A provocative and somewhat weird article in The New York Times today details men’s post-natal disgust with their wives’ vulvas, after seeing a baby come out of the vagina during childbirth.

You were … there?” he asked me, tentatively. “I mean, for the delivery?” . . .

He couldn’t bear to say it. “You saw more than you wanted to?” I asked.

The smile left his face. “I just can’t get it out of my mind.”. . .

“I mean,” he went on, “how are you supposed to go from seeing that to wanting to be with … ?” He stopped, but his eyes kept asking the question. . . .

[D]ozens of men . . . have confided to me that witnessing the births of their children has made it difficult for them to be attracted to their wives, at least in the short run.

They seem to have trouble seeing them as sexual beings after seeing them make babies, trouble reverting to a mind-set in which their wives’ sexual anatomy is just that - not associated with images of new life emerging through the birth canal. . . .

“Honestly,” one man, married for 12 years, told me, “I think one of the main reasons I don’t feel attracted to my wife is that I saw her give birth three times. It’s like I know too much about that part of her.”

(more…)

I posted a while back that I would be gone for a few weeks. Weird stuff happened while I was away, with the result that I wound up unexpectedly moving to a new apartment as soon as I got back from the West Coast. I’ve been swamped for the last 6 weeks with packing up the unbelievable amount of shit that accumulates in a one-bedroom apartment and compacting it into a 250-square-foot studio apartment (why? - that was the weird stuff that happened).

Still a few bugs in that system, but I’m at the point that I can start to put my head up again and see what’s going on around me. Glad to be back.