Pregnancy
Show Notes
Today we’re going to talk about a sometimes polarizing topic—pregnancy in romance. We think pregnancy poses some interesting narrative questions and conflicts. For historical romance novels, babies and pregnancy bring up questions that aren’t really as much of a contemporary concern like legitimate heirs and who will inherit what estate. What does a person do if they have a child outside of wedlock? More universally, how does this pregnancy affect the relationship? Sanjana (@baskinsuns) join us today to give us some of her thoughts as well!
Sanjana’s Twitter and Instagram
Books Referenced
Life’s Too Short by Abby Jiminenz
Seven Nights in a Rogue’s Bed by Anna Campbell
Simply Love by Mary Balogh
Devil in Disguise by Lisa Kleypas
Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
The Rakess by Scarlett Peckham
The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan
A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath
Black Silk by Judith Ivory
A Lady Awakened by Cecilia Grant
Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught
The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian
A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant
Not Quite a Husband by Sherry Thomas
Thief of Shadows by Elizabeth Hoyt
Lily by Patricia Gaffney
Destiny’s Surrender by Beverly Jenkins
Nobody’s Baby but Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Forever & Ever by Patricia Gaffney
Lord of Darkness by Elizabeth Hoyt
Works Cited
Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison
Transcript
Beth
Welcome to Reformed Rakes, a historical romance podcast that will carry our arguments to term. I'm Beth, and I'm on BookTok under the name BethHaymondReads.
Emma
I'm Emma, a law librarian in writing about justice and romance at the Substack Restorative Romance.
Chels
My name is Chels. I'm the writer of the romance Substack, The Loose Cravat, a romance book collector, and BookTok under the username chels_ebooks.
Beth
Today, we're going to talk about a sometimes polarizing topic, pregnancy and romance, or pregnancy trope. First off, pregnancy on its own isn't really a trope. As Emma spoke about in our miscommunication episode, tropes follow certain beats. Within the realm of pregnancy, yes, there are certain tropes, and we'll talk about them today. For example, secret baby, I need an heir, unplanned pregnancy, et cetera. Someone said this in our group chat, but calling it pregnancy trope is akin to calling marriage, marriage trope. Second, yes, you can definitely have a preference, and perhaps maybe pregnancy and kids as prominent story lines doesn't really interest you. That's completely fair. Sometimes, though, people use the preference argument to hide behind some unkind comments or reactions. I understand where some people are coming from, where maybe they feel like pregnancy and kids reinforce one kind worldview or approach to couples or some readers wish to see experiences closer to their lives. But there is a level of disdain I don't like when I see throw-up emojis in the caption of a video talking about pregnancy and romance. I think pregnancy poses some interesting narrative questions of conflicts. For historical romance novels, babies and pregnancy bring up questions that aren't really as much of a contemporary concern like legitimate heirs and who will inherit what estate.
Beth
What does a person do if they have a child outside of wedlock? And then more universally, how does this pregnancy affect the relationship? So please join us in our discussion about pregnancy. Okay, so today we have a guest, Sanjana. She's on most places on Social Media under the handle BaskinsSuns. Is that how I say it? Yes, that's perfect. She's currently working on her PhD and studies sex, gender, and women's health. So this background feels very apt for today's episode. So thank you for joining us.
Emma
Yay. We're so excited. This is so exciting here.
Sanjana
This is going to be so good.
Beth
Okay, so to set up why we're talking about this, we're going to have Chels talk about some backlash they got on all platforms after they posted about pregnancy on Twitter. I think Chels's tweet sums up how we all feel about how people talk about pregnant characters, and then we can get into some criticisms of why people say they don't like it. And we'll have Sanjana jump in here as well because she posted about pregnancy on TikTok and also got some interesting comments. So this is Chels's tweet. Honestly, the way BookTok jokes about pregnancy trope and pregnancy trope in quotes is so messed up. Pregnant people exist. It's a thing that happens to a lot of people. How shitty would it be to be a pregnant person and watch someone fake gag at encountering that in a book? So Chels?
