Men's Day and Mr. Moms

We recently came across an article that for some reason was lodged in our minds as being about male pregnancy. It turns out that it was this China Daily article about a man that was mistakenly tested for pregnancy (given a urine test) because the hospital thought he was a woman.

Although we were disappointed, we did find something else that was interesting: an article originally from the Shanghai Daily that says that August 3rd was the first Men's Day:

Male employees at 50 multinational companies in Shanghai took time off work on Thursday to celebrate "Men's Day."

The local offices of Marlboro, BMW and Volkswagen, among other large companies, allowed their male employees to relax on Thursday. Male editors from Men's Health magazine were given the day off their regular duties, but had to spend the day preparing for the Men's Day party.

"It was not my original intention to provide male employees a day-off," Shou said.

"It is a day for men to release their stress," he added.

We thought getting a haircut on Julu Lu after work was a good way to release stress from work, but evidently that hasn't "done the trick". Anyway, since Women's Day falls on March 8th (3/8), Men's Day naturally had to fall on August 3rd (8/3).

Still, our curiosity about male pregnancy was piqued and our questions remained unanswered. A search turned up the website malepregnancy.com claimed to document the pregnancy of the first pregnant man, Lee Mingwei. The website featured pictures of Mr. Lee, a Taiwanese-American artist along with ultrasound snapshots of his baby. However, it seems that this was merely a hoax -- Mr. Lee is a performance artist, and we guess that this is ... something performance artists do?

Still, there were plenty of articles about this in the Chinese media in 2005, which quoted an article in the online version of Pravda article, which you can read here. The article briefly mentions Lee Mingwei as well, but most of the article is devoted to a discussion of the science. You can also read an informative article from Popular Science about whether or not humans will one day join the ranks of male seahorses and the lead character of the movie Junior. For the time being, it seems like a remote possibility for most "normal" men, but for one Beijing surgeon, there is no reason for transsexuals to be subject to the same constraints.

Photo from Xinhua.