And another thing (from Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes): the guy who considered his football game to be far more important than knowing whether or not his girlfriend was pregnant. Not unusual. Most men worship football.
Guys, especially jocks—you have been brainwashed. It’s a fucking GAME. A game of tag with a game of catch. To see which side ends up with the highest score. That’s all.*
Compared to any one of being pregnant, giving birth, and having complete responsibility for the survival (and, hopefully, the flourishing) of another human being, your little football game is not even on the same scale. To think otherwise suggests a disconnect from reality akin to psychosis.
Why don’t women say more, a lot more, about how fucking important it is? How consequential?
Some do. And get dismissed. Because, same old same old, anything a woman does must be both unimportant and inconsequential.
And the others? They’ve been drugged by their bodies to forget, or at least minimize, the pain: of pregnancy (a condition that lasts for nine months compared to a mere ninety minutes); of giving birth (a condition that can last for days and can easily be more painful than tearing your ACL, several times) (yeah, the baby tears its way out). And they’ve been similarly brainwashed, not to inflate but to minimize the consequences (goodbye bladder control and fifteen years of plans and aspirations).
*Unless you’re of the 1% of high school players who end up playing pro. Then it’s a job; you get paid. So, consequential. But need I point out that far less than 1% of women get paid to be pregnant? And those who do get paid get maybe $20,000? For the nine months of being pregnant and the twenty-four hours of giving birth. Compared $5 million. For 14 games. That’s about $350,000 for an hour and a half. Yes, there’s the training. But women are pregnant 24 hrs/day. Men don’t train 24 hrs/day.