Chels
I did not know what was coming. That is something that I would normally tweet in circles because we had Twitter circles at the time, but I didn't. And so that... Unfortunately, I did have to listen to some people say some not very nice things. So I tweeted this after seeing a TikTok where someone pantomimed retching after encountering, I'm putting in this in scare quotes, pregnancy trope in a romance novel. What I explained in a follow-up tweet is that people seem to interpret my tweet as, You are a bad person if you don't like to read about pregnancy, when really I don't care what people do or don't like to read. Personal preference is one of the most boring conversations in romance, in my opinion. It tends to stifle really interesting confrontations and critiques and gets us stuck in this loop where we talk about romance novels as choose your own adventure stories rather than art. I don't care if you actively avoid pregnancy plots or if you don't like them. That is entirely your business, and you don't owe me an explanation. But there's this phenomenon of how we talk about pregnancy and romance that I find really weird and upsetting, where a very common medical condition gets diluted to being a single trope, which ends up in some casual cruelty.
Chels
For example, filming yourself retching at the idea of a pregnant person in a romance novel. And that's what I was critiquing. Maybe it's not a kind thing to do regardless of what your preference is. And I think we should be more cognizant of that. Interestingly, I didn't get a lot of backlash on Twitter where I could respond to it. A lot of responses to me were on TikTok or Reddit, but without the context of my tweet. So people were getting really heated at something that I didn't say, which was very frustrating. What's also really interesting is romance internet has a very difficult time alotting for gender nonconformity and queerness. And that's something that I push up against a lot as a non-binary creator. But for this one specific instance, they were treating me like a trad wife.
Sanjana
Oh, my God.
Chels
I got so indignant about that. I'm like, How dare you speak to me like that? I am gay.
But they were thinking the only reason that I could ask for us to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way we speak about pregnant people, because when you say pregnancy trope, that's what you're doing, because pregnancy isn't really a trope, is that I would be investing in having everybody conform to the suburban fantasy of mom, dad, two kids, white picket fence. It was just very patronizing. Also, just to assume that these are the only type of people that get pregnant, I could go on.
Beth
Yeah.
Chels
Which is why I have a podcast and why I should never tweet, because this is really something that I want to be able to explain myself about. And while I don't think my tweet was unclear, I do think that because it was so brief and then people were coming across it, it really raised their hackles.
Beth
There was definitely some uncharitable interpretations, or people wanted to frame themselves as being not as terrible as they actually were being.
Chels
Raise your hand if you were personally victimized by Chels's tweet.
Sanjana
The defensiveness was really consistent. I think there's I don't know. I feel a lot of ways about Twitter, and I guess now X. But I think there was this feeling that personal preference should translate to political leaning or alignment. It seemed like in a lot of ways, people felt like they were being called, I don't know, a conservative or I don't know. They were just called something that they didn't want to be called by this invitation to simply be kinder to pregnant people, which was really odd. And I also saw a lot of denial. So your tweet had made me think about an essay from Da'shaun Harrison on desirability and fatness and the ways in which desirability is a condition of being treated as human. And this was specifically mentioned in the context of fatness and blackness. Harrison authored Belly of the Beast, which is about the relationship between fat phobia and anti-blackness. I had stitched those two notions together and posted a TikTok about the overlap between being perceived as desirable, who is allowed to be a romantic subject, the dehumanization that pregnant people, and especially black pregnant people, would stand from outsiders, and the disgust that people articulate towards pregnancy and romance.
