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Remember what things were like in, say, 1992? Back when you were just starting to hear rumblings about what was then called the “Information Superhighway,” at the time personified by prohibitively expensive hourly services like Prodigy and e•world? Remember how alone you felt about your shameful thoughts that no one else could ever understand? What was the only place to find your secret prurient interest back then?

Maybe you’re not that old, but I am, and for me, it was pregnancy guidebooks. I’ve always loved them. Here’s the start of a new series in which we pay them loving tribute, while simultaneously mocking them mercilessly.

Who, you might well ask, is Caterine Milinaire? She’s the daughter of a French duchess, a photographer for Vogue in the sixties and seventies, and today is still active as a blog commentator. Googling her name gets you “Cheap Chic,” which was her best-selling book. But to me she’s the lady who wrote Birth, a hilariously dated but still immensely useful and readable pregnancy guide.

I found Birth in a box of old books in our garage. It was published in 1974, so I’m not sure when it was purchased; that was precisely halfway between my older brother’s birth and my own birth, and we’re 12 years apart. I can only guess that it was a gift to my mother from a hopeful friend who wanted another baby to cuddle soon… or a future version of me had planted it there for me to find, knowing that if I didn’t have something to feed my fetish I would just grow up to be a normal competent person.

Whatever; it was a godsend.

In 1974, the hedonistic self-abuse we associate with the Disco Seventies had not yet taken hold, and many people firmly believed in the healing power of sunlight, flaxseed, black cohosh, macrame, and nudity, all of which are prevalent in this book. This is not sexualized nudity, though, so much as simply feeling nude is the right way to be. There are multiple images of families– father, pregnant mother, and first baby– just lazing around in the buff like they were bears. This was considered healthy at the time, and to be fair I can’t really see a good reason for it to have fallen out of favor, but it did, and many of the pictures look kind of silly.

(There’s one picture I wanted to share, of an extraordinarily handsome man and his year-old daughter, but it seemed like it might be asking for trouble; there are those for whom it would provoke an extreme reaction. May Jesus save us from visible baby vulvas.)

The point is, Birth is filled with what we now call pregnancy glamour shots. You can’t swing a cat on Flickr without finding them now, but the only place to find them in 1992 was in books like these– which means that this must have been practically unheard of upon its first publication.

Birth takes a very homepathic, very holistic, very groovy, very Keep On’ Truckin’ approach to having a baby.

Grass can be relaxing, but if smoked as a habit, it can increase a latent paranoia. Strong weed can sap your energy besides attacking your Vitamin C supply. If marijuana gets you high, you should know better than to impose a continuous lethargy on your baby.

And remember what Freewheelin’ Franklin says: Dope will get you through times of no baby better than a baby will get you through times of no dope!

Though pregnancy is very well represented, about a third of the book is given over to personal birth stories, some of which are very unusual. Milinaire’s own home birth experience is there, and friends of hers who had water births, C-sections, birth under hypnosis, birth with no painkiller but the mother’s own singing(!) and a Haitian woman who gave birth by the side of the road(!!!), assisted by a midwife whose fee was two dollars(!!??!). The only kind of birth that is not recognized here, as a matter of fact, is a hospital birth.

Now, I was born at home myself, so I can’t fault anyone for wanting a home birth– it was a pretty awesome thing to have happen in the home. All the same, though, this book treats any birth that was not at home or in a place of the mother’s choosing, that was attended by a medical doctor, as a birth to be regretted.

Hospitals are not concerned with the spiritual side, they even hide your insides from you, for them it’s garbage. … It was so boring waiting in this blank room. The induction seemed to spoil the whole natural rhythm of the birth. I felt rather like a hen laying one of a million supermarket eggs.

We arrived at the hospital and, for openers, you have to fill out all sorts of forms while you are doubling over with contractions. They ask you for a $600.00 deposit before you can get any further! It’s insane! They could ask for any amount and you would say yes because you want so much to go and lie down somewhere! Luckily, my mother had a hospital credit card. Can you imagine that? It’s like going to shop for a very expensive toy in a big department store.

And then I got to hold the baby, but only for two minutes and it was taken away and only given to me today. That’s a drag. The baby was taken to the nursery which is located directly across from the abortion rooms at Hillcrest General Hospital in Flushing, Queens. How much more insensitive can hospital planning get?

I’m all for control over one’s own body, but come ON, did all of you have Josef Mengele as your ob-gyn?

And then there’s the poetry.

There are several poems in this book. Some of them are original; two of the birth experiences are in poetry, for example. Others are quoted from other sources, including Buddhic texts and The Talmud. All of them, however, are hilariously pompous and overdramatic. One in particular reminds me of Michael Bay trying to write a poem– lots of boom-kaboom-smoosh-BLAM! and no subtlety to offset it. I’ve reproduced one here, but two of these poems are so awesome that I’ll be making an article about them on their own soon.

The last third of the book is made up of myths and legends about pregnancy and birth from around the globe. Here are my favorites:

1. Pregnant Aztecs would wear an obsidian knife against their bellies to protect the baby from being born with a harelip.
2. Tawaret, the Egyptian goddess of pregnancy, started out as a mythical hippopotamus demon, who was later acquitted of all wrongdoing when they discovered female hippos were gentle and nurturing toward their babies.
3. When a baby is born in the Cebeles Islands, all the household’s pets have their mouths tied shut to make sure they don’t accidentally swallow the baby’s soul.

Ha ha ha! Other cultures are so strange and foreign! I hope I’m never that foolish and illogical, knock on wood!

In closing, Birth is wacky in retrospect, but it’s easy to see how it would be utterly revolutionary for its time. What now strikes us as clichéd patchouli-and-Birkenstocks dogma was truly dangerous speech back then– and this book recommends immersing your child in it before they’re even born. Perhaps this book had a greater influence on me than I had ever realized…