Experiencing life creation thanks to a dress?!

Hello and Happy New Year!  To start off this new year, I would like to jump in with a piece about new life... as in the experience of creating new life.  As of next week, I will resume my piece about integrating quantum mechanics into our 21st century lives and mentality.

Experiencing life creation thanks to a dress?!

I recently read about a dress developped for men to be able to pretend they’re pregnant in La recherche, sept 2011,n° 455.

At first glance, you might think, “we have made great progress for men to actually be interested in knowing what it’s like (used to be dismissed as woman’s work),to be prepared to take the time to follow the slow progression of a pregnancy (used to be the boring part or hassle), to be prepared to be invested in the child already, before it even arrives (used to be woman’s private sphere ordeal with the man doing little more than kissing the clean, quiet, and still child before bed), and to be prepared to get more in touch with his ‘feminine side’.”

But that is not how I see it at all.  I actually balk at the idea.  And for a number of reasons.

First of all, having a pregnancy dress is NOT what it’s like to be pregnant. 

That’s pretty obvious: 

·         They don’t undergo the hormonal changes that go haywire in a pregnant woman’s body, leaving her without control over her emotions or her physical development, which is terribly disconcerting and unpleasant, especially in an age when we are trying SO hard to control our own lives. 

·         They can take it off when they want to, which is not an option for the pregnant woman dealing with morning sickness or swollen ankles and water retention or sore breasts or back pains or trouble putting on shoes, etc., etc., etc. 

So who’s kidding whom?  What’s the point?  Pretending to be artificially pregnant does what exactly?  It certainly doesn’t give any indication of what pregnancy is like…

However it does, potentially, give the impression to someone who will never be pregnant to THINK he or she knows what it is like, having them falsely assimilate a misconception of the reality of it all.  I shiver to imagine the person having used the dress pretending, I mean believing, they know what it’s like to bare life.

Baby-wearers don’t go through the positive displacement of gravity from the “egocentric me” to the “me and other” duality of conscience.  9 months of pregnancy is, for a woman, a kind of Copernican revolution and awakening to being keen to more than one person’s acts and lives.  Gradually she takes on awareness that she will henceforth be wholly responsible for another than her own life.  And that her life is no longer only her own.  That dawning gestates with the growth of the fetus…   Donning a dress cannot represent this major transition within the life of a woman who carries a child. 

They also don’t deal with the social stigma of it.  I have heard young colleagues in France complain that pregnant women think they rule the world and that they suddenly have EXTRA RIGHTS… But in speaking with new mothers around me across Europe and somewhat in the US, announcing a pregnancy to an employer is more likely to REDUCE their rights and their status.  “Once I announced I was pregnant, my boss pretended like I was good for nothing,” told me a woman in Spain.  “As soon as I informed them of my pregnancy, I shot from promising talent to a woman with 2 neurons,” confided a French woman, whose sister lived through similar abasement.  “When I told them I was pregnant, they just presumed I would stop working to raise my kid, and therefore stopped putting me on the interesting projects” explained a German friend.  And I won’t even go into the trouble women live through once they come back from maternity leave, which I’ll comment on later!  Let’s leave it on the point that Western society has yet to be convinced that women can have children and still be sharp, dedicated professionals ( I’ll expound upon that in a future article too).   That’s why so many are obliged to demonstrate their loyalty by practically answering professional phone calls while in labor.  I’m not even sure what that proves…

Plus baby-dresses gracefully side-step the ordeal of labor.  I’ve been through 2; it’s indescribable pain, like your whole body being cracked open.  Even when you have an epidural.  Or a C-Section.  There’s the Exhaustion.   Plus the nursing or feeding before anything.  Plus the lion’s share of work at home – sometimes because the man doesn’t participate too much, most of the time simply due to the child who wants its mama and no one else.  And so on and so forth.  The point here is not that labor is labor, but rather the labor is just a middle stage between an exhausting pregnancy and an exhausting infant-raising plus all the bewilderment and life-alteration it entails.  People don’t often mention the duress of selflessness and empathy that it thrust upon as with this sudden “survival of two”.  Birthing is a miraculous, perhaps one of the most beautiful, acts of nature.  While the baby-dress expresses this admiration and wonder… it cannot come close to experiencing the real thing, neither the awesome nor the terrible.

A final thought:  it seems positive for these men to get in touch with their feminine side, even if we should keep in mind that each sex’s role is important and needn’t be confused …  Pregnancy and bearing life is woman’s work that she should continue to appropriate.  This is the way of the “motherself”.  While men can and should hear their feminine side, each has an invaluable role to play in the world, and in the family, with his very own characteristics. 
Just as contraception and abortion has allowed a woman to take back her rights over her own body, such should be the same for pregnancy and birthing, miracles only women can produce.  This point is crucial as we seem to be living in an era in which successful people must follow a very masculine, androcentric approach to life, success, and to living.  In a century in which there is a “flight from woman”.  This has led to many women ignoring or undervaluing their specific attributes such as motherhood as if they were incompatible with individuality and career.  I will argue through-out this blog that such need not be the case.

Rendez-vous next week for the next installment on "When will we accept we are like quarks ?   Part 4:  Identity need not be definitive"