Sanjana
I was maybe attempting to do a little bit too much. I see in retrospect, there's just not a lot of room for complicated conversation about things like this in a TikTok comment section. And in revisiting the comments, I think that was particularly clear. There was a lot of like, You're overthinking things, and this is a chronically online take, and lots of people write, Pregnancy as a Lazy Cop Out, which I mean, as with many things, if something is written poorly, it will read poorly. And I'm not sure that pregnancy is really the condition there, so much as poor craft. But one of the things that I found really, really interesting when I went back and looked at that was this passionate feminist defense for a world in which child rearing didn't have to be the end all be all of a happily ever after. And I totally agree with that as a child-free person who also studies infertility for a living. But it's also really interesting because pregnant people and pregnant people of color are, of course, the most vulnerable and unprotective populations in America. And as far as feminist projects go, pregnancy is the site of the most important conversations on bodily autonomy, susceptibility to violence, the intervention of the state on the individual, gender.
Sanjana
It's one of those things that was really odd because child-free people matter, of course, but it does feel a bad faith engagement with feminism to be like, Well, I'm really mean to pregnant people because of feminism. It's not a great take. And also, very importantly, why does being child-free or not wanting to be pregnant equate to a license to be downright cruel about pregnancy when it's fictionally represented in a text? And it was really crushing because I got stitches from people who follow me that really affirmed the fact that they were experiencing a hostile environment online after they became pregnant. Cass at Cassidy's Little Library said something really poignant about the whole experience when she stitched my TikTok and said that between BookTok and the Girl with the List, she loves this online community. But when she was most vulnerable, she felt the least welcome in reference to her postpartum experience. And the Girl with the List is for the uninitiated, a woman who keeps a list of all of the reasons not to have children. This began with things like, nipples can fall off during breastfeeding, but has increasingly just come to refer to things that pregnant people or parents do or that kids do that other people find gross or unseemly.
Sanjana
And the account has stitched and accounted for lots of people who are just sharing ordinary details of their ordinary lives without inviting Girl with a List to document their ordinary lives in that way. So it was supposed to be this educational effort to say, Look at all the things that people don't tell you about becoming pregnant. But now it's a lot of that casual cruelty. And of course, the blame for how terrible pregnant and early parenting can be is concentrated on the individual who's probably going through a tough time as opposed to the systems that are actively hostile towards pregnant people. I guess that comes back to the whole fatness conversation as well, where The pregnant body and the fat body are both extremely up for public discussion, speculation, surveillance, even consumption. And this is shared a lot in the feminist literature. All bodies are, of course, in some ways under surveillance in the shared sphere of discourse, but fat and pregnant people are particularly susceptible to that scrutiny, often along the lines of assisting in one's health and well-being. It's always like, We can offer commentary on you because you have some health condition that warrants commentary.
Sanjana
And I don't think that's very different across TikTok.
Emma
I hate the list. I hate the list so much. It's one of my least favorite TikTok phenomenons. I cringe whenever I see people in the comments of someone talking about being pregnant and people commenting like, Where's the girl at the list? Where's the girl at the list? Because I think that experience, just putting yourself in the shoes of that creator or the person who's about to have a baby and the comments are not the response of compassion or empathy. It's your experience is so scary that it's deterring me from this experience. Why are you even going through this? I think anything that characterizes pregnancy as scary without contextualizing why it's scary just is what boils my blood because it's one of the most fundamental things of existence. We are all the result of someone being pregnant. We were all once the babies of someone else's condition of being pregnant. Nobody should be pregnant without wanting to be pregnant. But it's also true that sometimes people are pregnant without the desire to be pregnant and will carry those pregnancies to term. That's the reality of the world that we live in. That fear and that lack of care towards anyone on the range of desire to be pregnant is one of the reasons that pregnancy is so scary.
Emma
We have this issues with maternal mortality rates in the United States because of this lack of interest and care for the condition of being pregnant. I could see TikTok as the space where people can talk about their symptoms, people can talk about the realities of their condition and get responses where they say, Oh, I also experience that, or that's a cause of concern. But when the comments are filled up with, That's so scary, from very benign things to things that very scary, when people tell their birth stories and they're filled with trauma and fear, and the response is, Where's the girl with the list? It's just this huge disconnect as we're in this moment, and this moment, I guess, is our entire lives, of reproductive health in the United States being taken away from us. It's so disheartening to see that community and that reality infiltrate both pregnant people's spaces, but also booktok, where I see this huge overlap between the two. People also, when they're talking about personal preference, don't seem to want to connect the two. They think that their personal preference happens in a silo that gets them out of the cruelty that they see in other places.
