manly men & blundering dads: on men’s guides to childbirth

Perhaps this list of (totally real) titles is weird enough to catch your attention?

• My Boys Can Swim!: The Official Guy‘s Guide to Pregnancy
• What to Expect When Your Wife is Expanding: A Reassuring Month-by-Month Guide for the Father-to-Be, Whether He Wants Advice or Not
• The Guy’s Guide to Surviving Pregnancy, Childbirth and the First Year of Fatherhood
• The Dudes’ Guide to Pregnancy: Dealing with Your Expecting Wife, Coming Baby, and the End of Life as You Knew It
• Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads
• The Caveman’s Pregnancy Companion: A Survival Guide for Expectant Fathers
• A Guy’s Guide to Pregnancy: Preparing for Parenthood Together
• New Father’s Panic Book
• Hold It Like A Football … Just Remember Not to Spike It: And Other Pearls of Wisdom on Becoming a Father

Are you feeling manly and a little freaked out yet? Excellent.

So, okay, the general tenor of these books can be gleaned from their titles: we know you are just a dude lost in hostile territory, and we know you are freaking out—you should be! But our shared, inherent guyness will ultimately help you make it through alive, manhood intact. As a group, men’s guides to pregnancy and birth (the ‘masculine’ counterpart to What to Expect When You’re Expecting) imagine their readers as stereotypically masculine husbands who regard childbirth as unknown and frankly unappealing territory.

And that’s pretty unsurprising. After all, birth books for pregnant women typically nudge us to perform ‘motherhood’ as a feminine role: to nurture, worry, martyr, and self-criticize even before the child is born. Childbirth and parenting are intensely gendered and intensely gendering moments or processes in our culture. But while childbirth is represented as a painful-but-positive rite of passage for women, a ‘natural’ opportunity to become ever more appropriately feminine, birth is seen as a threat to men’s masculinity (even as it turns them into fathers). That seems strange, right?

I recently read five of these books, which was a bizarre and lively exercise. I spent a lot of time getting my husband to read and gawk at particularly inaccurate and/or offensive passages. A good time was had by all. The texts I read were all published in the US between 1999 and 2009. Three are joke-y and communicate bad information through bad humor:

• Thomas Hill’s What to Expect When Your Wife is Expanding
• Bill Lloyd and Scott Finch’s The Dudes’ Guide to Pregnancy
• Ian Davis’s My Boys Can Swim! [disclaimer: I'm linking to these Amazon pages so you can see what they look like, and by way of citation--not so you can buy them!!!]

The other two are serious in tone and educational in purpose:

• Armin Brott and Jennifer Ash’s The Expectant Father
• Glade Curtis and Judith Schuler’s Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-Be

And what I found is that these manuals are way concerned with maintaining the masculinity of the man in the birthing room, which they present as an unsettlingly female and feminine space. Even as the books claim to inform, calm, and prepare (or at least amuse) the male reader, they actually anticipate—and reinforce—panic as a way of performing masculinity. They stake out a way for men to attend births while resisting the disastrous feminization that would apparently result if a man felt comfortable being with birth.

Since this is a blog post and you probably have Things to Do, I’ll content myself with offering some quotations and observations, trying (heroically!) to restrain myself from too much further analysis. Some highlights from the jokier guides:

• “I’m your everyday Joe. Nothing too unique here. I’m a mid-thirties, quickly getting out of shape, pathetic golfer with a receding hairline” (xiv), reports Davis. Proudly?
• Lloyd and Finch spend their foreword establishing who does and does not count as a real man—a “self-respecting man,” they repeat. Their insistence on their own and their readers’ self-respecting manliness make their self-respect and their manliness appear imperiled by this whole birth-and-babies thing.
• An introduction not only warns women not to read The Dudes’ Guide but actually threatens physical harm—more specifically, they threaten that I will become ugly, less feminine, if I continue reading: “The cover and pages are coated with a harmful chemical agent that is activated by the pH exclusive to a woman’s skin. [… T]he resulting chemical reaction [causes] severe skin deformities, making [women] resemble Joan Rivers … ew. Consider yourself warned” (xi).
• Lloyd and Finch claim that, if a man expresses emotional needs, he must have a “huge vagina” (90-1). They treat the female body as so alien and incomprehensible that they literally refer to the cervix as the “wombhole.”
• These three books explicitly tell men that they will—and indeed should—feel marginalized and disempowered in the birthing space. From The Dudes’ Guide: “Despite what you learn from television, your function in the delivery room is basically nothing” (187). And from an uncharacteristically earnest passage in My Boys Can Swim: “You should attempt to say and do things that may ease your wife’s pain. Unfortunately, the only thing that really works will be more drugs” (69). Davis consistently refers to obstetricians as OB/GODs.
• If a nurse lies about progress during pushing, The Dudes’ Guide advises, “You’ll be confused about whether you should side with the nurses (con artists) or your wife (the mark). The correct answer is the nurses in the short run and your wife in the long run” (189). In other words, the nurses know best, so lie to your wife for them to keep everything running smoothly. For heaven’s sake don’t get in the hospital’s way.

The Expectant Father and Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-Be include far more information and present birth as an emotionally significant experience for both mothers and fathers … and yet they rely on models of masculinity strikingly similar to the ones we’ve been observing:

• Both tend to imagine the female body as utterly foreign to the masculine mind. Curtis and Schuler write that “You may have a hard time relating to the pain she experiences during her labor and delivery” (222)—end of paragraph, end of section—as in, ‘and there’s no possible way to clear that up for you …’
• On the other hand, The Expectant Father claims bizarrely and without evidence that men always remember labor pain more clearly and for longer than the women who experience it. Because nature makes her pain fleeting so she’ll have more babies, but he—in his masculine rationality—will remember it accurately (181).
• In a particularly strange and detailed passage, The Expectant Father recounts the author’s fantasies of heroically saving his home and family from marauders, and then assumes that elevated heart rate in fathers at births is obviously due to a protective and terrified adrenaline rush (because it couldn’t possibly be due to excitement and joy, right?) (180-1).
• Your Pregnancy for the Father-to-Be relies on vaguer gestures toward a universalized masculinity: “If you are like most men, you don’t want to get caught short as the birth of your baby approaches” (205) [unlike most women?!?], “If you’re like many men, you may look upon [childbirth education] classes as an inconvenience” (206), etc. Men here are planners, fixers, practical, busy, interested in fatherhood but skeptical about birth.
• The jokey and the serious books seem equally invested in a model of masculinity that not only seeks authority but also respects institutional authority. The Expectant Father, for instance, acknowledges the feeling of suddenly being a helpless spectator during the pushing phase, when doctors and nurses abruptly take charge. But it addresses this emotional quandary by admonishing the reader to get the hell out of the way and be appreciative: “Let the professionals do their job” (183-5).

Whether they claim to be telling jokes or telling the truth, these guides all imagine and reinforce norms about gender and childbirth that ultimately tell men: ‘although you must attend your children’s births, you must also feel out of place and helpless.’ Stuck amongst the threatening femininity of emotions, the threatening femaleness of the physiology of birth, and the admired but overpowering authority of the medical institution, the best way to protect one’s masculinity is to feel very uncomfortable, stifle one’s feelings, support institutional logic over a woman’s body and experiences, and wait for the whole nasty ordeal to pass. Even when they attempt to inform readers about childbirth, these guides tell men not that ‘knowledge is power’ but that the power of masculinity is in conflict with and profoundly threatened by the experience of becoming a father.

[This post is excerpted and adapted from my presentation "Making Space for Dad: Anxious Masculinity in Men’s Guides to Childbirth," which I gave at the 2010 PCA/ACA national convention. I'm working on expanding it into an article, so I'd love to hear your ideas about these issues!]