Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
I consider myself an enlightened guy. I respect women so much that I even pretended to like Hillary. But recently, when my wife insisted I accompany her to her friend’s baby shower, to which all husbands were invited, I told her I’d rather stay home and research divorce attorneys. She called me “chauvinist” and claimed I had “outmoded ideas of how men are supposed to behave.” Does this make me a horrible person? How do you feel about co-ed baby showers, and would you have gone?
Rodney M.
Lusby, MD
Well, I have no way of knowing if you’re a horrible person. Though soliciting life advice from a stranger on the Internet while throwing your wife under the bus probably indicates that you have a miss in there somewhere. But you’re still getting a merit badge from me for having the good judgment to bypass the estrogen Olympiad known as the modern co-ed baby shower, which should be outlawed immediately.
Yes, I know we’re all supposed to “share” everything now. I know men are supposed to happily and without complaint show up in traditionally female enclaves, like Sheryl Sandberg TEDTalks and women’s restrooms. Perhaps men are even encouraged, while attending events like co-ed baby showers, to preserve the tattered illusion of their masculinity by being assigned to the house man-cave while watching manly sporting events like UFC fights and WNBA games, as the ladies conduct their lady-talk. Still, call me old-fashioned—I’ve been called worse—but the only male that should be at a baby shower is the one in utero, if it’s a boy. (Maybe also the stripper, if it’s a really modern baby shower.) And if your boy-child is a male, but you’d rather him be a girl, you’re in luck. All you need to do is wait for him to be born, to age a little, then to be dragooned into gender-reassignment activities like attending co-ed baby showers.
Unfortunately, this forced-socialization charade, this newfound scourge of the obligatory party circuit, is catching. So much so, that sites like beau-coup.com have published detailed guides on how to throw co-ed baby showers for wives and their eunuchs. They advise checking in with the “DTB (dad-to-be) to confirm that he does in fact want to be there.” (Like what the DTB wants has anything to do with anything.) They suggest recruiting a male co-host, to choose simple themes that appeal to both genders—something fun and tiki-torch-y, like luaus!—and to use “gender neutral” terminology in the invitations, perhaps calling it a “celebration” instead of a “shower,” since the latter connotes “pink punch and girl talk.”
Their reverse political-correctness is so desperate, as to be almost touching. They advise going with hearty taco-bar-style food, as opposed to cucumber and cream cheese tea sandwiches, since “guys have a big appetite!” They implore you to play fun games, like “baby bottle drinking contests” in which guests compete to see who can guzzle beer or liquor through a baby bottle, because nothing says “competent child care provider” like a high blood alcohol content. They caution to “avoid any awkward conversations,” such as those “involving the intimacies of pregnancy, labor, and/or diaper horror stories.” Because God forbid, ladies, that you should talk amongst yourselves about what pregnancy is all about, since you’re no longer actually amongst yourselves. Let’s erase the unpleasantness of childbirth, one of the most severe traumas your body will ever undergo, and sanitize it so that it better lends itself to Patron shots, quesadillas, and other sports-bar food as you strive to make what should have been a girls-only endeavor into an integrated sausage fest. Of course, since this was women’s idea in the first place, women are getting what they deserve. The irony being, they’re incorporating guys who likely don’t even want to be there, and who are operating under the assumption that they need to attend in order to continue having relations with their wives and girlfriends in this vicious circle of mutually-assured misery.
This is not only an insult to men, it’s an insult to women, who perhaps believe the co-ed baby shower is a way of sharing their childbirth burden, when, in fact, it’s merely discounting it. These showers aren’t thrown for real men. They’re thrown for faux-tag-along-men who go along with whatever their wives tell them to do, in the hope that their participation will bank them credit for doing as they’re told, which, of course, makes their wives secretly resent them.
The hard truth is that most women worth their salt don’t like their men to tell them “yes ma’am” no matter what they say. They want pushback. They want challenge. They want what any engaged human being wants from another supposedly engaged human being: signs of a pulse. Male pick-up artists call it “cat-on-a-string theory,” which, simply put, dictates that when a cat can have whatever it wants at any time (i.e., a yarn ball), it quickly loses interest. But so long as you drag the yarn ball in front of the cat, just out of reach, its interest is preserved and even intensified. Similarly, women secretly want us to resist incorporating ridiculous emasculating suggestions they might make, such as wearing mandals (man sandals), watching Orange is the New Black, or attending co-ed baby showers.
My wife has asked me repeatedly to attend any number of co-ed baby showers, thrown by good friends of ours. And no matter how much I like our mutual friends/their baby in the making, after I finish laughing in her face, I always say no, and come up with a good excuse for not attending: I’m washing my hair, or cutting myself, or reading the collected works of Sylvia Plath.
Because the one thing I don’t want my wife to do, in the now 22-year-old tango that is our marriage, is to think that I will say “yes” no matter what. While many women won’t admit it, the answer “no” often holds much more intrigue, especially when it’s offered for good reason: i.e., I don’t feel like sitting around with the gals talking lactation techniques.
Maybe most co-ed baby showers don’t amount to that. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one. But traditionally, baby showers are a rite of female passage—a chance for women to glory in their own motherhood. To celebrate something that they uniquely do, bringing a life into this world. Which is no small thing. I hate to break the news to sensitive guys who like to utter banalities like “We’re pregnant.” No, you’re not. She’s pregnant. You just did the fun part, scattering seed, which you were likely to do anyway, even if your wife wasn’t home at the time. And if several millennia of tradition hold, you will soon shoulder a just-as-heavy burden in the near future: financially supporting this child for the next 18 to 30 years. (At the rate millennials are currently leaving home.) These days, maybe the mother of your child will, too, since in 61 percent of married couples with children, both spouses are now employed. But in any case, there’ll be plenty of time for mutual shared sacrifice when raising the little bastards. Why start the misery early with compulsory attendance at dopey baby showers?
Despite all recent societal efforts to erase distinct gender roles, nature itself stubbornly refuses to let some be eradicated. Which is why, in any given maternity ward on any given day, those who are occupying the stirrups, pushing out the large craniums of the little bundles of obligation, screeching in ungodly pain, still break down as being roughly 100 percent women. So let’s let them have the spotlight, and their tea sandwiches, and their lactation talk. They’ve earned it. I don’t necessarily understand it all. Nor do I need to be in on it. Such is the beauty and mystery of womanhood, a sanctum that happily forever lies just out of my reach. Women are intriguing enough without us feeling the need to crash their parties, which is precisely why I married one.
So if you really need to have baby-bottle drinking contests while strapping on the taco-bar feedbag, have some self-respect, and do it on your own time. Like a man.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
