Today’s news features a set of brilliantly daft pictures from a Chinese hospital that is offering men the opportunity to experience the pain of childbirth.

The labour-simulating device (which sounds like a supercharged version of those useless abdominal toners sold to optimistic couch potatoes on shopping channels in the 1990s) delivers electric shocks via a set of electrodes placed above the abdomen; the pain apparently registers on a rising scale from mild discomfort to “it felt like my heart and lungs were being ripped out”, according to one, not overwhelmingly stoic, guinea pig.

The “taster sessions” have attracted about 100 volunteers so far – mainly expectant fathers, although a few thrill-seekers have apparently signed up too.

This experiment is not the first of its type, and the male desire to better understand labour is hardly new. You can, if you are so inclined (I was), watch a variety of men wince and writhe and whimper as they experience a birth simulation. The impulse seems essentially benign: these men want to have an inkling of what their partners will experience and, if it helps them offer support, why not?

Nevertheless, this simulated labour experience raises questions for me. Practically, how realistic can the sensation possibly be? Is it really necessary to experience pain in order to empathise? And, most importantly, why on earth was this device not made available last month when Robbie Williams was breezily live-blogging the birth of his second child?

There is so much more to labour and birth than contractions. It’s a maelstrom of emotion and sensation and it’s different for everyone: from fear and pain to sensual pleasure (allegedly). No device – I hope – could ever replicate the alarming torrents of stuff that issue forth from hitherto blameless parts of your body, the invigorating sensation of a large infant head “crowning” or the interesting experience of having your perineum embroidered afterwards by a stranger who insists on calling you “mum”.

Thinking back on my two labours, I wonder whether they might also have thought to provide the men of Shandong with a pretty, fresh-faced medical student to observe the whole unlovely process and comment upon it. (Mine asked, wide-eyed, if I had had an epidural as I crawled around the delivery room floor, snarling and thrashing like an enraged komodo dragon, leaving a trail of unspeakable effluvia in my wake.)

It seems unfair, too, to conclude that if Shandong’s expectant fathers can’t take the vicious Slendertone treatment, they are in some way weaker than women.

Birth is a delicately orchestrated (albeit, yes, painful) process, powered by a cocktail of natural chemicals (oxytocin, adrenalin, endorphins) and the female body does know what to do, generally. When things get difficult, the miracles of modern medicine – and particularly modern analgesia – are there to help.

The male volunteers are coping without natural or artificial pain relief and they don’t even get a lovely baby at the end of it, or that even lovelier cup of NHS tea and slice of toast.

I wonder, too, at this idea that men need to experience the pain of labour to empathise with it. Pain is both universal and utterly subjective, and knowing how best to respond to a loved one in pain has little to do with having experienced some narrow subset of the physical sensations involved. If anything, I would be concerned that fathers who think they “know” what labour feels like might be less open, less receptive to a partner’s experience. Surely the best thing you can do as a father in the labour ward is simply be there, be supportive, a hand to squeeze and a face to berate?

Perhaps, though, we should just accept that if this kind of stunt makes some expectant fathers feel better prepared, that’s good. I asked my sons’ father – a man who winces extravagantly if you show him a paper cut – whether he would have signed up. “Yes,” he said, rather surprising me. “Labour is traumatic and you feel so excluded as a father. I would have done anything I could to feel more part of what you were going through.” Which itself raises the question: aren’t the men most likely to sign up the ones who least need an empathy lesson?