Yes, we men play a
role in baby-making,
but it’s small. And
it’s over superfast.
What can we really
know about what the
mothers of our
children go through
during those nine
months? With help
from Japanese
scientists and a high-
tech pregnancy suit,
B e n j a m i n P e r c y
spent nine humiliating,
emasculating weeks
trying to find out
GQ intelliGence
B
- - - a i s tA n d o v e r
J o h n U e l A n d 1 2 4 g q .
c o m m a r c h 2 0 1 3

GQ intelliGence
B
The Male
Species
Its breasts are as round and hard as tennis balls. And the belly beneath them swells with a giant gel dome zippered into a sleeve. Weighted bags fill another compartment, each bag meant to replicate another month of pregnancy. This is not a Halloween costume. This is my reality.
For the next few months, I am going to be a mother-to-be.
When our son was born, when my wife tried to breast-feed him, he had trouble latching on and began to precipitously lose weight. It would have been easier to stir up some formula, but my wife was determined: Her gyno-Guinness would not go to waste. So every time the boy woke up to feed, she would pump, and
I would ready a bottle and kick back in the recliner with him. For the first five months, before he began sleeping through the night, this was our routine, so that I fed him through his infancy, the boundary between mother and father blurred, which seems indicative of a larger trend.
No one has bought me the World’s
Greatest Father co≠ee mug yet, and I don’t deserve one. I’m crabby. I’m impatient. I wear skull T-shirts. I kind of look forward to my children growing old enough to walk twenty yards ahead of me in the mall and pretend I don’t exist. But male empathy— at least among the co-op-shopping, NPRlistening crowd—seems never to have been
greater. And when I see a man coaching in the junior soccer league, or watching his kids for the week while his wife travels for business, or shopping for groceries while patiently playing spelling games with his
5-year-old, I know I should do better.
I never felt like a better father than when tucked into that La-Z-Boy, feeding my son, his wrinkled face hardly distinguishable from the swaddle surrounding him.
Maybe, ridiculously, the pregnancy suit will bring me back to that time. Maybe— by helping me experience the one thing unavailable to men as parents—it will be more than a costume, but a way for me to alter my point of view, deepen my empathy, help me overcome my mouth-breathingcaveman deficiencies.
The pregnancy suit was shipped to me by the Kanagawa Institute of Technology,
the author traveled to tokyo to meet dr. takayuki
Kosaka and take his mommy tummy pregnancy simulator for a spin. where a scientist and professor named
Dr. Takayuki Kosaka has headed up the development of an even more technologically advanced pregnancy simulator, the
Mommy Tummy, which somehow hooks up to a computer and supposedly replicates nine months of weight gain and balance struggles and baby kicking. In a few months Kosaka will host me outside Tokyo, where I’ll try it out. It is hard to know what to expect. I imagine I will swim through a giant glass vaginal channel in a white scuba suit or be strapped to a table and stabbed with hormone-oozing needles, all while Dr.
Kosaka studies me and takes diligent notes on a clipboard.
But in the meantime, because part of the agony of pregnancy is how long it lasts— and experiencing the extent of the agony is kinda the point—I’ve agreed to wear the rudimentary prosthetic he has mailed me for a nine-week term. And if the women in my life love me for it, all the better.
At f i r s t i t f e e l s cumbersome, parasitic. I knock into walls, tables, doorways. I cannot fit it under my clothes, so
I wear it on the outside, my torso green and rounded, turtled. I do push-ups in my pregnancy suit. I mow the lawn in my pregnancy suit. I chop wood in my pregnancy suit.
I read the newspaper in my pregnancy suit and rest a steaming mug of co≠ee on the belly. I sweat in the pregnancy suit—horribly—and I develop a rash and begin to smell fungal. I do not have sex in the pregnancy suit.
I wear the pregnancy suit to a neighborhood gathering, where the men slug me in the gut and the women tenderly pat my back and say Bless your heart and my 6-year-old son pulls me aside and tells me I really ought to take the thing o≠, I’m embarrassing him. Of course I expect the attention—the funny expressions, the eager hands, the endless questions—but that doesn’t mean I like it. I am reminded of the strangers who would approach my wife, once she started to really show in her second trimester, and put their hands on her stomach without asking.
