In his "Poetics," Aristotle says, "For we enjoy looking at the most accurate representations of things which in themselves we find painful to see, such as the forms of the lowest animals and of corpses." We slow down and crane our necks at crash sites. Why did every single one of us, including the mothers, NOT want to watch the childbirth video at last week's class?
I was watching the news later that night, and a story came on about a woman who tried to stop a hit-and-run driver by hanging on to his door handle. He dragged her down the street, and the news team was interviewing her in the hospital showing (over and over) her icky abrasions and lacerations. And I kinda wanted to watch. But I definitely did not want to watch the childbirth.
I've been through childbirth three times--the first two without drugs. It is horridly primal and painful, as everyone knows, and I think the sounds a human makes during extreme pain are very uncomfortable to overhear. I don't even want to watch/hear my giving birth video.
It's interesting that the "Friends" clip, to me--because I am older, seemed relatively uncomfortable and graphic compared to the sanitized way childbirth has previously been portrayed. Until recently, the 1980's maybe, you would rarely see a woman's legs up in the stirrups, or an actress really groan in pain.
Why can we watch all manner of reality and movie special effect yuck and not want to watch the miracle of birth? Food for thought: the pain of childbirth is described as a cursed punishment from the rebellion in the garden of Eden.
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