Abstract
Employing a material discursive approach, this article deconstructs advice within published guides to pregnancy and birth written by men for men. We deconstruct the representation of feelings and emotions in men during this period rejecting essentialist and social constructionist views of gendered emotionality. We find the texts are saturated with emotional advice, which is ambivalent and resorts to forms of essentialism that obscure male vulnerabilities and leave male forms of power intact. While men can expect to feel love, fear, and disgust, the case for male calm and stoicism is reconstructed, threatening dire consequences if he fails. Our study makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the affective assemblage that accompanies men who are now expected to care during pregnancy, labor, and birth. Men are constructed as having an embodied experience that cannot be admitted to, ensuring that hegemonic masculine understandings reinforce gendered constructions of care, caring and emotions during pregnancy, labor and birth.
Keywords
Introduction
There has been intense social scientific interest in fathering and fatherhood, following a relatively rapid social change in men’s involvement in pregnancy and birth in the United Kingdom. The proportion of fathers now present at birth is 87% (but with lower proportions amongst some ethnic groups (National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit 2014)) compared to 35% in the 1970s and the 1980s (King 2017); in many parts of the Global North, a father’s presence at birth is arguably no longer seen as optional (Ekstőm et al. 2013). These changes are reflected in United Kingdom’s health policy as well as internationally. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (2014), the Department of Health (2012), the Royal College of Midwives (2011), and the World Health Organisation (2017) have all issued guidance for involving fathers in antenatal education and care, birth, and postnatal care.
Despite or perhaps because of such rapid social change, the roles of men during pregnancy, labor, and birth remains far from clear. Empirical studies, primarily in Western Europe, consistently report that men feel marginalized, uncertain, and helpless, especially during labor (Chin, Hall, and Daiches 2010; Dolan and Coe 2011; Ekstőm et al. 2013; Fenwick, Bayes, and Johansson 2012; Ives 2014; Premberg et al. 2011). We also know that men who lose control of their bodies or emotions in the birth room risk being sanctioned by staff and told to “leave the room” (Premberg et al. 2011) or to “pull themselves together” (Draper 1997). When there are tensions between men’s marginal, largely passive role and more conventional norms of masculinity associated with skilled bodily activity or calm rationality (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), men’s fears may be heightened, leaving them emotionally isolated and their embodied experience unexplored (Dolan and Coe 2011). Given the evidence that fear may play a part in men’s experiences of pregnancy, labor, and birth, we might expect parenting manuals to attend to such feelings.
Research on parenting texts have identified that when men appear, they are often positioned as part-time, supplementary, and lacking competency in caregiving, with their primary role as financial providers (Hunter et al. 2020; Sunderland, 2000). Analysis of texts for fathers who are the primary caregivers, the presentation of a “masculine caregiving repertoire” is playful and more “rough and tumble” (Hunter et al. 2020, 161). This legitimizes their care role while preserving their masculinity. Yet there are very few published studies of pregnancy and birth advice books (exceptions are Kennedy et al. 2009; Rodgers 2015; Sunderland 2000). The literature available suggests that representations of men in pregnancy and birth guides are limited and problematic. For instance, Thomas, Lupton, and Pedersen’s (2018) examination of pregnancy applications ('apps') for fathers found that notions of “intimate fatherhood” are encouraged in men, and yet at the same time, their advice is trivialized. Similarly, Shiebling’s (2020) analysis of “Dad Bloggers” identifies tensions in reconstructing “caring masculinities.”
Research examining the rise of adaptive “nurturing” forms of masculinity or masculinities has primarily focused on how men socially construct their identities to integrate caring roles as they transition to becoming fathers (Chin et al. 2011; Crespi and Ruspini 2015; England and Dyck 2014). Such studies draw upon respondents’ talk to suggest an enactment of hybrid masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014), generating a literature that finds that “inclusive” masculinities now coexist without dominating one another (Anderson 2009; Borkowska 2020), because men are becoming more emotionally attuned (de Boise and Hearn 2017). However, hegemonic masculinity is adaptive (Connell and Messerschmit 2005), and these studies suggest that it functions in more nuanced ways by absorbing so-called feminine behaviors without radically challenging politically gendered inequalities.
