COmADE Cloud Of Unknowing “The state ofman: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety." -Pascal The concept of the pregnant man touches a deep and persistent chord in our civilization. The cover of a grocery checkout tabloid boasts about a man carrying a child, but the story, half a column in length, turns out to be that a disinterred body in Dutch Guiana shows a sizable tumor in his girth. A hormonally confused Senegalese is widely reported (but narrowly documented) to have borne twins, real milk has issued from the breasts of an 109-year-old Cossack, and a deluded fireman in Pensacola insists he is carrying Amelia Earhart’s baby, and rocks, and rocks, and rocks. By Michael Finley Anxiety and the Expectant Man Illustration by Zola Anne Belanger Design by Carol Evans-Smith 12 Clinton St. Quarterly—Summer, 1988 Such stories make headlines because, whether true or not, they turn on an elemental obsession of our culture and of all cultures—the idea that woman is woman and man, man, and any departure from this formula is a marvel, a freak. And we like thinking about freak occurrences because, while they suggest the possibility of monstrous error on the part of nature, they are “out there”—they do not really touch the lives of those of us outside the carney wagons. It can be alarming for a male in our culture to suddenly find himself emulating the female of the species. The expectant father is prone toward all sorts of “mother imitations” ranging from morning sickness, vomiting, heartburn, and constipation through such motherly other complaints as backache, abdominal swelling, appetite changes, insomnia, snappishness, and a general dragged-out feeling. Couvade—in which fathers participate in rituals that mimic a mother’s preparation for childbirth —was unknown to the West until the nineteenth century, and the establishment of the modern science of anthropology. As preliminary observations and records were taken of peoples long remote from European and American academic eyes, long- cherished attitudes about what was civilized and what was savage began to falter. Anthropological pioneers were particularly taken by the habits in different cultures surrounding courtship, marriage, and childbear-
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