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c o m m a r c h 2 0 1 3
She always smiled at them through gritted teeth, because she knew what I know now: When you’re pregnant, you become public property.
Often I whistle or sing under my breath.
There was a time when I might have sounded like a jukebox worth listening to—as I favored Johnny Cash or Guns N’
Roses or the Rolling Stones—but that time is over. I now sing along to the Laurie
Berkner Band. (I have tried without success to cure the constant flow of kindie rock by blasting Led Zeppelin on the stereo and leaning into the noise.) And now, at Cub Foods, when I stand before the meat counter and eye up the porterhouse cuts, I find myself humming Chim chim- en-ney, chim chim-en-ney, chim chim cha-
roo. One of my hands grips a shopping basket. The other rests on my pregnant belly. When the butcher, in his bloodied apron, narrows his eyes and asks if I need any help, I get the feeling he isn’t talking about the meat selection.
I clear my throat and hitch my pregnancy suit and in the deepest voice I can muster ask him to round me up some steaks. “Big ones.”
In the produce section, I am approached by a woman with scissored jean shorts and dark roots showing beneath her highlighter-yellow hair. “Um, what are you wearing?”
“A pregnancy suit.”
“Why?”
“So that I know what it feels like to be pregnant.”
“Like in that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie?”
“Junior. Yeah. Pretty much.” o U r f r i e n d s J e r e m Y and Abi crash at our place for the weekend. When I answer the door and welcome them in, I am greeted by stunned silence. Then Abi claps a hand over her mouth to mu≠le a laugh that sounds like a strangled bird.
She has three children, and her hand falls from her mouth to her stomach, remembering. “I’m having shortness of breath just looking at you.”

GQ intelliGence
B
The Male
Species
Of course she wants to try on the pregnancy suit. Every woman wants to try on the pregnancy suit. In part they are motivated by nostalgia—all of them, like Abi, instantly begin to rock their hips and rub the belly—but more so by their compulsive dissatisfaction. They know, long before they Velcro the straps over their shoulders, that the suit cannot possibly substitute for the nine-month imprisonment they endured. “How long do you have to wear this, again?” she says.
“Nine weeks.”
“Nine weeks?” Her tone of voice implies,
Nice try, pussy.
Abi circles the kitchen table. She grabs the back of a chair and squats so low her knees pop. “I guess it’s all right.” She has a way of narrowing her eyes that seems at once bemused and suspicious. “But you don’t get the boob weight and the pressure.
You don’t have the itchy skin or the swollen ankles. Your bladder doesn’t feel like there’s a hot brick sitting on it. Maybe they should inject you with hormones? Maybe you should wear ankle weights? And roll around in poison ivy?”
She lies on the floor and rolls one way, then the other, using her arm to sling the belly. “And it doesn’t pull everything around.” She wrinkles her mouth at my wife. “Do you remember that? When you lie on your side, there’s that side thing? Your guts get yanked around? I hated that.”
Jeremy helps her up and loosens the straps, and the suit drops to the floor so heavily that the dishes in the cabinets rattle.
Everyone stands around staring at the thing for a minute, and then Abi says,
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What are you waiting for? Put it on. It’s your baby.”
I shrug on the suit once more and then dig four Fat Tires from the fridge and pour them into pint glasses. Just before I am about to raise my glass in a toast, Abi says,
“What are you doing?”
“Having a beer.”
“No way.”
“Yeah,” my wife says and snatches the beer and drinks from it, and the foam mustaches her upper lip. “No way.”
“But—”
“Think about the baby.”
“But—”
“How about a nice sparkling water?”
“But—”
But nothing. For the rest of the night,
I pretend my Perrier is vodka. When I first agreed to this experiment, I thought women would respect me for it, pat me on the back, and say what a sweet, understanding man I am. Instead they seem
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c o m m a r c h 2 0 1 3 to take glee in my discomfort and relish pointing out the suit’s inadequacies. “Good start. But is there some way I can make you bleed seven days a month?” a female friend posts on my Facebook page.