Apart from post-hoc and vague accounts of experiencing “confusion,” what this means men may actually feel, or representations of what they may expect to feel, while they navigate pregnancy, labor and birth has received little or no systematic attention. Feelings matter because they tell us something about material-discursive tensions, and they direct our attention away from neat post-hoc cognitive social constructions that neglect gendered power relations (Borkowska 2020). Feelings are felt within bodies and derive from emotions that are forms of mental reaction. When bodies and embodiment become our focus, we resist the Cartesian mind-body dualism with its tendency towards an objectification of the body, and instead we treat bodies and feelings as important sources of data for understanding entrenched forms of oppression as well as opportunities for empowerment. How to study feelings is, however, not without its challenges. This is because feelings and emotions for men can be sources of (gendered) shame that “talk” avoids.
Perhaps more than any other arena of social life, pregnancy and childbirth are treated as indubitably a woman’s realm. Materially and therefore empirically speaking, most activity happens within and through women’s bodies. However, this privileging of the woman’s body is in tension with how men may have responsibility for some physiological and social aspects of pregnancy and birth (Almeling and Waggoner 2013). Fathers too will be having an embodied experience at this time (Elliot 2016), and this matters in order to avoid the dualism that men are all reason and women are all body. The focus on a woman’s body alone obscures how contemporary gendered relations interact with an arena of social life that is intimately entwined with nature and “the natural” (Garlik 2019).
An emphasis on the cis woman in pregnancy and birthing publications, some authors of popular pregnancy guides have argued (Beaumont 2013; Sinclair 2014), has given rise to a pressing need for literature and material that is distinctively aimed at men. Ignoring the compulsive heterosexuality of this said need, numerous books have entered the United Kingdom market, written by men, for men. We have chosen some texts primarily designed to guide cisgender men in heterosexual relationships about what to do, and not do, during the pregnancy and labor of their partners, and during the birth of their kids. They are replete with advice about what to expect and “do” with feelings, and as such they offer a rich empirical avenue into the representation of embodied masculinities, and thus provide insight into a professed “confusion” around the expectations and experiences of a man’s involvement. Representation of embodied masculinities we argue, point to normative assumptions about power relations that may be obscuring men’s embodied understanding of their experiences.
Ontology and Epistemology
Written texts relating to heterosexual relationships can be particularly rich sources and important epistemological sites to study how gender is being constructed relationally (Lazar 2007; Sunderland 2000). We use a material-discursive analytical approach to focus on the representation of emotions and the advice given to men about managing their feelings. We treat pregnancy and birth guides as affective objects in that they are designed to elicit specific emotional responses in men, and they draw upon wider affective assemblages of gender and emotion work (Fox and Alldred 2015).
For critical scholars of men and masculinities, emotion and embodiment is an area of growing interest (de Boise and Hearn 2017). Such research highlights assumptions about men’s emotional embodied lives that deserve close examination. Feelings and emotions are felt within bodies (embodied), amid suppositions that men simply “repress” emotions (Pease 2012), which is treated as bad both for men’s well-being (Cleary 2012) and for gender equality (Kaufman and Kimmel 2011). Rather than being an innate biological trait, emotional inexpressiveness is an effect of being socialized within a patriarchal society (Branney and White 2008). For some, the implication is that, if a lack of emotional expressiveness is socialized into men, then presumably emotional inexpressiveness could be socialized out (which would assist the pursuit of gender equality as well as promoting men’s well-being; Elliot 2016). If the available spaces and “permission” to express feelings or emotions are less accessible to men, then men’s emotional lives matter because they tell us something about gendered systems and structures. “A fear or worry of being judged ‘unmanly’ by partners, peers or colleagues may actually support so-called cultural displays of ‘rationality’” (de Boise and Hearn 2017, 8). Anger or silence, therefore, may be deemed rational even if they are not progressive. This interface between felt emotion and the acceptability or unacceptability of emotional expressivity is where embodiment becomes theoretically relevant.
When men enter territory that is traditionally associated with women, pressure to perform discursive and representational gender work intensifies. Hegemonic masculinity—associated with “hyper-heterosexuality, control, technical/physical competence, autonomy and rationality” (Cottingham 2014, 136), or emotional detachment—becomes the valorized discursive position against which men largely position themselves (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). de Boise and Hearn (2017) argue that men learn to hide emotions or maintain an emotional distance as a result of being socialized to become a man. If we “belittle men’s emotional competence [we]…reinforce gender inequalities” (Holmes 2015, 180). As such, it cannot be assumed that an emotional embodied experience is present only if it is overtly expressed and articulated. A presumed lack of emotion, de Boise and Hearn (2017, 4) argue, is better explained as the absence of an overt display of emotion; “It is an inability to understand, express or communicate, rather than an inherent inability to develop emotions which men often struggle with.”
