Kenny Bodanis takes offense to Serena Williams remarks on men and pregnancy.
Previously posted on FatherDaddy
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Three things I will never do:
Spend an evening of intimacy with Ronnie Wood.
Share a bowl of chocolate-covered pomegranate seeds with Barack Obama.
Work myself into the Lotus Position without dislocation.
Three things I can never do:
Serve Eggs Benedict (covered with a perfect Hollandaise sauce, sprinkled with fresh chives and smatterings of smoked salmon) to Benedict Arnold.
Sit strapped into a cockpit seat, alongside the pet monkey I don’t have, as a pioneer traveller aboard a Sputnik spacecraft.
Have a baby!
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After winning the women’s title in Madrid on Sunday, Serena Williams made the following statement:
“Women are way tougher than men. That’s why we have the babies, you guys could never handle kids,”
“We ladies don’t complain we just do our best. On the WTA (tour) we are real performers, we are not about going out there and being weenies.”
These philosophical musings were in reference to Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic blaming their poor performances on the court’s new blue clay.
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It is conceivable that men will once day allow themselves to be medically tampered with to such an extent we will experience pregnancy. Whether they will find an orifice accommodating enough to allow a form of delivery for us other than Cesarean Section is a seperate challenge. In the meantime, can we agree that “you don’t know real pain until you’ve experience pregnancy and childbirth” be taken off the table as a counter argument to vasectomies, cystoscopies, head colds, and men’s complaints in general?
If I could experience childbirth, I would. (No, you wouldn’t.) Yes, I would.
However, I think the truth is: women wouldn’t want me to have pregnancy on my physical C.V.; it would kick one leg out from under mom’s OBGYN table. Where do you go from there? A man who’s been through it all, and still complains about pneumonia? How do you shut him up then?
If men were to bear children, we would survive the process. Why? How? For the same reason women do: we’d have to. One does what one must when one desires something enough, like children for instance. Or medical school; or becoming a pole vaulter.
Are pregnancy and childbirth more difficult than the training involved in Olympic pole vaulting? I don’t know. I will never run along a track, jam a flexible pole into the ground, and catapult myself vertically twenty feet over a bar, hoping to land on a mat the size of a mattress on the other side.
Nor will I ever have a gestating human slowly push many of my major organs to the corners of my abdomen while stretching the uterus I don’t have to the size of a basketball just before he/she forces his/her way past my pelvis which has expanded barely enough to expel this child I will have to care for for the rest of my life.
But neither has Serena Williams lived these experiences.
What she did accomplish on Sunday was win a tournament, pocket $630,000 in prize money, and then call me a weenie–a condition which apparently explains my inability to bear children.
The metaphor of men’s inexperience of childbirth frustrated me so much during my wife’s two pregnancies, I wrote a book about it: “Men Get Pregnant, too. (Despite Never Pushing a Watermelon Through a Pigeonhole).
What I’ve discovered is: getting a book published appears to be nearly as difficult–although not as painful–as pregnancy. I might have an easier time pushing the thing past my cervix than I’m having promoting it to bookshelves at Barnes & Noble.
Perhaps Serena can lend me the money to self-publish in exchange for a stake in the book’s profits? If not, I’d be happy to be the subject of the ‘Serena Willams Medical Fund Promoting Pregnancy in Men’…as long as any experimentation doesn’t come at the expense of my weenie.
Ovaries Photo Credit
Serena Williams AP photo / Alessandra Tarantino
Pregnant Man photo: nateone / flickr
I wonder something, having never played tennis in my life let along at that high I level. I wonder, would playing 5 set matches and at a much higher pace be effected by a different play surface. Perhaps that is why the women tennis players aren’t complaining , they only play 3 sets and at much slower speeds. Again, easy to solve, get rid of gender and everone plays the same number of sets and men and women play each other. And what is ‘funny’ is that Ms Williams to the best of my knowledge has never had a child,… Read more »
No. She has never had children. As far as the surface goes – whether it affects play or not is somewhat moot since both players are forced to deal with any disadvantage. Could you imagine the backlash if Roger Federer said of Serena yelling at a line judge: “Typical of women…loud and shrill.”?
Yeah, for some reasons she seem to think it is better to threaten to kill a lines judge than to complain about the court clay when one is loosing…
Lol. The irony of threatening a 5’2″ line judge and then belittling men for not being tough.
Any women out there wish to respond to Ms. Williams’ statement that women never complain?
Two days later, I believe we’re hearing the sound of women with better things to do than respond to Ms. Williams.
Physiology clearly says men would find delivery *infinitely* more difficult than women. If you think vaginal delivery is painful, imagine passing a baby through your penis! Women are obviously spoiled wusses when it comes to childbirth – they get to dilate up to 10 cm and they get a rush of oxytocin afterwards. Try passing a human being through your urethra, ladies, then tell me you’d be tougher. Seriously, though, Serena has also insulted every woman who never gives birth, an increasing percentage of the population. Her message is that if you haven’t or can’t give birth you aren’t all… Read more »
weird nature fact: female hyenas have a penis that they give birth through. And male seahorses get pregnant. It’s a wonderful world!
It just drives me nuts that she uses this ‘go-to’ line meant to prove toughness having never been through the experience herself.