Strollerderby : TMI

Airing the Parental Dirty Laundry

Brett Singer — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

If you blog, you presumably want readers. And one way to do that is with a snappy headline. One could borrow from supermarket tabloids and go with something sensational and completely fake -- "Sarah Palin Gives Birth To Three Headed Alien" – that would do it. But if you blog about family matters, the truth can work just as well.

For example: this post on Yahoo! Shine.

My son is home!!! And I am really mad at his father.

The title got me to click and see what the heck was going on.

The first sentence was a grabber:

I recently wrote a blog about how I hate it when my son goes to his father's for Christmas.

Then it got better:

So many of you left very nice comments about my tough time while he is gone. There were a few that said I was being petty. Let me Go deeper into this........

I started to feel like a voyeur. This was pretty personal stuff. But it's not like I'm looking in the author's window. I'm reading something she posted on the Internet.

I'm not sure what the initial post was about, but this one tells the tale of a father who brought his son home after Christmas with an injured thumb. The mother was mad because the kid should have gone to the emergency room, and thinks that pop was too cheap to pay the seventy-five dollar co-pay. The injury is described in "ER"-level detail: "When I picked him up, it was black and purple and he could not bend it. We went immediately to the ER. After 2 shots of pain killer, they drilled 2 holes in the nail to relieve the pressure." Presumably the couple is divorced and the boy was spending the holidays with his father, although the post doesn't say that explicitly.

So here's my question. Is this fair to the kid, the father, and everyone else involved? Most of us who blog, whether for pay or play, reveal certain details. But it's one thing to talk about a goofy thing your three year old told you. It's another thing to reveal personal details like the ones on this particular Shine post.

It could be a generational thing. I'm selective about what I share with the world, and I think most folks are. Other people don't mind putting it all out there. (That's why Facebook is so successful.) In this case, I imagine that posting these personal details is therapeutic for the author. It is also interesting to other people; the post has over 100 comments. But if I'm the father, I'd be irritated.

Of course, if I'm the father and I really didn't take my son to the emergency room because I didn't want to spend seventy-five dollars, I'm also a major league jerk. Part of the problem, of course, is that we don't know what the father did or didn't do. It's possible that he weighed in with a comment; I haven't read them all. Still, judgments will be made – by me, the commenters on Shine, and commenters here. That's the nature of blogs. Once it's out there, it's out there. But is there a line that we shouldn't cross when kids and/or our significant others are involved? Can there be such a thing as too much sharing online?

Source: Yahoo Shine

Image (which is completely unrelated to this topic): sas.org.uk

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Ohh, Baby - Orgasmic Birth Video

Brett Singer — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Some things go great together. Chocolate and peanut butter. Milk and cookies. Childbirth and orgasms.

What, you disagree? You think that it's unbelievably weird to be thinking about sex while your child is being born? What are you, a stiff?

There's a scene in Edward Albee's play "The Goat or Who is Sylvia?" (which is about a man who -- SPOILER ALERT -- cheats on his wife with a goat) when the father (who is having an affair with a goat) is comforting his son and talking about becoming sexually aroused at a certain inappropriate time (when a baby is bouncing on your lap). His friend enters and overhears the conversation, saying, "Is there anything that doesn't turn you people on?"

That's what I thought of when I saw this video. What possible good can come from reaching orgasm while you give birth? Why does it have to be either insanely painful or insanely pleasurable? Why not something in between?

If somebody wants to give birth outside of a hospital, that's their business. (Unless they want to do it RIGHT outside a hospital, on the street. That seems like a bad idea.) Madeline Holler just wrote a terrific essay on home births. But why does it need to be a sexual experience? And before you say, "Don't knock it 'til you've tried it," let me be the first to tell you that trying it isn't an issue, because it'll never happen.

Here's the video. You tell me what the creepy factor is. For me, on a scale of one to ten, this is an eleven. But maybe I'm just uptight.

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Come Again? Orgasmic Childbirth?

Kelly Mills — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:23:00 GMT

It would be criminal not to report on this one: Jezebel had this bit on women who have orgasms during childbirth. Yes, that would be an orgasm during childbirth.

Yep.

Now, I've had a few days to absorb this one so my reaction has been tempered by time. Why, I was even able to click on the link and read the stories, something I could not make myself do for like, four days. And now that I've mellowed a little, I'll say I understand the connection between pain and sex (though in my experience, childbirth pain was a completely different kind of praying-for-death pain) and I would not want anyone to feel ashamed of a surprise O, so that's what I've got on the positive side.

But that does NOT mean I want to hear the details of the birthing orgasm, because I'd actually like to have sex again, thanks. No more of this: "A woman in California was giving birth at home in a portable birth tub and feeling very sexy and loving with her partner. Each time she had a contraction she would cry out, 'Oh, baby, I love it. More...more!' Her windows were open because it was July, and soon a crowd gathered outside her home. When the baby was born amidst shouts of 'Yes!!! Yes!!! Oh, my God, yes!!!' her neighbors gave her a great round of applause. They only realized that it was a birth after they heard the cries of a baby."

Yeah, that was one of the tame ones. And there's a couple more reasons I don't wanna hear about it. The stories skeeved me out in a big way. I do not ever want to know about anyone's oiled vagina sexy baby coming. Bleugh. And because while birth might have been goody-goody sweaty Goddess primal power for a few of you, I'd rather be waterboarded than do childbirth again. The fact that some people orgasm is maybe proof the universe hates me so much, because, um, not me, AT ALL. Should I ever make the mistake of allowing myself to get into that mess for a second time, I'll have them hook me up to a non-stop epidural at the first Braxton-Hicks. Oh, and if you made a spectrum of how childbirth felt, my experience would be over here, 'bearable' would be somewhere near Mars, and 'orgasmic' would be in a galaxy so far away Captain Kirk hasn't even dreamed about the hot alien chicks who live there yet.

"Honey, on the day you were born, I had the most amazing orgasm." "Could you please shoot me now, mom?"

No thank you. If you O'd, you've got company. Great. But no more TMI.

Strollerderby : TMI

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