This tension between what is felt and what gets articulated, de Boise (2018) argues, is conditioned by and reproduced within an array of cultural forces rather than biologically determined. Representations of men, who assume roles traditionally associated with women and care, contribute to this affective territory. Following the “affective” or “materialist turn” points us to an examination of how power circulates through feeling and is negotiated within the public sphere, and then experienced through the body (Doucet 2013; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). The social circulates through our bodies, but is not reducible to the individual, the personal, or the psychological. Instead, as Ahmed argues, “feelings might be how structures get under our skin” (2010, 216). This means that “men” should not be taken as an identity-orientated category, but rather as a social material-discursive category susceptible to de-construction (Beasley 2012; Hearn 2014). Feelings have an ontology as do representations that ideologically represent men’s bodily experiences and emotions. We favor a materialist understanding whereby “bodies, things and abstractions” converge and as such we do not treat a text as analytically discrete (Fox and Alldred 2015, 2).
The absence of studies examining the representation of men’s feeling and emotion during pregnancy and childbirth indicates a gap in our understanding of the affective assemblage and context in which men are now expected to be involved. Guidebooks seek to elicit desirable emotional responses in men, but within a hierarchical gender order and a context in which some emotions are deemed positive (love) and others negative (anger; de Boise and Hearn 2017). In this paper, we undertake a material-discursive analysis of affect and embodiment via pregnancy guidebooks, as opposed to the accounts of individuals. This offers a novel way with which to theorize the tensions between men’s vulnerabilities and power. Emotions are not merely subjective experiences but are a form of “disciplinary regulation” within the context of power and privilege (de Boise and Hearn 2017, 10). By deconstructing these texts with a materialist-discursive lens, we see that the texts are saturated with men’s emotion, both in tone and in the focus of the advice. This materialist focus will contribute to our understanding of how gendered inequalities, and here especially masculinity, may be lived (Macht 2020).
Study Design
Drawing on a material-discursive approach in our analysis of guidebooks on pregnancy and birth for men, we sought to identify discursive representations of affect in men to better understand masculinity as a technology of embodiment (Garlick 2019). We identified five popular guides to birth and pregnancy, written by men, for men. As our context, both experientially and in terms of maternity care arrangements, is within the United Kingdom—as there are cross-cultural variations in both masculinity and fatherhood—we limited our focus to this geographical region. We selected the clear leaders on Amazon’s bestseller list of pregnancy and birth guides written by men in the United Kingdom and marketed specifically for men. 1 While we recognize the limitations of sampling texts in this way, the presence of these texts on the list suggests that the books are marketable and, at least to some extent, in current circulation. Following Illouz (2014), we would argue that their relative success reflects their resonance with their audience. Resonance, according to Illouz, is achieved when a text draws on familiar cultural structures, norms, and values. Resonance can also be evoked when a text says something that is difficult to articulate; either because it defies language, it is socially unacceptable, or it addresses a social experience that is not adequately understood or categorized. Texts that resonate typically address social contradictions and offer readers guidelines to use in their lives. Illouz argues that popular self-help books and child-rearing books resonate in this way.
The books included in our analysis are resonant in the way they speak to norms of masculinity, and to uncertainties around what men may feel about pregnancy, labor or birth. While they vary considerably in approach, emphasis, and viewpoint, all five books cover pregnancy, labor, and birth; the physiological processes of fatherhood; what to expect from healthcare; and what they, as men, should and should not be doing and feeling. While on the surface these books are about men becoming fathers, they are also texts about what men may expect to feel around pregnant and birthing women. It was this focus that interested us.
The five books analysed are: Rob Kemp’s (2010) The Expectant Dad’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know; Mark Woods’ (2010) Pregnancy for Men: The Whole 9 Months; Dean Baumont’s (2013) The Expectant Dad’s Handbook; Neil Sinclair’s (2014) Commando Dad: Raw Recruits; and Mark Harris’s (2015) Men, Love and Birth. The first four focus on men’s expectations of fatherhood during pregnancy, as well as their role during labor and birth. With his background in midwifery, Harris’s focus is preparation for birth. All five books imagine the reader to be a heterosexual, in-work man, who is relatively affluent (able to afford a “flight” and decorate “the nursery”). Sinclair does dedicate a section to young fathers, but otherwise there is little attention to the diversity of fathers and no reference to queer experiences.
