And SO FREAKING CUTE!! [link]

Huh. That one's not blue....

Gigantic brain dump, and it's all juliana's fault:

I'm completely not innocent of the spousal-slagging -- I'm fairly sure I've gone rantycakes to at least a couple of those here present about Hec's craxy filing system and lovingly maintained Mountain of Clothing -- but I try really, really hard never to jokingly slag on issues that cut much closer to his Heccy core. No digs at his music loves, no eyerolly snickering tales of Lame Shit He's Done With/To Emmett Under The Delusion That He's A Competent Parent, no breezy assumption that because he lacks a womb he's automatically totally clueless about pregnancy and incapable of giving me any real emotional support through it, no joking when I get together with girlfriends about what a huge relief it is to be FREE for an hour or two.

(And yes, all of these are things that dear and true meatspace friends have said about their spouses.) I can't do it, and I feel like a humorless pill but I can't enjoy it and laugh along when my friends do it, no matter how much I know that they really do love their husbands and it's all just kidding and jokey. I can never shake the feeling of veiled hostility, despite all the protestations to the contrary and despite what I know of their loving and committed actions toward their husbands. The jokey-sneery words just grate.

And, of course, it's all totally supported and encouraged by the culture at large, with the endless TV and radio and print commercials and sitcoms and movies that play on unpleasantly exaggerated traditional gender roles: men do stuff and make money and are well-intentioned but emotionally retarded, women are snarky and closer to the earth, a man who's actually aware of his feelings and maturely, competently attentive to the women and children in his life is a faintly self-deluded object of pity and ridicule.

Last week, out of idle curiosity, I went to amazon.com to look at reader reviews of the pregnancy books I've been working my way through, to see how my reactions tally with other folks'. And it turned out that they don't much.

The one book I'm loving dearly is Sheila Kitzinger's Complete Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth: calm, matter-of-fact, and very much focused on understanding your body, recognizing the changes it's going through and what they mean.

And it's also the only book I've read that is hugely, deliberately inclusive of the pregnant woman's partner; she assumes that most pregnancies happen within the bounds of a committed monogamous relationship, and that the changes to the pregnant woman's body and her hormonal seesawing will present challenges not just to herself but to that relationship. There's an entire chapter devoted to impending fatherhood, all the issues and fears and losses it may ping, and ways for couples to both deal with their own personal shit and support their partners' struggles with their shit. She always addresses the non-pregnant partner as an active participant, if not in the pregnancy, then at least in the relationship, as someone who both needs his own support and is totally capable of providing support in return.

The other books? Well, one called Your Pregnancy: Week By Week not only crams itself full of scary-ass scenarios for every single freakin' week about some ghastly life-threatening disaster you need to be on paranoid alert for, but mentions partners about every 10-15 pages in little sidebar paragraphs labeled Dad Tips, with eyerolly suggestions like "Because bending and squatting are difficult for your partner now, you may want to take over scrubbing the floors." Gee, ya think? Also, the fuck?

And don't even get me started on Vicki Iovine's Girlfriend's Guide To Pregnancy, which is all about that ha-ha, our husbands are all such emotionally incompetent fucktards, isn't he cute, and isn't it wonderful that we have our GIRLFRIENDS to help us through pregnancy since the grown-up humans we've pledged our lives to are so utterly fucking useless? Ha-ha!

There were a handful of user (continued...)

( continues...) comments on Amazon that called Iovine on her jokey-hateful shit, but mostly everyone thought it was a scream and a hoot and just a great jolly lark and the reviewers who didn't like it were obviously stick-up-their-ass humorless cows. And Kitzinger's book was spectacularly hateful and anti-man, because in all her talk about the emotional lives of men entering fatherhood and the shifting ground of a loving partnership becoming a family, she never used the word "husband," but always "partner." What a man-hating bitch!

In conclusion, it all makes me want to stab the fuck out of a whole lot of people, in my crunchy granola politically-correct (and apparently man-hating) way.

Can I have an aardvark?

No.

t wants to marry JZ's rant

Can I have an aardvark?

You think *that's* cute?

I'm completely not innocent of the spousal-slagging

::brow furrows::

I'm fairly sure I've gone rantycakes to at least a couple of those here present about Hec's craxy filing system and lovingly maintained Mountain of Clothing

::brow furrows so deep you could tuck JZ's entire crinoline collection in them::

it all makes me want to stab the fuck out of a whole lot of people

::points wife in the direction of her own man-hatey friends::

I'll admit to liking The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy and Your Pregnancy: Week by Week.

I found the former amusing in some ways, and a nice escape from all the articles and books and essays about the growing of lungs and development of ears and DON'T EAT THAT OR YOUR BABY WILL POP OUT OF EAR. She was anti-man, but I glossed over that. I usually do. The latter I found not as worry-inducing as What to Expect.... My biggest issue with YP:WbW was that the poor woman on the front was obviously maternity-fashion challenged.

No.

WHY???

Down with That Sort of Thing.