Ugh (I read a web forum)

While being somewhat frustrated at work I decided to let off steam by reading a bit of Ilta-Sanomat web forum. These things are sometimes interesting in a trainwreck sort of way.

Found a thread about ceasarian vs. vaginal birth (I can read these things fairly comfortably due to a firm decision never to have anything to do with either). Here are the themes that often came up there:

1. "You can't control everything in life." Yeah, obviously. Is that a reason to avoid controlling things that we can and want to control?

2. "Why are people nowadays so intent on avoiding physical pain?" If you need to ask that, the only appropriate answer is a practical demonstration. No, I don't recommend that my readers perform it for such people, and I myself am a sufficiently law-abiding person not to perform such demonstration for people who discuss this topic on the net or in person. But if I ever hear something like that from medical personnel while asking them for pain relief (and that has happened to some writers in that thread), I really will perform a practical demonstration that will hopefully make them understand why people prefer to avoid pain.

3. "But giving birth is a natural process." Yep, in some countries it still is. Check their infant and maternal mortality rates.

This is a rant against stupid arguments, not against vaginal birth. I am sure that everyone who intends to have children is able to choose their optimal method of bringing them into the world without my learned advice, and am also sure that vaginal birth in the civilized world is a lot safer than somewhere where it is indeed fully and irreversibly natural.

Another thing that has struck me as weird before, and especially in that thread, is the way many people tend to consider other people's sexual life totally unimportant (unlike, of course, their own sexual life). And I don't mean the normal healthy selfishness - of course our own lives are a lot more important to us than those of other people's, it would be weird to expect otherwise - but that the gap between our attitude towards our own sex life and our attitude towards other people's sex life is a lot wider than most (all?) other such gaps. "Turhamaisuus" (vanity) was the word most often used on that web forum with regard to women's concern about possible damage to their vaginas from birth. And I don't think it's a gender issue - I've seen in other contexts people dismissing men's concerns about erectile dysfunction just as nonchalantly. Somebody also compared men concerned about possible damage to their wives' vaginas to immature 13-year-old boys. People who cannot get laid are mostly laughed at, even by the people who take it very seriously when they cannot get laid themselves, and people who complain about their spouses withholding sex are told to grin and bear it. And yet most people take their own sexual life as a matter of utmost importance. I wonder why is there such a strong difference? Is it one of the results of sex still being a taboo on some level?