A COUPLE of my friends are pregnant, which has got me thinking about childbirth.
It really is nature's biggest joke, isn't it? Proof, if we needed it, that God must be a man.
I imagine the conversation where God proudly unveiled his blueprints for Adam and Eve to Mrs God went something like this...
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God: "And this is my design for woman'," (proudly holding up a diagram).
"Once the seed is sown the baby will rest cocooned in her stomach for nine months where it will receive all the nutrients it needs to grow and mature until it is ready to survive in the outside world."
Mrs God: "Oh, wonderful dear, a brilliant design. But, erm, just one question - how does the baby get out?"
God: "(Flustered) Erm . . . oh . . . erm, yes, erm, I hadn't actually thought of that dear. And it's too late to change it now - I've already sent the plans to the factory. Never mind, it'll be a tight squeeze but I'm sure it can be pushed out of somewhere or another with a bit of effort."
I mean, would it have hurt to include a bikini-line zipper?
It's not just childbirth (although that is the top trump). Women have to suffer a lot more pain in their lives than men - and that's a fact. Women regularly have to undergo pain-inducing and costly regimes just to stand any chance of attracting a man in the first place.
There's plucking, waxing, walking in heels, squeezing into skinny jeans (I'm not even getting started on thongs) . . . and have you seen those contraptions we use to curl our eyelashes? They look like medieval implements of torture.
By far the most painful thing I've ever encountered in the name of vanity was laser teeth whitening. The mere mention of it has me shuddering even months down the line.
How can I describe the pain? Imagine carefully lining all of your fillings with tin foil and biting down repeatedly for 45 minutes, and you'll be in the ball park. And a nice little added extra was that I had a one-in-a-million bad reaction which caused my top lip to swell so badly a rumour started in the office that I'd had collagen implants!
How did my (male) dentist describe it to me beforehand? "A bit uncomfortable"!
Human beings in general, both the male and female of the species, require enough upkeep even without the ridiculous lengths us women go to make ourselves look good.
In fact, if bodies were a modern-day design rather than the result of evolution, you'd send the designer back to the drawing board.
We're uneconomical, needing re-fuelling every four hours, we are prone to disease and infection, we don't travel particularly fast, and with a little bump or scrape our skin punctures and starts leaking blood.
I doubt any of the dragons on Dragon's Den would put their money into manufacture of the human body.
But getting back to childbirth - don't worry about it guys, maybe all that preening will have built up a strong pain threshold.
And if not, at least there's the good old epidural to fall back on.
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