A video from Feminist Frequency. I think her argument loses focus towards the end, and generally needs more nuance, but is still worth watching:
(Transcript here.)
I think the way to think of this, is something like The Bechdel Test. It’s not a comment on any individual work — you can make an argument that the pregnancy plotline in BSG was well-done, for instance, or perhaps Alien 3. After all, for some women, there are substantially creepy issues surrounding pregnancy, and it’s legitimate for fiction to explore that. But the problem isn’t that an individual work is bad because it includes this trope; it’s the pattern formed by the use of the trope across many works.1
Crystal Coleman‘s essay is stronger, including doing a better job of making the connection to the virgin birth (which the video mistakenly refers to as the “Immaculate Conception”).
Mary is the Mystical Pregnancy model that all other models look to. She is visited by the angel Gabriel and informed that she has been selected to be the mother of Jesus, son of God. She marries her fiance and gives birth to the prophesied child, and three men follow a star to find the baby. Although non-biblical sources give Mary a life before Christ, there is no mention of this in the Bible. Quite often, Mary isn’t even mentioned by name, just referenced as the mother of Jesus (although, admittedly, this might be partly to distinguish between the myriad of Marys in the Bible). After Jesus’ crucifixion, Mary disappears. We know nothing about her, where she is born and when, what her life is like, what her life with Joseph (who is sidelined, as well) was like, if they had other children, how and when she died… nothing is canonical. For a figure that is so very important to many religions (just look at the amount of art that has been inspired by the Madonna), it’s surprising how little we actually know about her as a woman with her own unique identity.
Coleman also discusses the current season of Doctor Who.
I don’t think writers should never write mystical pregnancy plotlines. But at this point, the trope has been done often enough — and thoughtlessly enough — that it should only be used when the writer really believes they have something genuinely new or interesting to say with (or about) the trope.
One more note: According to a comment-writer on Feminist Frequency, Star Trek: Enterprise did once inflict a mystical pregnancy on a male character: Offensively, it was played for laughs.
- I’m kind of impressed that “Buffy” never went there. Of course, “Angel” made up for that by dipping into the mystical pregnancy well again and again. [↩]
Though interestingly we do know that Jesus had brothers – which a lot of Christian churches (including the Catholic Church) retcon into stepbrothers or cousins, by entertaining circumlocution designed to preserve the doctrine that Mary was a lifelong virgin.
“it should only be used when the writer really believes they have something genuinely new or interesting to say with (or about) the trope.”
I’m pretty sure all of the writers in all the examples you’ve mentioned felt that this description applied to them.
What’s striking me about the mystical pregnancy (which I think could be more fairly called the outre horror pregnancy) is how anti-natalist it is. If the writers have that much trouble imagining a pregnancy which leads to a baby which becomes a child, there’s something rather odd going on. (I might be unfair here– since I don’t follow visual media much, there might be normal pregnancy stories as well as horror pregnancy stories.)
There’s also some xenophobia– a piece of what’s going on is the idea that anything outside the usual is extremely dangerous. Offhand, Galaxy Quest is the only sex-with-aliens-is-harmless-fun movie I can think of, but I’m not a movie buff.
I’m pretty sure all of the writers in all the examples you’ve mentioned felt that this description applied to them.
Or they were trying to figure out to fit an actress’s pregnancy in without having to deal with the kid afterwards. On an action/scifi show they can’t spend the whole time sitting behind a desk or holding grocery bags.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just burnt out on trope-based criticism, but in this particular case I got the feeling that the critic was doing far more to reduce characters to their biological functions then the shows themselves.
Earth Girls Are Easy.
(Another one of those things I never thought I’d say on this blog….)
Oldie but goodie that’s rather on-topic.
Ugh, my Netflix queue just came around to “The 4400,” the old mid-2000s SF TV show, and the very first season is all “mystical pregnancy, OMG!” And the way it is presented, it is constantly an excuse to
1) make the pregnant woman physically vulnerable
2) make her emotionally vulnerable
3) make her male partner act strong and protective
4) make both of them victims of Evil Conspiracy Forces
5) reflect visually on her pale, fragile, feminine, angelic whiteness and blondeness
This show gets, like, one more disc to stop annoying me so badly and then I’m dustbinning it.
As a personal reflection, this trope annoys me so much in part because I’m nearing 40 and due to divorce and personal ambivalence, still haven’t sorted out whether I’m ever going to become a mother or not which constantly makes me feel pressured and defective. And also, because when I was at my most severely depressed and stressed out (carrying the burden of either full-time graduate school or full-time work, plus very nearly 100% of household management and financial responsibility due to a severely depressed and anxious partner), I sometimes wished that I were pregnant, not because I wanted a child at that time, but because I wanted people to be solicitous and nurturing toward me.
I think this topic is taken a BIT too far. When I watch movies, I don’t count how many things they put in there to supposedly “oppress women.” Honestly, I’ve never thought about it this way until she made a big deal out of it. As a women myself I’m not offended by writers encorporating “mystical births.” I don’t feel it’s degrading at all to women. Movies are made to be fictional; Accept it. Stop whining and using your gender as an excuse to be dramatic.