These texts are rich sources of constructions of men’s feelings and emotions during pregnancy and birth. Not only do these texts draw upon the authors’ own embodied experience of pregnancy and childbirth (as fathers, antenatal teachers, and, for one author, a midwife), but each author also has extensive working exposure to the experiences of men-only settings (running antenatal classes for men and writing for magazines for men). This is not to suggest that these authors “faithfully” reflect the feelings of other men; only that the choices the authors make about how to construct, frame, and articulate what “should” be known speak to some broad assumptions about what men want to know and typically fear and feel as they become fathers. Our contention is that these texts are such valuable sources about men’s embodiment precisely because of their explicit and implicit focus on emotions.
Our analytical approach was to engage independently with the texts, reading each text over a period of months. We posed a number of questions adapted from Lupton and Barclay (1997). How are expectant fathers discursively positioned in relation to a pregnant partner? How do the authors frame and construct men’s feelings, emotions, and bodies during pregnancy and birth? What assumptions are made about the gendering of feelings during pregnancy and childbirth? What is given particular attention or focus? What are the material silences and absences?
We also discussed our own embodied experience of reading. Reflexively, we noted that the texts were not written for us. As cis-gender women, academics, and mothers, we are not addressed by the texts and found ourselves reading from the margins (Fetterley 1997). While supportive of men’s involvement in pregnancy and birth (and having given birth with the support of male partners), we both found aspects of what we were reading uncomfortable in terms of how we, as women, were depicted. Using “blokey” humor, we found ourselves painted in universalizing and disembodied ways. However, by looking for representations of men’s embodied relationship to pregnancy, labor, and birth we found a compassionate reading that offered a view beyond the surface appearance.
We examined the construction of men’s roles in pregnancy and birth, with particular attention to how emotions and embodiment are represented. As the possibility of social sanction is high when men enter women’s territory, the exploration of men’s embodied experiences is fraught with methodological challenges. An interrogation of the kind proposed here offers the valuable prospect of examining what may get socially repressed, not through the frame of identity, but as a study of affect. These texts instruct men on “how to move through spaces in ways that are acceptable, normal and in concert with public expectations” (Doucet 2013, 291).
We met to discuss the emerging patterns and themes informed by our theoretical and ontological framing. We undertook an iterative process of re-reading, interpreting, and discussing. We found advice about the regulation of emotions and what to do with them was evident throughout the texts. We identified three themes about feelings that in our view were given most emotional charge in terms of the style, tone, and emphasis. The feelings or emotions most worthy of description and advice were love, fear, and disgust.
Findings
Fatherhood and Emotions: “Emotion Alerts!”
Each author of the five pregnancy guides signals his own credentials as a father, including admission by four authors of a lack of preparedness and feelings of regret that went with their first experience of the transition to fatherhood. Woods, a journalist, describes himself as having been “so confused” (3); Kemp, also a journalist writing for men’s magazines, says, “I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do” (10); Beaumont, initially a builder, became an antenatal educator because: “in the environment of the labour and birth I was totally out of my comfort zone. This led to memories of the birth of my son being tainted with feelings of guilt for not being better prepared” (2). Sinclair, an ex-commando and now stay-at-home dad writes: “This is the book I wish I’d been issued with when I found out I was going to be a new dad” (i). Harris, a practising midwife who runs a birth education program for “blokes,” poignantly observes: “being present at birth provokes a wide range of behaviours from men, from angry confrontational shouting, to becoming withdrawn and playing games on a tablet” (17). Each author talks about how it felt to be uncertain and unprepared, with Harris explicitly referring to the behavior he witnesses as a midwife that can result in feelings of “regret” and “shame.” All five feel strongly enough to publish advice for the benefit of other men. This speaks to compassion and to the emotional experience that leads to being “absolutely passionate about supporting dads to become better prepared for fatherhood” (Sinclair, 2004, 1).
