Pregnancy reveal (not mine)
What we can learn about how men talk about pregnant women
Hi horny readers! Thank you so, so much for reading the ADULT SEX ED newsletter.
New here? Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a filmmaker, comedy writer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter in 2023. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!
I took last two weeks off and to say that a lot happened in the news is an understatement. Some of those events involved pregnancy, so that’s today’s topic. What do men’s thoughts on pregnancy reveal about the state of our society, past and present?
Previously at a Women’s History Month event, President Trump said “I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.” A couple of weeks ago, he elaborated on that by discussing plans on how to increase the birth rate in the United States. The ideas on how to increase the birth rate included teaching classes about periods, giving women medals who have many children, and paying women $5000 to have a baby.
Classes about periods aren’t inherently bad—we spend so much time in sex ed teaching kids to be afraid of having sex, getting pregnant, and getting AIDS (because *obviously* that’s what would happen), and many people don’t know the science behind actually getting pregnant when the time comes. On the flip side, the rhythm method, which helps individuals track their menstrual cycles to either prevent pregnancy or promote fertility, is taught in schools in Scandinavian countries as part of sex education. It seems like these government funded classes won’t mention the birth control part.
Paying women $5,000 to have a baby is laughable, not only because the average hospital bill with insurance in the United States is a few thousand dollars. Without insurance, an average vaginal birth is around $13,000 and a C-section is at least double that according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That doesn’t include pre and post-natal care, childcare, maternity/paternity leave, lost wages, etc. There are other countries that offer paid incentives from the government for women who have given birth, but it’s not structured as a cash prize. I floated the $5,000 amount to a few friends who are single moms and they were a combination of enraged and amused. There’s no one-time cash prize that can replace tax breaks, paid family leave, and make up for the current policies that make it really hard for new mothers to work. Not only can most people not afford to start families, but the US maternal mortality rate is still higher than other developed nations.
As for the medals, that’s where we are suddenly in sinister territory. The Honor Cross of the German Mother was an award first introduced by the Nazi regime in 1938 to encourage married German women to give birth to many children. Women were awarded bronze for four children, silver for six children, and gold for eight children. It was an incentive to breed certain children—Aryan ones only. The Soviet Union also gave medals to women and that tradition is carried on today in Kazakhstan. Make America Kazakhstan Again.
This emphasis on birth didn’t come out of nowhere. Vice President J. D. Vance and Elon Musk are both enthusiastic pro-natalists. I wrote about breeding kinks and the pro-natalist movement two months ago here. There are many examples of this ideology in fundamentalist groups and one example is the Quiverfull movement, followed by Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, known for ugly clothes and the reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting. The movement follows strict gender roles, the women wear modest clothes, shun birth control, and are encouraged to have as many kids as possible, based on Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them."
The newer pro-natalist movement (sometimes called the bro-natalist movement) claims having more babies is the only way to save civilization, but from what? There was a recent conference in Austin TX called Natal Con attended by mostly white men, where people discussed “demographic collapse.” While the organizers claim that the purpose isn’t to promote eugenics, they recognize that their goals overlap with the goals of some white supremacist organizations. Some factions of the new movement say the quiet part out loud—that women shouldn’t have careers. Of course most men I know don’t actually feel this way, especially when they’re faced with the actuality of present-day economics!
From the beginning of time, pregnancy has been weaponized and some men have always held these beliefs about women. Since the written language was largely reported by men, the slang words to describe a pregnant person are also revealing. Please enjoy the following post from last year about being a “defective typewriter.”
I remember watching Grease as a kid, probably at around 7 or 8 when I was cast in a summer camp production. I didn’t understand the scene when Rizzo informs her friend Marty that she’s pregnant because it’s basically a masterclass of euphemisms. First, Rizzo says that she feels like a defective typewriter because she skipped a period. In the scene that follows, her condition is referred to as P.G., a bun in the oven, knocked up, and a mistake.
The reason why Rizzo and her friends might not have used the actual word is that Grease is a period movie—it’s set in the 1950s, even though it was released in 1978. In the 1950s, the word pregnant was deemed too obscene for TV. On I Love Lucy, a pregnant Lucille Ball couldn’t actually say she was pregnant on CBS (even showing her pregnancy was a huge deal, but CBS eventually allowed it). The episode’s title was “Lucy Is Enceinte,” the french word for pregnant.
The earliest known use of the word pregnant is in the Middle English period (1150—1500). Since it’s been uncouth to use the actual word, both in society and on TV, there were many euphemisms that developed over time. The written language has been mostly contributed to by men throughout history. Just like in the other editions of the history of slang that I’ve written (links below), there are overarching themes that reveal society’s view of women, sex, and in this case, pregnancy.
Theme #1: euphemisms to reflect that no one could say the real thing because they weren’t allowed, or because pregnancy is an embarrassment.
Expecting, with child, in a family way, in a delicate condition, in the club
It’s a country club, I assume. These really common euphemisms conjure images of tight lipped wasps for me.
Many of the terms for sex involve destruction (bang, hammer, rail). In the first edition of the history of slang, I researched the words for vaginas over time. While the euphemisms for a penis through time have been some kind of weapon or useful tool, vaginas have often been infantilized, or compared to receptacles, homes, or holes. That’s reflected in these next two themes:
Theme #2: Pregnancy is an affliction, often given to the pregnant person by a man.
Knocked up, banged up, jacked up, stung by a serpent, poisoned, breeded up, up the pole (first used all the way back in Ulysses!)
Theme #3: Women are a receptacle, not a participant.
Bun in the oven, pea in the pod, bat in the cave, full of it, harboring a fugitive
Theme #4: Well, she’s fat now. Also, she’s done.
Big, belly bumping, blown up, eating for two, gonna pop, as big as a barrel, done, in pig, belly up, ruin’t, spoiled, out of circulation
Theme #5: Oops.
A mistake, in trouble, caught, in a fix
Overall, very few terms reflect growing a life, but many of them reflect the ending of one. The overarching theme is that pregnancy is something that happens to you, not something you participate in. This is important because it’s reflected in policy and politics, and the policing of pregnant people’s bodies.
The strangest euphemism I found was the rabbit died. There was an early pregnancy test where a woman’s urine was injected into a rabbit. The rabbit would be dissected and the ovaries examined for changes. It was thought that a positive test would cause the rabbit to die, but technically the rabbit died either way to be dissected. The term rabbit test was first recorded in 1949 and in the 1975 song “Sweet Emotion,” Steven Tyler sings "You're telling her things but your girlfriend lied / You can't catch me 'cause the rabbit done died."
Like most euphemisms, it always depends on the delivery. While some people may find it creepy, preggophilia is a rather common sexual fetish (also known as maiesiophilia or maieusophoria). I guess if an erotic insemination fantasy involved being filled up, it takes on a different tone. There are more romantic terms that invoke the actual process, like giving life and in bloom, but not every pregnancy feels like a total miracle. The actual word “pregnant” has French and Latin roots and means before birth, and now that we can actually say it, it’s usually the best way to go.
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