Quoth D-Squared: I think the analogy’s pretty direct

I think the analogy is quite absurd and borderline offensive. It’s like comparing someone who faints at the sight of blood to someone who suffers from Negrophobia. If you seriously think these constitute moral equivalents, you’re either reading way too much into people’s reactions to bodily fluids or you’re way too flippant about the importance of racism. Neither reflects well on your capacity to judge who is or isn’t being an “asshole” in this instance.

I have to agree with Dan, here. Belle’s show of insecurity isn’t doing her any favours in the “asshole” sweepstakes by comparison with her targets.

Well the aesthetic response in this case actually seems to be fairly normal: instinctive revulsion toward things that most people, I suspect, find fairly revolting. In any case the role of feeling, sensation and association seems more determinate in aesthetic response than cognition.

I wonder… if a woman spent several hours watching her male partner shit, piss, ooze bile, vernix and other fluids from his penis and anus; watching as his painfully stetched scrotum was cut open with a disconcerting pop; watching as a slimy, bloody living creature was pushed out of him; and then watching as the process was capped capped off by a gushing expulsion of several pints of blood along a raw, meaty placenta – and she watched all this from a distance of two or three feet, as her husband groaned in agony – are you telling me she would immediately experience the desire to hop on?

The fact that many couples go on to have a second child, third child or more in fairly short order tells us that most men quickly get over whatever difficulties they have with arousal in the immediate aftermath of viewing childbirth. But give the guys a break. It takes a while for certain mental images to go away, and it seems to me that most people are not particularly attracted to shit and blood.

But even straightforward deliveries are, well…it’s a violent process and babies come out slimy and smelly. Witnessing it all didn’t put me off sex, but I can understand how it might have that effect on some. Blaming these guys for feelings over which they have no control seems ridiculous. When did sneering at people who experience psychological problems because they won’t shut up and stop whining become acceptable in progressive circles? I mean, I know they’re men and all and, therefore, inherently less deserving of sympathy. But even so—sheesh.

Of course she cares – that’s what her entire essay is about. She is clearly threatened by the revelation that some men might find their mates less attractive sexually, after those mates give birth.

I’m baffled here, Belle. Are you not more attracted sexually to certain kinds of people than others? Does that attraction have nothing to do with visual/physical stimuli? Why is it okay for your libido to be shaped and determined by certain visual stimuli but completely unacceptable for the libidos of these men to be so shaped?

What I don’t understand is why you think “fault” has anything to do with this. There are lots of people whose looks/smell/movement, etc., I’m simply not attracted to, just as there are lots (far too many, in fact) of people who are not attracted to me. It’s not their fault that I’m not attracted to them (or vice versa). But it is nonetheless true that I’m not attracted to them, and that telling me to “suck it up” isn’t going to help.

Squeemishness isn’t a vice exclusively held by those who pee standing up. Personally, I think we should mock those who are afraid of childbirth. I this is similar to a fear some younger men have about sex: you stick a perfectly good hard-on in there and out comes a limp dripping weiner. Sort of vagina dentata all over again.

I think you’re absolutely wrong, and that it is incomparably worse to be sexually turned-off by race than by witnessing childbirth. But I think you’re right to frame the critique the way you do, as a matter of objective values.

I was born in 1970, my brother in 1975, and our father was present for both our births. It might not have been a common phenomenon yet at that point, but it wasn’t unheard of, either.

By way of analogy, let’s say that while carrying out genealogical research, Fred discovers that his wife Betty had a black grandparent, and finds that he can no longer bring himself to have sex with her now that he knows she is not the English rose of his dreams. Tough luck on poor old Fred, but also what a racist bastard. I think the analogy’s pretty direct).