Sanjana
Also, there's something about the list and this very specific discourse about pregnant people that doesn't make room for ambivalence. It doesn't make room for people to process, I don't know if I want kids, or I have some regrets about having kids, or I have complicated feelings about the reproductive destiny that's imposed on me without it being this really binary decision of kids are crotch goblins or kids are my life's purpose, which is just a false binary. That's just not how it is for most people.
Beth
Yeah, it's interesting because I come from... So I grew up Mormon, and so I just have a foot in that world where I've seen women leave that sphere. And they have that ambivalence you're talking about, where it's like, they don't regret having their kids. A lot of Mormon culture pushes you to get married young, have kids young, have a lot of kids, which has maybe lightened up in the past few years, but that's still the rhetoric that comes down. But I think I see in that community more of accepting you can love your kids, but also maybe grieve the life maybe you would have had if you had different choices or different information operating at that time. So yeah, I really like that. I think it should be allowed to express multiple feelings and you not be forced to one end of either spectrum. So we've been talking about some heavy hitting things already. I love it. I did want to talk about a few common critiques I see. I went through Reddit and TikTok and Twitter just to see what are the three lines that people are saying. And so, yeah, we already talked about this one.
Beth
People don't want to tie the HEA to kids. People think there's an oversaturation of babylogues or children as part of the We got together and created a family. Another one, there are a lot of comments where people talk about what the limit is for them, so why they don't like pregnancy. So maybe they had a miscarriage or they were going through fertility treatments of some kind are the more common ones people bring up. I often find these people feel like they need to qualify why they're avoiding pregnancy and will trauma dump in the comments. I don't think you need to qualify. If you don't want to read something, you don't have to tell people why. Just don't read that thing. It's fine. Some people don't mind pregnancy or kids as long as it's not the main plot of the book. And this is a quote I found on Reddit It. "Hate it," in reference to pregnancy. "Pregnancy and children ruin the romantic element for me. If there absolutely must be pregnancy included in the book..."
Chels
If there must.
Beth
"… Then keep it where it belongs, the epilogue." Or someone said this, which makes me more angry. "I don't mind the pregnancy trope, but I just can't have it portrayed in a weird, gross way. It can be part of the story, just not all of it." Another one. "Many parents say that pregnancy isn't sexy and babies are hard work, and they want a fantasy, not the real life." And this is another quote from Reddit. "Now that I have a baby, I always roll my eyes when they get pregnant, and that becomes the main focus of the relationship/book. I want escapism from being a parent." And then I think related to that, I've seen some people talk about how authors don't depict pregnancy realistically. Thoughts, feelings on these critiques?
Sanjana
Oh, boy.
Chels
So much.
Sanjana
Well, I mean, I feel like for each one of these, I have so many thoughts. The whole pregnancy not being sexy thing is warped because I very distinctly remember this comment I got on my TikTok about how pregnancy read as body horror to someone. And that was a really crazy thing to say about a real condition that real people go through. But even if you accept this premise of pregnancy as body horror, I also read a lot of monster romance, and especially in the past year or so, I've read a lot. And exactly the things that people find repugnant about pregnant people is the stuff that is celebrated the cornerstone of eroticism in Monster Romance. It's the bodily fluids, the malleability of the body, it is The uncertainty of the form, the changeability, the danger aspect, even some of this grotesqueness stuff is the thing that's really exciting and titulating about monstrous bodies. But we have none of that same excitement and energy for pregnant humans, which is really bananas to me. And then I guess I was also trying to hold some space for the fact that historicals, in particular, use pregnancy as the stopping point for a character.
