Is He Pregnant?

Somewhere, sometime, somehow, someone decided that pregnancy was a sexist plot.

One day in the dark recesses of a mind that was unfamiliar with the light of reason a flicker went off. In an instant it saw that there was a grave injustice in the fact that women and only women got pregnant.

Could God be a sexist? No, that was too horrible to contemplate. It must be a patriarchal conspiracy to keep women out of the workforce, to make them weak and vulnerable.

Pregnancy and motherhood provoked warm and cuddly maternal instincts in women, thereby preventing them from fulfilling their true potential as bond traders.

What does a good feminist do when reality offends her? What does she do when biological imperatives refute her most deeply held ideological convictions?

Well, she decides to set about changing reality. It’s better to change reality than to change diapers.

The feminist chapbook tells her that you can change reality by changing the way people think about it. How do you do this without joining the thought police? Why, you change the way people talk about things. You join the talk police.  

Thus, the feminist mind, such as it is, decided at some point that the reason women got pregnant and men didn’t was that we had fallen into the habit of saying that SHE is pregnant.

In the egalitarian mindwarp called feminism this injustice would be overcome if everyone started saying that everyone got pregnant. To achieve that dubious goal, everyone had to stop saying that SHE was pregnant. Instead she/he/it would have to say that WE or THEY are pregnant.

There, that solves the problem, doesn’t it?

The result is palpable. Today every man whose wife gets pregnant announces that: We are pregnant.

Given that manliness seems to be in short supply these days, I am not sure why we should be encouraging this feminization of men.

There is a method behind this madness. If you see men and women in permanent conflict with each other, then making men get pregnant, or, at least, simulate pregnancy, will level the competitive playing field.

If, however, you believe that men and women belong to one society and are together engaged in competition against other societies and cultures, your efforts to turn men against women and women against men will ultimately be self-defeating.

You will lose for winning.

Naturally, as our culture declares pregnancy to be a shared experience, some men whose wives are pregnant develop symptoms that resemble those of pregnancy.

This is not really news. Physicians have long known about it; they usually call it a sympathetic pregnancy.

A man suffering the condition will see his prolactin hormone increase when his wife is pregnant.

Prolactin is a nurturance hormone. It makes you warm and cuddling. Men who get a prolactin rush from their wives’ pregnancies become better nurturers.

To feminists this means that men can get pregnant. Thus, Jena Pincott entitles her Wall Street Journal article, “The Plight of the Pregnant Man: When a Woman is Expecting So Is Her Mate….”

I do not want to insult anyone’s intelligence, but a man who acquires some of the symptoms that characterize pregnancy is not pregnant. Even if he says he is pregnant; even if he has morning sickness; even if he develops at protruding gut… he is not pregnant.

Keep in mind that some women suffer from a condition called pseudocyesis, or hysterical pregnancy, where they acquire all the signs and symptoms of pregnancy without actually being pregnant.

As it happens, a man who is suffering a prolactin rush will become less competitive. If you are a man involved in a competitive job, you do not want to have your prolactin levels increase.

Of course, this also implies that women who become pregnant will also become less competitive on the job.

Pincott writes: “The fathers with a significantly higher level of prolactin—and the irritating symptoms that go with it—tended to be more attached to their newborns and more responsive to the babies' demands than were the men with lower levels. Those who experienced couvade were the type who clucked and cooed whenever their babies cried. Fittingly, the testosterone levels of high-prolactin papas also dropped, an average of 30%, after holding a baby—arguably making them less competitive, more compassionate, and less likely to stray from their partners.”

Pincott finds it reassuring that these fathers are more nurturing than the fathers. She ignores the fact that we also want these expectant fathers to be be out competing against the Chinese, growing their businesses, hiring more workers, and even trying to support their families.

A culture that promotes male nurturance will naturally lose out in these competitive arenas.

Sorry, guys, you can’t have it all.