Each author treats the “journey of fatherhood [as] an inherently emotional one” (3), but lest this emphasis on emotions is misinterpreted, they also signal their conformity with hegemonic masculine ways to show they remain “real” men. Each provide examples of this. References to “commando dad” (Sinclair 2014, ii); “rock hard erections” (Harris 2015, 63); “pregnancy magazines [being] insightful—not just the lingerie section” (Kemp 2010, 74), “puerile…humour” (Woods 2010, 2), and “be[ing] her protector” (Beaumont 2013, 72) explicitly signal the masculine (read heterosexual) credentials of the authors. Women’s bodies are graphically described, where there is largely silence (other than reference to hormones and arousal) about men’s bodies. They seek to validate their advice and to reassure the reader that they too can be a birth companion without compromising their association with culturally valorized masculinity. Sinclair peppers his book with “Emotion Alerts!,” and all the authors provide guidance “to safely navigate your way through” (Beaumont 2013, 47).
There is something potentially radical or progressive about each text. They acknowledge that men have strong emotions and an embodied experience during pregnancy and birth. However, they ultimately fall short of subverting hegemonic masculine tropes in their construction of the pregnant and birthing woman as irrational, hyper-emotional, and in need therefore of a stoic “rock” rather than an emotionally intimate and literate partner.
Of the three emotional themes identified in the texts, love (or at least strong positive feeling) and fear were explicitly referred to across all five texts, whereas disgust was implicitly derived from tone and emphasis in descriptions of women’s transforming, “leaky” bodies (Shildrick 1997). We found that men are instructed that love is both desirable and to be expected at birth, but that displays of love may need to be instrumentally cultivated during pregnancy. Fear, by contrast, is treated as a feeling to expect but one that men should repress for the sake of their partner and to avoid becoming a hindrance during labor. The texts seek to quell feelings of disgust by rational, physiological explanations about changes to a woman’s body being a necessary part of growing “his” baby.
Feeling Love: “Emotions So New to You that They Will Knock You Flat on Uour Arse”
Fathers are told to expect a wave of positive emotions: “…the memories of the moment you became a father…nothing even gets close to how you will feel.” (Woods 2010, 217) “Gentlemen, expect waves of huge emotions” (Sinclair 2014, 118). Only Harris makes explicit and regular reference to feeling “love” for the woman as well as the baby. Kemp refers to the possibility that following birth some men may feel “underwhelmed,” lacking emotion as a result of the “trauma” of birth (191). Love for mother and baby is framed as a “natural” response, expressed through taking on the masculine role of “protector.” Both Beaumont and Harris see the “protector role” as being the masculine, bodily way to display love, so she feels calm and “safe.” The plan is to utilize “natural” responses, based in evolution, that will facilitate women to produce oxytocin, a necessary hormone for birth. Harris appeals to men to use love and protection in the service of a rich and “natural” birth experience for both him and her.
As well as predicting and expecting that men will feel love and “emotions so new to you that they will knock you flat on your arse” (Woods 2010, 19) at the point of birth, their projects are concerned with persuading men to cultivate such feelings and to “care for and about” the fetus before birth. Like Harris, Woods wants to make the case that men’s care for their partners has a necessary biological effect on pregnancy and birth. As such, “doing” care, he concludes (with some uncertainty), must be an intrinsic part of men’s nature: “[I]t seems almost natural for the expectant dad to start playing a more active—supportive role” to help him become focused on his “role as a new dad” (34; our emphasis).
For the sake of their babies and themselves, men are instructed to bond prior to the arrival of the baby, and care or love becomes an affect to be treated instrumentally: “a massive impact on the bonding process for both you and your baby” [because] “involved dads lead to more successful breastfeeding” (Beaumont 2013, 25, 27). And if the prize of becoming an effective father with a well-bonded—and breast-fed—baby is not sufficient rationale, then self-interest is evoked: [R]esearch…shows, the sooner we act like dads, the more chance…we’ll hang around…the…less likely [we will be] to suffer from depression…and [the] more likely [we will be] to develop a strong connection with the baby (Kemp 2010, 11).