Sanjana
So everyone's got a dead mom who died in childbirth. It's just this perennial thing that... You can't even list examples because there are so many books with dead pregnant mom or mom who died in childbirth. And in some sense, this immortality of the HIE is maybe challenged by maternal mortality rates, which is, I think, still really unfair. And in this way, I guess, pregnancy and disability have this interesting relationship with temporality that calls for some more expansive ideas, I think, of what the ever after constitutes. And I also am like, we already know that in most romances that are being read today, pregnancy is not equivalent with death, even in a historical. That happily ever after is still going to be reached. And so this existential wound, I guess, that people are frustrated with doesn't feel real. Also another thing from the comments that I remembered more recently is that lots and lots of people just don't really like their kids. We're really comfortable sharing that on the Internet to a bunch of strangers.
Chels
I'm always shocked by how many people are just like, Having kids is gross. I don't like my kids. I don't want to read about kids. I'm just like, Okay.
Beth
I feel like they're trying to position themselves as like, Well, I have kids and I don't like this, so you know it's bad. And I'm like, Okay.
Chels
It's like, Well, what would I know? Well, apparently I'm a trad wife, so If you give Chels that authority, they will take it. I'm not really thinking of real trad wives. I'm thinking of the TikTok trad wives that are fetish content.
Emma
Yeah, you're doing it for engagement. Yeah, for sure.
Chels
Where I'm just badly needing bread with my cleavage. I'm always surprised by that, too. One thing that I was thinking about, too, is that I think this might be another one because oftentimes I have really strong opinions about romance, and then I realize, Oh, I read a niche of romance. There are a lot of experiences that I just don't really know as well. But one thing I do have an interesting thought about, or I think my thought is interesting, is babylogues. So the babylogue is seen as ubiquitous, but I think that's actually a really recent thing because I read a lot of older books, and a lot of times they won't even have an epilog at all, and they might be more likely to have pregnancy in the stories themselves than at the end, sometimes multiple pregnancies by one of the main characters. I think we have this idea that romance has always been this one thing. And I know Babylogue is a pretty recent development. I like them, but also I could understand. I definitely understand why the ubiquity of them would be frustrating, just tying a happily ever after to having children, which we're going to talk about some books that decidedly don't do that.
Chels
But yeah, just interesting to me that that's how if we're going to view this as a regressive thing, which I don't think it is, but if you were to view it that way. It's also recent.
Emma
I guess I think the... Because I was thinking about books where they have sex and then the pregnancy leads to marriage. I haven't done an empirical study of this, so it may just be intuition. I think in more recent books that I've read, maybe the past decade, compared to older books, it seems like the marriage is more likely to come speculatively. Because you might be pregnant, we're going to get married. Where in older books, even 15 or 20 years ago, it's still in the century, it's more like, Let me know if you're pregnant. If you're pregnant, we'll get married. Which seems more, I imagine, historically accurate. Because I think the idea that people weren't having sex and just speculatively burying the first person they have sex with is a little absurd, if you think about it. People still, I don't know, wanted to figure it out. But even Lisa Kleypas and Mary Balogh, those books from 2000s, 2010 area, it's like, Let me know if you're pregnant. And then Tessa Dare, Sarah McClean, those more like, I think when they're going towards... It's like the act of penetrative sex triggers the marriage proposal, whether the character says yes or no.
Emma
That can sometimes happen in newer ones where the heroine will say, No, I don't want to get married to you just because we've had sex, but it still will trigger the proposal because they might be pregnant. That seems to be a change in the conception of what it means to have to get married has changed. Also thinking about body horror with what Sanjana was saying, I was thinking about the... I wrote this thing about Frankenstein in pregnancy when I was dealing with the idea that no one ever dies in childbirth in a romance novel because they literally can't because you can't... No one who's pregnant, who's the main character, is going to die. It's like, what happens when this potential for narrative gets cut off? There's this gap in the possibility of pregnancy endings for main characters. Other characters can die in childbirth, but the main character can't die in childbirth. But with Frankenstein, which is one of these origin text of body horror, if you look at the composition of that and the reality of Mary Shelley and how people tie her biographical reading to the writing of Frankenstein, the concerns of pregnancy and body horror in that writing deal with the lack of support around the pregnancy and the lack of support around child rearing rather than the act of being pregnant and also the maternal mortality with her mother dying.
