From the book Save the Males by Kathleen Parker, from the Chapter entitled “Gelding the American Male”:

Midwifing Men into Women

Those men who do somehow find themselves engaged with a real woman often become husbands, significant others, and, as nature prevails, fathers. No longer is it enough that men should protect the hearth, bring home the bacon, and support their offspring. In the age of the sensitive male, it is also necessary that they participate in and bear witness to childbirth. Thank the sixties, when it was decided that having babies shouldn't be endured only by women, but be a shared experience. The thinking was that men who participate in their children's births would be more invested in them. (Personally, I'm partial to the wigwam way. Hand me a stick to bite and get lost. I'll send some smoke signals when the work is done.) Given that men have no natural role whatsoever in this process, birthing consultants handed the guys a stopwatch and said, "Count!"

Count what?

Her contractions.

Oh, okay. Breathe, honey, breathe. One, two, three. . .

Yes, yes, I know, childbirth is a beautiful thing. And a man counting while his wife puffs and grunts through the agony of contractions is sharing a deeply moving, spiritual experience. That's the story, anyhow, and hardly anyone wonders if it's really true. I'm just observing here. Would a man dare protest that he really didn't want to share that exquisite moment with his beloved? Ask writer Rick Marin, who wisecracked to his wife's birthing class that he had tried to get out of attending, but the doctor wouldn't let him. "You could hear crickets chirping," he wrote in The New York Times. "I stopped short of tapping an imaginary microphone and asking, 'Is this thing on?' But I got the message: Such heresies are not to be uttered."

At this stage of our social evolution, few of childbearing age remember a time when men didn't go into labor with their wives. Today, 90 percent of fathers witness their child's birth. Even Prince Charles attended the birth of his first son, William (and maybe Harry, but by then I'd lost interest), emerging afterward to comment, about fatherhood? "It's a rather grown up thing, I've found." Well, it bloody well is. And while one can hope-or insist-that fathers bond with and be invested in their offspring, it was a marketing coup unparalleled in human history that got men believing they were needed in Labor & Delivery. Quicker'n you can say "Attagirl," the question "Why can't men be more like women?" became a command to midwifery. Suddenly couples, not just women, were pregnant. They gathered with other couples they'd never met before in bare rooms where men cuddled their engorged partners with pillows and feigned fascination with films showing other women sweating through the gynecological splendors of childbirth. I may be wrong here, but if I were a guy, I'd be thinking: Never again.

Whatever hormonal emissions steal a woman's modesty during these raptures, meanwhile, are apparently airborne and contagious. How else to explain the video virus infecting otherwise normal men who, though they would manually dismember any other man who tried to steal a peek at their wife's pudenda, don't hesitate to post photos of their wife's crowning achievement as baby's head tunnels through the birth canal and out the trapdoor? Or to share a home movie?

The absence of sexual content in birthing photos and videos does not, I repeat, does not make the miracle of birth any more appealing to Other People. Everyone's birth is a truly awe-inspiring event, and every child is precious (though mine is more precious that yours, it goes without saying). Nevertheless, trust me when I tell you that no one is interested in seeing the birth of your child. No one. "Seen one, seen'm all" doesn't come close to covering the appropriateness of privacy at such times.

Just in case even one new age dad is not sufficiently offended at this point, allow me to broach an inconvenient truth that must have occurred to more than one male in the past thirty years. Men are not really needed in the delivery room unless they're doctors. Dad has made his contribution-and it was the best ever, promise/-and now it's time to pace the hallway and make phone calls to the two or three other people who are interested in current events. The truth is, even the mother doesn't have much to do with the birth process. I don't mean to diminish the experience for those men and women who benefit from extreme sharing, but surely some men in their private moments must consider the possibility that they've been conned into playing a minor role in a feminist morality play. For what lesson does a man learn in the final hours of labor-witness to his wife's torture, martyrdom, and postpartum resurrection-than that she is an Amazing and Brave goddess/creator, while he is but a clock watcher, voyeur to miracles, third wheel in the cycle of life?

Companion to my TMI aversion is a preference for the end-over means school of maternity specifically and womanhood generally. Just because you like steak doesn't mean you want to slaughter a cow. Viewed in the right light, female architecture can seem like the cathedral at Chartres. Or, if you crank up the kliegs, like the Vatican tunnels. Whatever feminine mysteries remain to lure men from the embrace of their La-Z-Boys is not long for a feminized world that thinks coed bathrooms are progressive manifestations of equality. And while no one could reasonably argue that men shouldn't help with child care as much as possible--or participate in birth if they really want to-the Lamaze mandate does seem to conceal among all the heavy breathing a punitive subtext that goes something like this:

You got me into this mess, buddy. No sitting in the waiting room with your stinking cigar feeling proud of yourself. We're in this together! Now you're so good at math, count, dammit!