Preparedness for birth is presented as necessary for playing the role of protector with the potential for challenges to masculinity if men feel “useless:” It is inevitable that you are going to see her in pain and at times you may feel helpless. (Sinclair 2014, 101) Too many men feel a sense of regret or shame at not being able to “do anything” when the woman they love seemed to need them most. (Harris 2015, 21) The most important thing to remember is: don’t panic!…you have to remember that you can be a hindrance to the birthing process and your job is not to direct, but to protect. This can be easier said than done for many men due to our inbuilt “fix-it” reflex.…In summary: listen to her, reassure her and just be there for her. (Beaumont 2013, 75, 78-9; original emphasis)
Feeling Fear: “Gentlemen, I don’t use the Word ‘Fear’ Lightly”
Fear is the predominant feeling that expectant fathers are coached to expect: fear of becoming a father, fear that they may not feel the way they are expected to feel, and fear of witnessing the birth. The authors do not mince words. Men can expect to feel “scared shitless” (Woods 2010, 204) and “petrified” (Beaumont 2013, 36): “Gentlemen, I don’t use the word ‘fear’ lightly. As a commando I experienced truly frightening situations. I soon realised that I didn’t fear being a dad, that was now inevitable—I feared the unknown.” (Sinclair 2014, 1)
Kemp writes about “struggling to feel any bond or empathy with the thing growing inside her” (10). He explains he was not sure he wanted to be a dad and, in interviews with expectant fathers, describes some meeting the news of pregnancy with a “rarely voiced sense of impending doom” (19). Woods too acknowledges that feelings of fear may generate a flight response: “you may start hatching your ‘escape plan’” (119). All authors treat these feelings as entirely explicable and rational but also as “negative.” Such feelings may be regarded as socially unacceptable, so should not be verbalized: “For the love of God do not let…[it]…turn into words” (Woods 2010, 44).
Instead of treating feelings and emotions as relational, embodied, and something inherent to being human, men are instructed to engage in a form of emotion work. Such feelings are not presented as a starting point for a conversation with their partner about what may be worrying them. Harris explicitly invokes the biological imperative: “[a man’s]…main job…and in one form or another it’s been the role of a man for thousands of years—is to keep fear at bay” (34). Men must, Beaumont stresses, “deal with them” [negative feelings] (34), although how is not expanded upon. Men just have to “act as a calming, reasoned voice of comfort” (Kemp 2010, 51; our emphasis).
These texts suggest that this form of emotion work is appropriate and helpful for men while partners are pregnant and birthing, thus reconstructing essentialist assumptions that only women can be having an embodied experience of pregnancy and birth. Masculinity, then, is defined as disembodied and thus unobjectifiable. Men are guided to suppress their own feelings through surface acting (keeping feelings intact and faking a response) and deep acting (changing internal feelings to align them appropriately with normative assumptions about what is appropriate). Kemp gives men the “advice and tips you need to make the right decisions and noises” (15; our emphasis). He recommends men should “massage the bump. Psychologically it’s thought that by doing this you’ll lose many of the negative thoughts you have about the baby” (Kemp 2010, 71). Not only should men mask “negative” feelings, but they should also assume responsibility for the management of their partner’s emotional state. Expression of emotions and “volcanic eruptions” are treated as legitimate for women, but his task is to do his best to manage and control his partner’s feelings. He is the one to “bring things down a notch or two” (Woods 2010, 44). “It’s down to you to keep her if not happy, then at least on the right side of volcanic” (Woods 2010, 193).
This advice for men to do emotion work becomes more strident with the onset of labor. Men unable to achieve a state of “deep acting” (Hochschild, 1983) are depicted as creating scenarios saturated with avoidable risk: If I was to tell you that you have it within your power to affect the length of your partner’s labour, the degree of pain she may or may not feel during labour, even the outcome of the birth—whether interventions are required or even whether she has a Caesarean section—how would you feel?…it’s all true. (Beaumont 2013, 79; original emphasis)
Beaumont takes this further, reducing it to the biological: they are in animal mode and beyond surface acting. “She will smell your fear” (Beaumont 2013, 77). A man unable to stop his fear leaking will produce the hindering influence of adrenaline in “mum,” “potentially leading to a prolonged or even stalled labour” that is “more painful and more complicated” (Woods 2010, 201) as well as causing “delayed bonding with baby” (Beaumont 2013, 40). Beaumont suggests men unable to combat their fear should “question whether you should really be there at the birth” (36).
The advice is heavy with the implicit recognition of a materially embodied experience, and yet the authors pull back from the full meaning of this possibility by reasserting disembodied behavioral tropes and cognitive instruction on ways of being for men. Reflecting upon the emotionally alarmist tone of what men should do with their fear, we surmise that this is because pregnancy and birth are consistently constructed as their partner’s experience, even though some advice is contradictory. It is not his, but at the same time, it is his to mess up. Men are framed in disembodied ways and as cognitively plastic: “As a Commando Dad you will be tactful and empathetic” (Sinclair 2014, 154). The notion that men are merely “supporting actors” (Woods 2010, 154) because this is materially feminine-embodied territory constructs silence about men’s relationally embodied experience, or the possibility that the woman might want to know about how it feels for him.
