Consenting to Trauma
Men, Birth, and the Truth About Power
The entire purpose of “consent” is to elicit submission and to manufacture the illusion of power where there is none.
This is true in the context of voting
It’s true in the context of medical treatments
It’s true in the context of sexuality
And it’s true in the context of industrial childbirth.
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Anyone who asks you for your consent (or your vote), owns the playing field, and controls the rules of engagement.
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If you choose to play on their turf, they own you.
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I shared a post on instagram recently, in which I stated:
One of the objectives of the industrial obstetric sphere is to emasculate men. It’s such an interesting contradiction to see men who will “forbid” their wives from giving birth at home and insist that their wives give birth in the hospital. They genuinely believe that in dictating institutional birth they are being protective of their wives, because we have been so successfully sold the myth that the hospital is the safest place to give birth. But in fact, what these men are doing (unwittingly) is offering their wives and children up to what amounts to a ritual sacrifice while he, the husband and father, stands by watching the sexualized violation of his wife and baby— watching as another man (if it’s a male obstetrician) puts his hands inside his wife’s sacred portal. This makes men complicit, not only in the abuse of their wives and babies, but complicit in their own cuckholding.
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We are only just beginning to unravel the multi-faceted impacts of birth-related trauma on mothers and babies. The repercussions of the humiliation ritual of industrial birth on men are all but entirely ignored.
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Yet when men neuter themselves, by consenting to their own powerlessness to protect their wives and children, this has an effect, to say the least; an effect on the man himself and his sense of dignity, on his wife and the way she perceives him and his role as her protector, on the sexual dynamics of their relationship, and on the culture at large.
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(My husband Lee and I have created a birth-preparation course for men and women, called Freebirth for Awakened Fathers—enrolment is open now).