My God, how stupid can a supposedly smart woman be? I mean, I've been having babies off and on for twenty years now, but even when I started, about a decade younger than Wolf was when she had her first, and in the early 80's, I knew from the get-go to be suspicious of established obstetrical choices.
I suppose I should backtrack, in case you don't know what the book is about. Naomi Wolf is a social critic who gets her ideas for her books from her personal life and concerns. So when she was a young babe, seeking to make her name, and concerned about her appearance, she brought out The Beauty Myth, a critique of our society's obssession with women's appearances. Now, since she's been through childbirth twice, she's decided to expose the underside of the American childbirth scene. You know - uncaring medical professionals who try to wrest control of the birth experience from the birth mother so their golf dates won't be disrupted. Duh. Does anyone not know about this?
Wolf, for all of her chat about her pregnant friends, seems to get her cues on how she "should" feel about pregnancy and motherhood from television. She keeps offering dire recollections of how she couldn't be the buoyant, blissful mom-to-be that "everyone" told her she should be. Who? Who tells her that? No one's ever told me that. I and every other woman I've ever spoken to realizes that there are a variety of experiences of pregnancy, and furthermore, during those last two months, everyone is pretty much uniformly miserable, hoping somehow that the calculations were wrong and the baby is really due a month earlier than we thought.
There's more. A lot more. But right now, I've got to try to get some of my own writing in, and believe me, I'll do an extra-close scouring of it for whiny self-indulgence after enduring a dose of Naomi Wolf's.