Feeling Disgust: “There Will be Blood…and Poo!”
Material changes within and outside a woman’s body are extensively detailed in Sinclair, Beaumont, Wood, and Kemp. Harris puts more emphasis on the materiality of hormonal activity. Pages of description explain what is happening within a woman’s body, as the fetus develops. The rationale for this emphasis seems to be that men will notice and therefore might feel alarmed and even disgusted as a woman’s body changes from the body that is sexually familiar to the body that is now maternal and unfamiliar. The emphasis and the tone of these sections of the text suggest shared assumptions about how men might feel about bodily changes within a woman during pregnancy and birth.
Men are warned that women will experience weight gain, absence of a waist, larger breasts, leaking breasts, breast engorgement, increased sweating, vaginal discharge, stretch marks, waddling, wind, hemorrhoids, constipation, and darkening nipples. Graphic body descriptions suggest the likelihood of, among other feelings, horror or panic about the changes to women’s bodies. Any anxieties men may feel about the body failing standard tests of hegemonic femininity are not dealt with head-on. Physical changes are treated instead as merely “symptoms” of pregnancy (Sinclair 2014, 102). “Her nipples are darkening in colour [and] the blood supply to your partner’s vagina and vulva increases in a big way from now on and they both tend to turn a purple colour, so please don’t be alarmed” (Woods 2010, 53, 84). This assumption that men will be unnerved by and need reassurance about the physical changes to a woman’s body suggests that men are be expected to have a hegemonic masculine relationship with a women’s bodies. Sinclair refers to a pregnant and birthing woman as the “Commanding Officer” or “CO” and the fetus as “Baby Trouper” or BT:” “The weight of your BT is pressing on the large blood vessels in your CO’s pelvis…this causes smaller veins in the pelvis, legs and rectum to swell” (22).
Feelings of apprehension and disquiet in men towards the leaky female body are in high evidence as earthy descriptions of what to expect during birth are put forward: “it’s almost certainly going to get ugly” (Sinclair 2014, 100) and “there will be blood…. Just get yourself back together as soon as possible…. As ever don’t panic” (Kemp 2010, 157 and 165).
Men are also advised to “prepare for poo” (Woods 2010, 211). Kemp suggests that should this happen, it could be “the bit that’ll never leave your mind” even though he then advises “your role at this point is to ignore it completely” because “your partner shouldn’t feel embarrassed for a single second” (Woods 2010 178, 211; our emphasis). Advice encourages men to maintain the illusion, apparently for her sake, of the bounded female body.
For a man to see the body of a woman with whom he is sexually familiar in such unexpected and challenging ways is represented as generating unsettling feelings.
These examples within texts are saturated with allusions to an embodied emotional turmoil in men as they transition toward fatherhood. Feelings of alarm, panic, and disgust about a woman’s transforming body and the meanings associated with such changes suggest these emotions are both demanded and elicited from men who can expect a viscerally embodied experience. Yet to avoid the shame and guilt of acknowledging the gendered meaning of this embodied experience as unmanly, advice simultaneously avoids this territory, beseeching men to keep what they feel to themselves, to perform heteronormatively, and so to maintain the veneer of hegemonic masculinity, all as an act of care.
Discussion and Conclusion
We know that men want to, and are now expected to be, present during pregnancy and birth. Even so, they report feeling marginal and confused about their role (Draper 1997; Premberg et al. 2011). The pregnancy guides written by men that seek to prepare other men for a specifically masculine role during pregnancy and labor provide guidance about what they can expect to be doing and feeling when they enter what is traditionally women’s territory. Our material-discursive analysis identified the construction of three affects—love, fear, and disgust—in relation to a range of feelings men may undergo during the pregnancy of a presumed partner and the birth of a child. We then examined the extensive gendered advice about what to do with these feelings, the effect of which, we argue, is to ensure that gendered assumptions about behavior do not get destabilized.
