Men experiencing contractions??

Over the weekend I came across some interesting videos...

This first one is from one of my favourite Australian TV presenters as he is put under simulated labour.

This video is of two Dutch Men who host a TV show and put themselves under labour-like conditions for 2 hours (make sure you turn on the subtitles, unless you happen to be fluent in Dutch.)

Obviously men will never be able to truly feel the pain of childbirth, as even this exercise stimulates different muscles, but it is an interesting exercise anyway. (Well, considering men don't have uteruses... (uteri??) they can't stimulate those muscles, plus all the other stuff that goes on...)

It made me think, if these men were so cocky before and thought that labour would be easy and then came out the other end questioning whether they would put their wives in that position, what would happen if everyone experienced the extreme pain that can come from endometriosis? I would hope that it would mean that women would not be told that it is "all in their head" or that they just have a low pain threshold and need to "harden up" and "deal with it". I have never experienced childbirth (no secret babies around here), but I have had contraction-like pain. During this pain I have ended up in many of the same positions that these men adopted when in extreme pain during the experiment.

Not many people have seen me in this state (and thankfully this kind of pain has been very rare since my surgery) and that is part of the curse of endometriosis. I look totally healthy and normal when I'm not in extreme pain, particularly as I have learned to cope with day-to-day pain. So I end up looking like a sook. It's not so believable that you have something wrong with you when others can't see it or experience it for themselves.

I found both these videos through this article.