Connections
So I was reading Bitch PhD which linked to this post at a different blog about a story in the NYTimes about how traumatizing it can be for some men to see their wives give birth--I mean, listen to this story:
And not every man gets over it. Several men have confessed to me that they never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children.
"They ended up having to cut her open to get the baby," one patient told me. "I saw it. I mean, how am I supposed to get that out of my head? Every time I look at the scar, it's like I'm seeing it again."
So the blog had lots of comments on it, and one was by Timothy Burke, our very own blogger and professor. Talking about his sexual desire for his wife after she gave birth. (It wasn't affected):
It was amazing, interesting, yes occasionally overwhelming for its bodily intensity, but the idea that this would affect my sexual desire just seems weird to me.
No, wait, not weird. Weird is what I'd call someone's emotional state when that state might make some sense but it's not my state of mind. This is more than that: it seems to me that it's about someone whose sexual desire for women is premised on the necessary maintenance of the idea that the vagina is secret, mysterious, unseen, a place where men disappear into the unknown. Which is like the whole stupid "women are mysterious" thing, which I just can't respect.
So good on him.
Small world.
And not every man gets over it. Several men have confessed to me that they never regained the same romantic view of their wives that they had before seeing them deliver children.
"They ended up having to cut her open to get the baby," one patient told me. "I saw it. I mean, how am I supposed to get that out of my head? Every time I look at the scar, it's like I'm seeing it again."
So the blog had lots of comments on it, and one was by Timothy Burke, our very own blogger and professor. Talking about his sexual desire for his wife after she gave birth. (It wasn't affected):
It was amazing, interesting, yes occasionally overwhelming for its bodily intensity, but the idea that this would affect my sexual desire just seems weird to me.
No, wait, not weird. Weird is what I'd call someone's emotional state when that state might make some sense but it's not my state of mind. This is more than that: it seems to me that it's about someone whose sexual desire for women is premised on the necessary maintenance of the idea that the vagina is secret, mysterious, unseen, a place where men disappear into the unknown. Which is like the whole stupid "women are mysterious" thing, which I just can't respect.
So good on him.
Small world.