Only women are to be permitted free reign with their (irrational) emotions, whereas men should stoically bear “female” eruptions, suppressing feelings of fear and channeling calm rationality, while also averting a critical “gaze” from a body that will fail the tests of hegemonic femininity (Price and Shildrick 1997, 3). To aid their feeling management, men may conceive of themselves as “protectors”—strong, capable, and in control. Love may erupt at birth but is construed in instrumental terms during pregnancy as a positive and necessary feeling that should be cultivated primarily for the sake of the fetus (soon to be “his” baby). Such advice about what men should do with feelings is reconstructed as the masculine way to “do” his love or “care” during pregnancy and birth (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Doucet and Lee 2014; England and Dyck 2014).
In writing emotions into the enactment of a masculine role, the texts are potentially progressive. However, we found that the authors implicitly give men permission to “cleave” to conventionally masculine ways of being to “conceal inner emotional turmoil” (Holmes 2015). As men’s bodies do not undergo the same upheaval and given the texts’ essentialist assumptions that men are rational (and therefore unemotional)—or at least should be emotionally inexpressive—the authors construct a set of “feeling rules.” These are based upon a hierarchy of “need” (de Boise and Hearn 2017), in which those with visible “symptoms” and thus legitimate expressive feelings must take priority. These “feeling rules” are rationalized but accompanied by highly emotive language, often in alarmist tones, exhorting men to induce or inhibit “correct” feelings. The authors are strident in their advice. Despite the core recommendation that embodied men should enter cis women’s territory, they nevertheless instruct men: by all means feel, but on no account fully feel and certainly do not show or express your “negative” feelings.
By constructing some emotions as positive and others as negative, they leave both the emotional vulnerabilities of men unaddressed and the Cartesian associations of the body and emotions with irrationality and women intact (de Boise 2018). Such gendered textual advice forms part of an affective assemblage of “feeling rules” that recommend stoicism, emotional control, and manipulation together with cultural displays of rationality (de Boise and Hearn 2017).
While these texts make a discursive attempt to resonate with men who undoubtedly want to engage with and be involved in pregnancy, labor, and birth—with all the benefits that this presumably brings to the family unit—their advice is not suggestive of a more “inclusive” form of masculinity (Anderson 2009). On the surface, the books appeal to hybrid forms of masculinities (see Bridges and Pascoe 2014). Sinclair relies on militaristic metaphors, Kemp speaks to a heteronormative sexualized man, Woods is the comic, Beaumont’s men are the “protectors,” whereas for Harris they are “lovers.” What unites the authors, however, is a reliance on thin advice for men to construct rationalist forms of control over their emotions in order to enact a form of care. Arguably this advice is “functionally rational in a patriarchal, capitalist system” (de Boise and Hearn 2017, 8). By drawing on hegemonic masculine tropes to support men to manage embodied experiences within the gendered space of pregnancy and childbirth, their advice functions to protect the cis-gender, heterosexual men who are imagined as their primary audience from the shame of being associated with devalued marginalized bodies, behavior, feelings, and identities (Scheff 2003). Emotional repression, as Doucet (2013) argues, remains a powerful way to maintain bourgeois colonial patriarchal privilege.
If the disciplinary regulation of emotions “affect our understanding of our bodies in contradistinction to other(ed) bodies” (de Boise and Hearn 2017, 10), then pregnancy and childbirth are affective moments that typically empirically invite either essentialist explanation or social constructionist critique. Neither are adequate. Garlik (2019) cautions against becoming “mired in debates over essentialism” (385) because in so doing we “position masculinity solely as the socially constructed other to nature” (390). If the production of men and women as properly masculine or feminine mean that masculinity gets “established via the domination of nature” (386), even if that nature is ours, then advice to control emotions writes men’s vulnerabilities out and their power in.
Pregnant and birthing women and nature too easily get conflated, as if woman is also nature. In contrast, an epistemology of embodiment would suggest that representations focusing on the body-reflexive practices of masculinities, during pregnancy and childbirth, may in fact be “bio-political techniques for the reduction or management of the complexity of embodied life” (390). The acknowledged tensions identified in representations of feelings men may expect while attending pregnancy and birth point to possible patterns of embodiment and affect in men. To advise men to have feelings but not reveal them, and then claim that this is both the rational and loving thing to do, is to divert attention from the socio-political work that such disciplinary regulation performs. In so doing these texts remain conservative manifestos that we argue go some way to illuminate (even if, we suggest, they ultimately fail to alleviate) the “confusion” that men report.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Nicky Hudson for helpful comments on an earlier draft. We are grateful for the feedback from the reviewers.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust small research grant (reference: SG141683).