Emma
It's this weird... If you look at the origin, you're like, Oh, body horror and pregnancy go together. It's like, actually, body horror and It's pregnancy when it's talked about or reviled and body horror go together. Rather, it's pregnancy in and of itself is not body horror. It's body horror when you don't have support, no one's listening to you, no one's empathizing with you.
Beth
I like what both Sanjana and Emma were talking about with, I guess people reviling pregnancy or having support around pregnant people. And then Sanjana tied it to there's a connection between pregnancy and disability. I think that's important to bring up because I think a lot of the outcomes that we get from pregnancy are coming from a lack of support. I feel like the way that sometimes romance readers talk about it, it's an individual thing as opposed to recognizing at a system level, we are leaving pregnant people to dry, and then they might actually end up become disabled afterwards.
Sanjana
When we talk about disability and romance and pregnancy and this overlap there, there's, I guess, a pregnant body also destabilized realizes our idea of a singular main character. The main character is all of a sudden physically contains more. I guess it just probes at a lot of the I don't know fully where I'm going with this. This is maybe not the most coherent thought. But in the ideal of a really contained romance, the main characters are immortal in this moment of youth. They're immortal and fixed in body and in time in the moment that the book is taking place, that the romance is taking place. But pregnancy shifts all of that. It makes you think about life after raising the child after the body after, because the body is not consistent over the course of the novel as it would be otherwise. And similarly with disability, the body is, again, different, especially if the disabling event happens on page or if if the character is very recently recovering from the disabling circumstance. And so there's something about this theoretical instability that I think pokes at this beautiful, fixed, perfect, liminal moment in which the romance takes place.
Sanjana
And I think a lot of people find that more psychologically unsettling than maybe they are willing to disclose, especially because I think so many of the comments were these impassioned defenses of, It's not pregnant bodies. I just hate that. I didn't know how to fully say it. Is it possible that both things are possible? Is it possible that you have, I guess, legitimate critiques of how this is happening and also inadvertently translate that into just being cruel towards pregnant people? Is it possible that this is pushing against all of the comforts of how a romance should take place, in your opinion? I don't know. It It was a really interesting time.
Beth
Okay, I really like that. We'll move on to... We've been talking about critiques that people have made and how valid those are, but there are critiques you could make about pregnancy. I think that's what's so frustrating about this conversation because I'm like, there's common things that authors use that make this storyline poorly written. So we're going to talk about some of those instances. And my example is actually from a contemporary novel, Life's Too Short by Abby Jimenez. And it was the first time I'd heard the term plot muppet, which is coined by the website Smart Bitches Trashy Books. So a plot muppet is, quote, a small child who has no purpose or development except to drive the plot forward. I think I'm more okay with having a character only serve a plot function. I guess my critique is more that you could have like, swapped out this newborn baby out with a broken pipe and kept the plot pretty much the same in this book. The The baby mostly serves as a meet cute between Adrienne and Vanessa, where Vanessa has custody of her newborn niece. I think Jimenez uses a newborn to show us Adrienne as a nice guy because he's good with the baby, and it's also a little different from your usual meet cute.
Beth
But I think this was a wasted opportunity to incorporate the baby more, or maybe just used a broken pipe because Adrienne was the landlord of the building. I don't know. I guess my argument is the newborn didn't feel fundamental enough. Why have this baby here? This newborn didn't feel all-consuming to Vanessa's life the way I thought it should have been. So, yeah.
Chels
That baby needs a job.
Beth
That baby needs a better plot function.
Chels
It needs a personality.
Emma
I love when kids are in books. I think I'm probably the person of all of us who enjoys pregnancy and family plots the most. I seek them out, which I think people also project that onto Chels and Sanjana, and I think both of you were like, I think I'm defending something that is not actually to my taste because you're just kind people.