“Go sit down,” Abi says. “Go sit down on that soft sofa right now. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Comfortable yet? Now try to get up. It’s hard, isn’t it?”
I am sweating heavily. I go to crank up the air conditioner, and my wife pauses my hand and says leave it, she’s perfectly comfortable.
“You’re not hot?” I say.
Her voice steadily rises in volume when she says, “You know when I was hot?
Constantly? When I was pregnant.”
I make my way to the kitchen for another Perrier. “Look at him!” she says, her laughter like the sound of a knife being sharpened. “He’s waddling!” t h e J A p A n e s e c U s t o m s agents at
Narita International Airport do not like the pregnancy suit. Not one bit. They wear white gloves when they unzip its compartments and remove the weighted bags, the giant gel stomach, and turn them over and hold them up to the light and pose questions in a language I cannot understand.
They wave over more agents. They have the pregnancy suit surrounded.
I tell them I am here to visit Dr. Takayuki
Kosaka at the Kanagawa Institute of
Technology. I tell them he invented the
Mommy Tummy, the Cadillac of pregnancy suits. The portable vest they’re inspecting, the one I’ve been wearing the past nine weeks, will seem prehistoric by comparison.
For a long minute they whisper among themselves. Then one of the agents approaches me. “You mean like Junior?” he says.
Hours later I am wandering through
Tokyo in my Carhartts, my boots, and my pregnancy suit. Wherever I go—Shinjuku
Station, Piss Alley, Central Park—more and more people seem to follow me, orbit me, as if my increased mass has given me the gravity of a sun. Cicadas scream. Neon signs flash. Clouds of cigarette smoke and metallic thunder spill out of pachinko parlors. Sweat runs down my back, darkens my armpits. I am jet-lagged, sleep-deprived.
My legs ache from the thirteen-hour flight.
My guts feel twisted up with airline food.
Maybe this is what my wife and Abi were talking about. Maybe this is a dose of the misery they endured.
I take the train to meet Dr. Kosaka, an hour out of Tokyo. People jam in all around me, and it isn’t until three stops later that
I find a seat. No one speaks. Everyone is

GQ intelliGence
B
The Male
Species reading, staring at their phone, or listening to music. The man next to me wears the standard uniform of most o≠ice workers: a white-collared short-sleeve tucked into black slacks. A magazine is split open in his lap. He licks his finger and snaps through the pages. I see an anime lady giving a blow job. I see another bent over a table. I blink hard, thinking thirty hours without sleep has finally caught up with me. I later learn that it is not uncommon in Japan to see men consuming porn in public, but right now I am shocked and fascinated, even more so when I lean in to see another naked cartoon woman being strangled and penetrated, her face geisha white.
His face reveals no emotion when he looks up at me. He glances at my distended belly and returns to his magazine.
This is what Dr. Kosaka is battling, a culture he claims remains rather insensitive to women. We meet in the glasswalled, concrete-floored laboratory at the
Kanagawa Institute, where he teaches as an assistant professor. He is no great and terrible Oz, more of a Wonka, a boyish 34 with floppy hair parted down the middle.
He speaks through a translator and wears black-framed glasses, a striped buttondown, and tight blue-black jeans.
I un-Velcro the mobile pregnancy suit and return it to him with an “Arigatou.” He bows. I bow, and as I do, I notice how easy it is, the absence of mass at my center, as if a part of me is missing.
Kosaka asks how long I wore the suit, and I say nine weeks, and he says something the translator doesn’t bother repeating, what I guess must be, “Jesus, that is a
He looks at the translator, who shrugs, and we continue.
Right now Kosaka travels the world with the Mommy Tummy, visiting technology conventions, and he hopes one day to sell the suits to schools, hospitals, parenting classes. He hopes to create a kinder man.
He hopes for empathy. There is a population decline in Japan, he says. Many believe this is due to the rising professionalism of women. Their husbands won’t help, their bosses won’t accommodate them, so they choose not to have children at all. Kosaka hopes to battle this insensitivity with the
Mommy Tummy, creating a greater awareness and consideration for pregnant women. He hopes to maybe even develop a remote unit that men might wear surreptitiously, something that will connect them to their wives and let them know when their baby is kicking.
