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Got the pull quote here from this article. I’m at a weird intersection with this topic because I’ve been trying to get my wife pregnant for about a year now, which has not happened, and all the while I’ve been seeing people around her (she’s younger) get pregnant semi-easily, or claim it’s semi-easy when in reality they’ve been trying for eight months and no one knows that part once it’s announced on The Gram. Anyway, though. My point is: in the last 12–18 months, I’ve spent a lot of time in my own head about masculinity, what makes a man, the role of pregnancy, whether all women want to be mothers, sex, and various associated topics. I cannot say I’ve come to any amazingly deep conclusions, but I can give some quick thoughts.
Obviously I think we conceptually revere motherhood. We don’t actually revere it, at least in the United States, because working moms situation is a hellscape, and stay-at-home mom situations are maybe better in some respects, but if you’ve ever seen a bunch of stay-at-home moms congregating somewhere, their situation is not necessarily great either. I think there’s also an old-school mentality, still hanging on at the highest levels of corporate and public governance, that women should be married up by about 23 and “popping out niners” (pregnancies, SNL joke) by 24. The man shall work, the woman shall raise the progeny, and the two shall mostly have sex in the name…
