Bringing Up Baby

AskMen.com, an online lifestyle magazine, enjoys a larger readership than Maxim, GQ, and Men’s Health, with 15 millions visitors each month. According the their website, AskMen’s readers are "confident, successful and interesting men," and AskMen’s mission is to "help guys become Better Men."

Becoming a Better Man doesn’t have much to do with knowledge about pregnancy, apparently—even though AskMen.com is clearly meant for straight, cisgendered men interested in sex with straight, cisgendered women—because there are only five articles on the topic (notwithstanding news on celebrity pregnancies), two of which are exclusively about sex.

Welcome to Wisteria Lane, where every neighbor is a potential killer, every friend a potential enemy, and every woman victim to TV’s most overused childbearing tropes. Join me as we take a tour of these tropes—we need not even leave Wisteria Lane.

Let’s face it: Dexter doesn't do women many favors. "Career women" are not sympathetic characters, "housewives" are vapid, and on the whole, women with power are conniving, dangerous seductresses.

Nothing instills a fear of pregnancy more than watching childbirth scenes that take place during the Medieval period.. or the Renaissance... or during the Enlightenment... or any time, really, before the twentieth century. Screaming mistresses/courtesans/queens/princesses lay flushed in their canopied doily beds as frantic women flutter about the room, dipping cloths in hot water. Onscreen stories from the olden days are generally about royal or famously wealthy and powerful families, so the message we get is that childbirth was a horrifying pursuit, even for the always-beautiful progeny of the upper classes.