Chels
Emma's the real trad wife.
Emma
I think I like when the kids serve... I think one of my favorite plots is adopted children, mixed family, especially when one of the characters is is unsure of their relationship to children.
Beth
Someone to hold.
Emma
Yeah, someone to hold. Or like Cousin West, when he's with the boys, I lose my mind. I just love it. But I think there has to be a character-related thing. This seems to really be plot, and that makes it weaker. It feels like a perfunctory baby, maybe, rather than... Again, I think it works better with children who have their own personalities. Maybe it would be hard to do with just a baby because a baby is not going to talk or have a personality.
Beth
I feel like newborns are more likely to serve just a plot function, but I feel like it should be very fundamental to the plot. If I took that baby out, then the whole plot would not make sense anymore.
Emma
Presumably, does the couple adopt the baby together and that makes their unit, and that's the happily ever after?
Beth
Yeah, I think she keeps the baby at the end. I need to reread it.
Chels
I'm just picturing Beth as a fairytale villain who takes the baby in the middle of the and replaces them with a broken pipe.
Emma
I do think I'm going to find her somewhere, I imagine someone swaddling the broken pipe. Like, Jen Hamilton, the nurse on TikTok who swaddles her chickens?
Beth
Okay.
Emma
She always swaddles things that aren't... She's like, Well, it's swaddle. And she's like, I'm so good at swattling because I'm a nurse. And so she swaddles her chickens. But I imagine her swaddling the broken pipe.
Beth
Yeah, swaddling is a talent. I never mastered, but that's impressive.
Sanjana
It's such a chaotic remix of a changeling.
Emma
All right, so I could talk about two books that I don't... I've been thinking about it. Most books that I don't like that I really have problems with have to do with reproductive something in one way or another, how they talk about it, I think I get the angriest at it, maybe because I seek out books where this happens the most. So two books that I... One I've definitely talked about before, how much I dislike this book is Seven Nights in a Rogue's Bed. And I have a lot of problems with this book, but on the pregnancy plot, this is one where the male main character has sex with a female character for the first time with no discussion of pregnancy or consequences, which, again, not atypical of historical romance. Sometimes that happens in of itself. It didn't make me that angry. But then before the second time they have sex, he decides that they need to plan for potential eventualities. The heroine makes it very clear she does not want to get married. That's integral to her character development or how she is characterized is that she does not want to get married for lots of reasons.
Emma
The hero makes it clear if there is a child, he will marry her to the point where he even tells her, basically, he will coerce her into marrying him. What drove me crazy is that the heroine, a very recent virgin, brings up potential methods of birth control, and the hero's response is that none of them are totally reliable. This is a quote from the book. So then they don't use any. Then, of course, she does get pregnant. She hides the truth from him, and then he finds out and insists on marrying her, though he now hates her for unrelated plot reasons that I won't get into. There are all these options for talking about birth control in historical romance. The author can blithely ignore it, which happens in a lot of books. They can attempt it, but then it fails, like with a French letter or coitus interruptens, not having access to it, talking about how it's hard to access or even talking about how it's not reliable. But this discussion of it exists and could potentially avoid the one thing the heroine does not want and the hero won't use it, it just made me so mad.
Emma
I think there was a stitch prompt maybe a year ago at this point. It was How do you feel about birth control in romance? It was obviously for all romance. I was like, I almost never think about birth control in historical romance unless it comes... Sometimes it comes up, but if it's not there, it's like, I don't really mind. But this was an example of the way birth control was talked about just drove me crazy. Then another one is by an author that I generally enjoy, Mary Balogh. But Simply Love is an example of her worst habit that annoys... It just drives me crazy when she does it. It's when a main character has to apologize to their parents for when the parents do a cruel thing. In this example, Anne, the heroine, has a child who is the product of a rape. She sees this as a mark on her virtue because of the way her family rejected her after the pregnancy. I really loved the relationship in this book. I thought it could have been one of my favorite Balogh books. Anne is learning to be intimate again after the violence done to her.
