess what? Women do it, women survive it, women go on to do it repeatedly. HOW BAD ASS ARE WE, MOTHERFUCKERS?

Then they proceed to freak out about poo. Shit. First the mother shitting, then the baby having its first gooey black extreta. It's at this point I figure I should send these guys a consignment of t-shirts saying, "We talk big, but we're a bunch of jibbering weiners." I'd say pussies but in this instance, its clear what a pussy is made of.

Following is them freaking out about the fact that the baby's head is a little munted when it comes out the other end of the harrowing passage out of the tiny cavity that is the human pelvis. It only lasts a couple of days at the most, and really, it's a miracle of nature that the baby can survive such a thing with such a huge freakin' bonce.

The final medical thing they wail about is foetal monitoring. It's a bit shocking to read about at first, I'm sure, but what else are they supposed to do? Put a little finger clampy thing on the baby's fist?

There is SO MUCH these guys clearly don't know about childbirth. It is a bloody, messy, pain-ridden, demanding, life-threatening miracle and women survive it every day. Men go through a fraction of that kind of agony and get called heroes. Women do this every day and we're safely delivering the next generation into the world - it's nothing. It's what we're here for.

In stark contrast to the blatant misogyny in some of the humour on that site, it's kind of embittering, really. They're self-congratulating with the macho-ideal, laughing at what they think women are like while they're at it, and yet when confronted with a mere fraction of the huge truth of womanhood, they lose their collective shit.

Well. *sigh* Sometimes they're funny, I guess. They clearly need more women writers.