Freedom, men in pregnancy movies, and Momlife_comics

The internet loves a good dogpile. Social media moves swiftly and furiously when a new "main character" has been announced, and it's crazy how a nearly anonymous someone becomes a talking point around the world. With all the posting about Ana Mardoll today or whoever is the new hot topic by the time this posts, it may be hard to remember that just days ago that target was... Momlife_comics. 

Momlife_comics is an Instagram comic that became the target of rage, amusement, and mockery for about a day on Twitter. I honestly don't know how the recent attention started, and I've decided for the sake of my sanity not to find out (researching Twitter accounts seemed like a rather depressing idea of how to spend my time). I do know, though, that the reach of the attention was vast; my husband and I have shockingly different Twitter algorithms and follow very different people, but when I started talking to him about Twitter dogpiles and an online comic, he immediately said, "Oh yeah, I saw that. The one about a couple with no faces?"  

Reposting screenshots of a few bland one or two panel comics, many people on Twitter acted like the Instagram comic was the most toxic thing they had ever seen for one reason or another. The woman was either a shrew or a martyr, her husband was either weaponizing incompetence or in a thankless and abusive marriage. I also saw many posts shocked and appalled at the number of followers the comic had, people expressing absolute horror that so many women on Instagram called the comics "relatable."

Now, I'm not going to try and analyze whether or not the comic creator and her husband are good people or in a healthy marriage. Like most people on Twitter and Instagram, I don't personally know them, and it's not my place to say. I'm also not going to talk about whether Momlife_comics is a good comic or not. I'm not especially interested in that question, and ultimately what comics seem "good" is often subjective and more about personal taste. What I want to address is WHY people (outside the Twitter mob) likely follow it. Namely, it highlights something that many female parents struggle to articulate but are deeply aware of: Male Parent Autonomy and Freedom. Basically, the freedom of "Dad-life" compared to "Mom-life." 

In heterosexual-presenting relationships, childcare in our societal context often falls more on the female parent than the male one. This is for a number of reasons, both biological (carrying the child and possibly breastfeeding, the effect of postpartum hormones) and social (the difference in expectations and length for maternity vs paternity leave, the societal norms of gender roles, possible difference in monetary earnings). Even when household responsibilities and work are evenly split, the labor of Motherhood (with a capital M) can make it feel very smothering. The mother often, again for various reasons, gives up parts of her freedom and identity in order to do her labor, while the father may not need to. 

Many of Momlife_comics focus on this dichotomy. The infamous peach comic (a mother sees a peach and thinks to save it for her children, compared to a father who sees a peach and thinks to have it as a treat for himself in his morning smoothie) has been harped on too much for objective analysis, but two other comics seem to hit on the same idea. In one, a mother feels she has to give a long disclaimer and give children instructions about where she'll be and what they should do if they need anything before she goes to the bathroom. The father, in contrast, can just leave to go to the bathroom without saying anything. There's no expectation of a needed explanation. In another comic, a father's nap alone on a couch is depicted, along with a list of "Things Only Dads Can Pull Off." In the next slide, this is contrasted with a mother's nap where her body is literally being used as a pillow and bed for her children. The father has the freedom of space and bodily autonomy that the mother doesn't feel she has. 

This isn't the experience of either every mother or every heterosexual-presenting couple. But it's relatable enough that many mothers either follow or comment on Momlife_comics because they relate to this feeling. They feel seen. 

While I personally did not relate to all of the comic's ideas (especially the exaggerated essentialism and occasionally passive-aggressive tone), I've definitely had times when I'm breastfeeding at six in the morning and baby turns and spits up all. over. me. that I'm a bit resentful that my husband is able to sleep and be spit-up free in that moment. I've felt the labor of Motherhood when my baby will only contact-nap on me or only stop crying if I sway and pat him a certain way that his dad can't replicate. Heck, I'm writing this very sentence on my phone in one hand while my baby is cradled in my other arm and literally feeding off of my body. 

Motherhood can feel smothering, transforming, and consuming. And, while I'm sure there are fathers and other gendered parents who have very similar experiences, it's a feeling broadly shared by many cis-women who become mothers. Thus the easily title of the Instagram comic that so many women readers relate to: Momlife.

This difference in freedom occurs even before birth, of course. The dystopian overturning of Roe v. Wade made it abundantly clear the difference in freedom between many men and women during pregnancy. Even before that overturning, I found those differences featured and reflected in two movies I watched during my own pregnancy: Knocked Up and Baby on Board.

You've likely heard of (and maybe even seen) one of these movies. Judd Apatow (screenplay writer and director of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, Funny People, This is 40, and The King of Staten Island) has become a Hollywood icon, and the 2007 film Knocked Up is one of his best known films. As of this writing, the movie is certified 89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Baby on Board is less acclaimed and less well-known. It was released two years after Knocked Up and was written by... honestly no one you've heard of. They've done a handful of B-movies, Hallmark Christmas movies, and one of the writers worked on a film titled The Dogfather, which is surely a masterpiece. As of this writing, Baby on Board is only 20% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Despite a difference in acclaim and overall quality, these two movies share some shockingly similar plot-points, and they both show the vast difference in freedoms between their male and female leads. Both movies feature sacrificing and driven women alongside men who are able to act terribly, irresponsibly, and selfishly for a majority of the film before they are redeemed by meeting a bare-minimum standard before their baby arrives. 