We arrive at his corner of the lab, where the Mommy Tummy is laid out on a mat.
At the moment, it appears to be nothing more than a pink dress, cupcakepatterned and tied around the middle by ribbons with strawberries at their tips.
Kosaka sewed it himself, out of the girliest materials he could find, as an antidote to what he calls macho Japanese posturing: “I want a man to feel as feminine as possible when wearing this.” I want to tell him that no man—Japanese, American, or
Kiwi—would ever wear this thing, but I don’t want to crush his spirits.
He helps fit me into it. All around us, students and professors pause to smile.
Some of them call out to us, and some of them whisper among themselves. The
long freaking time.” Most men wear it for a few minutes, maybe a few hours. His smile grows wider.
He tours me through the laboratory.
Students tinker with a solar car. A professor readies a piece of wood beneath a laser that cuts designs into puzzles.
From the ceiling hangs a glider as big as a pterodactyl.
Kosaka talks about the initial spark that led him to develop the Mommy Tummy.
He kept seeing pregnant women standing on the trains and subways. Men seemed to dutifully ignore them, never o≠ering to give up their seats or help carry a bag.
“I know!” I say. “The same thing totally happened to me. I had to wait like three stops before I finally sat down.”
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c o m m a r c h 2 0 1 3 pregnancy suit seems a curiosity even in the laboratory where it was born.
What looks like a long umbilical cord, as wide as my arm, reaches from the dress to a mainframe unit that branches o≠ into a computer and air compressor. He asks if
I’m ready. I nod, and he switches on the system. Not all at once, but in swelling increments, the dress comes alive.
I notice first the familiar heaviness as the belly gurgles full of hot water. My breasts begin to swell, constricting my breathing. At the computer terminal,
Kosaka points out an image. “Your child,” he calls it. At one month, then two months, then three, it looks like some Silly Putty crossbreed of snake and mole. Eventually it morphs into something more human, a big-headed infant curled up like a shrimp.
My belly and breasts continue to grow.
Four months, five. And then, for the first time, after nine weeks of dead weight,
I feel something move. I know it’s not real—three layers of balloons mimic fetal movement—but I can’t help but feel giddiness and horror, the willful delusion that a creature lives inside me. I feel a hard kick, a fluttering of fists. What could be a head presses into my bladder. I am reminded of the chest-bursters from Alien.
Kosaka holds out a tube of lipstick.
When I reach for it, he drops it to the floor.
“Pick it up,” he says. I want to tell him, “You pick it up, asshole,” but I do as he says. With some di≠iculty, I fall to one knee and fetch the lipstick and lumber up and return it to him. He drops it again. Then again. Then he orders me to lie on my back.
On the computer screen the 8-monthold baby stares back at me. My belly squirms and bulges. The baby is restless, rolling around like an insomniac trying to find the cool side of a pillow. “My baby is so pissed!” I say. Synthetic fibers spiderweb the suit and serve as conductors that react to my touch. Kosaka tells me to rub the belly gently and soothe the child. I do, and the kicking slows, the baby calms.
I try, and fail, to stand up. I roll on my side—then, with a heave, end up on all fours. Kosaka appears before me and refuses my hand when I reach up. “It’s hard, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s hard to be a woman.”
I think of my wife, red-faced from a severe contraction, bowing over her pregnant belly, crying softly as the doctor fumbled the epidural into her spine. I think of my mother, who refers to my sister and me as her life’s work, and I think of my father, who brags about never having changed a diaper in his life. I think of Hemingway, who said, “To be a successful father, there’s one absolute rule: When you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.”
And in this cupcake-patterned apron, with this robot fetus prodding and bulging against my torso, I cannot help but feel as though I am back in the living room with
Abi and my wife yelling at me, disciplining me, punishing me, as if I were not one man but many men, all men, a faceless mass of hair and penis and cluelessness spanning generations. It’s almost like, with their cruel, badgering insistence, the women want a confession or some kind of acknowledgement. So I give it to them.
“Yes!” I say. “Yes! It is hard!”
I turn to Kosaka and, with the wellearned impatience of a woman in labor, say, “Now get me out of this thing.” benjamin percy’ s new novel, Red Moon, comes out in May.