In Knocked Up, Seth Rogan plays Ben Stone, a stoner who is working on an idea for a website but otherwise is broke and unemployed. Katherine Heigl plays Alison Scott, a career-driven E! entertainment presenter who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with Ben. The odd-couple routine commences as they both prepare for their new baby, though the film shows a vast difference in what each character must do for their arc by the end of the film. 

Alison is shown balancing her career with her preparation for motherhood, conducting an interview in one scene and buying a stack of baby books in another. Ben just gets to be the lovable jokester for most of the film, giving a kind of humor-laden "moral" support to Alison but otherwise doing little. Not long after she asks him to read some of the baby books she purchased, Ben gets stoned and, during an earthquake, forgets that Alison has slept over. After she becomes upset that he didn't think to try and protect her and their unborn baby during an emergency (not to mention has done little else to take away her stress or help her workload preparing for the baby during the film), the cracks start to deepen in Ben and Alison's relationship. 

Both Alison and Ben, however, have revelations that cause them to want to change. For Alison, it's seeing her sister "nag" her brother-in-law Pete, played by Paul Rudd, at her niece's birthday party. After this, Alison reflects on how she should accept Ben for who he is rather than trying to “train him” the way her sister attempts to train her husband. Ben's revelation also comes with the help of Paul Rudd's character Pete; the two men fly to Vegas and trip on mushrooms while watching Cirque Du Soleil. During his drug trip, Ben has a mushroom-inspired revelation: "I should have read the baby books." He admits to Pete that he didn't because reading them would make the pregnancy and his journey toward becoming a father seem "real." 

Alison and Ben's reconciliation happens as she is going into labor. He shows he has read the baby books by explaining to her what is happening with her contractions (why Apatow has Alison surprised to learn about the term "bloody show" is beyond me; she's the person who bought all the books that Ben read in the first place, after all) and generally takes charge during her labor. This includes, by the way, telling Alison's sister (the person who supported Alison all the way through her pregnancy, including when Ben and her husband ran off to Vegas to watch Cirque Du Soleil and trip) that she is banned from the birthing room (something Alison did not ask him to do). This is presented as something heroic and responsible; Ben is "taking charge" and acting like a patriarch. He has worked on himself. He has read the baby books. He has stepped up. All is forgiven.

Years after this movie's release, Kathrine Heigl said in an interview that she found the movie rather "sexist." After all, she explained, the men in the movie got to be "lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys," while the women had to be "humorless," responsible, nagging, and "uptight." In my view, she's not wrong. The whole time I watched the movie, I was also just infuriated that, as an audience, we barely see what Alison goes through in the story. We get a little bit of her trying to keep her place at her job by (badly) hiding her pregnancy. We see her gradually become frustrated with Ben's childishness and irresponsibility and then more rapidly come to the realization that she needs to accept Ben for who he is. But what about her own struggle with identity and becoming a mother? When does it seem "real" for her? Alison cannot run off to Vegas to do 'shrooms and have a revelation about motherhood. She stays home and goes to kids birthday parties. She buys the baby books. She goes to work. She does what she's supposed to. Her only featured growth is to learn to accept Ben. 

Baby on Board is... so much worse. I'm not going to recap the whole plot, but essentially a woman named Angela (played by Heather Graham) and her husband Curtis (played by Jerry O'Connell) learn they are going to have a baby, right as a series of miscommunications cause their marriage to start to fall apart. Curtis moves out of their shared home and refuses to speak with his wife for most of her pregnancy. While Angela struggles to balance her career (also trying to comedically hide her pregnancy from her boss, the same as Heigl's Alison) with getting ready for the birth of her baby, Curtis parties like a single guy with his friends, at one point ending up in a hotel (also in Vegas? This movie really did share a lot of qualities with Knocked Up) with a sex worker. The fact that he doesn't sleep with her is a choice the movie frames as nearly heroic. See, the film seems to say, he's a good guy who actually loves his pregnant wife who he essentially abandoned.

Like Ben in Knocked Up, Curtis' redemption comes from him doing the absolute bare minimum: besides the aforementioned not cheating on his pregnant wife, he is framed as a "good dad" as he sneaks into the Lamaze classes that Angela is attending without him so he can spy on the class and know the breathing techniques. 

Again, like in Knocked Up, the couple reconcile at the delivery, where the male lead is able to reveal that he engaged in the most basic of prep (for Ben it was reading the baby books, for Curtis it was learning about Lamaze breathing) and thus all is forgiven. 

As a pregnant woman when I watched these movies, I found myself shocked that both of these endings were framed as happy and unproblematic. The pregnant women in both films are tasked with being responsible for everything in their pregnancies, which they both handle while fighting for promotions or projects at their competitive jobs. The films both seem to treat it as expected that they will do what's "right" and responsible at each stage, learning what needs to be learned and preparing for their roles as mothers. Because they are the ones who biologically have to become mothers (neither movie seriously discusses abortion), neither woman is given an arc about growing, struggling, or accepting that. It is taken as a given that they will fulfil their roles.  Meanwhile, the male characters are free to be in denial, to mess up and grow, to slowly accept their new realities... potentially while partying in Vegas. 

This expectation of Motherhood, of the women being the ones who are by default expected to be in the responsible parent role, is present in both of these films. In both of these movies, in many other cultural works, and in Momlife_comics, there is a reflections that male parents often seem to have freedoms that female parents don't. The freedom of their bodies, the freedom to leave without explanation, the freedom to care differently, the freedom to mess up and be rewarded for growth rather than failure. 

Seth Rogan's Ben gets to take mushrooms in Vegas; the faceless dad in Momlife_comics gets to eat the damn peach.