Emma
The mailman character, Sydnam, lost an eye, arm, and leg in the Peninsular War. Very Balogh hero. So he has to learn that Anne is not recoiling from him because of his disability, but because of the violence done to her. Anne has no interest in reconciling with her family. But then Sydnam keeps pushing her after they get married, when she gets pregnant again, to be with her family. Then during the meeting, her father and other family members are still blaming her for the rape. Anne, with the implied encouragement of Sydnam, forgives the family and ask for forgiveness in return in the name of moving on. The issue here is more how secondary characters treat a pregnant character, and Balogh frames it as Anne wants to be able to move on and have this connection with her family, even if she doesn't agree with her family's assessment of what happened to her. But it just boiled my blood again that nobody punches her dad in the face when he says, Of course, you seduced him. It was the closest I've ever come to throwing a book across the room. But again, the issue is really how secondary characters treat a pregnant character that they ostracize her from her family, that they abandon her in this time of need, independent of even the fact that it's the product of a rape.
Emma
There's just cruelties on top of cruelty to a character, and it just made me furious.
Chels
Yeah, that's making me mad.
Emma
Just I'm not thinking about it. It's what I would never recommend anyone to read unless you want to throw something against a wall.
Beth
You got some steam you need to get out.
Chels
I'm struggling with specific examples. I know I've read some, but I was looking through my good reads and it was just like, Oh, these are good books. I'm like, Maybe I just DNF a lot? I don't know. But I really, really, really do not enjoy the rewarded with a baby thing, where a character has a loss and is given a consolation pregnancy, or where a character struggles with getting pregnant, then is rewarded with a baby when they meet the right man to impregnate them. The latter is less of an issue in historical romance and contemporary for me, because there are lots of examples Where a woman thinks she's infertile because she has never had kids with her husband. But then when he dies and she's with someone new, she discovers that it was actually the husband that was infertile because there was really no way to know at that point, I believe. So it doesn't... I can see the logic in it sometimes, but in general, it's not something that I like. I think that it treats human life as replaceable And it would be very patronizing to me if I lost someone or I miscarried, and then it would be like, Oh, but you got pregnant again, so it's fine.
Beth
Right. Here's your replacement child for what you lost. But it doesn't work like that. Yeah, No.
Sanjana
Right. Or infertility is your fault for not choosing the right partner the first go around. This is what I really struggled with in Devil in Disguise by Lisa Kleypas, or I guess Kleypas, as I've been- It's Kleypas, no? As I've been mispronouncing it for years of my life. We looked up.
Beth
But she doesn't correct people, so that's on her. I'm not changing. We're all sticking with Kleypas.
Sanjana
Okay, yeah. That's none of my business. But yeah, it's what I dislike most about Devil in Disguise by Kleypas, who I admittedly have a huge soft spot for. But the FMC merit in that story, has explicitly stated that she has uterine fibroids and is unable to conceive a child, and her infertility is a core problem with her first husband, who ends up deciding to go on a journey to Boston to recuperate from the loss of this potential child they should have had together, and then he dies at sea. So Merrit is blaming herself and has all of this guilt for the loss of her husband and the way that she delivered this news about her fertility and her inability to have a child. And then Sebastian from Devil in Winter's Secret First Baby, pre-Evie, which is itself a complicated and controversial plot point. His son, Keir, wanders onto the scene and magically impregnates her. And it's extremely frustrating, and it's particularly sloppy writing. There's some passing conversation between care and merit about how her fertility issues don't pose a problem for him. He himself was adopted and sees that as a valuable way of having a family and a child if they should choose.
Sanjana
But yeah, interestingly, the gripes on Goodreads are a lot more about the secret baby of it all, as opposed to the magical baby of it all. I will also say that I've definitely read a few contemporaries that use pregnancy as a vehicle for some explicitly anti-abortion propaganda, and that has not been my experience with historicals. I will also say that I more often see this anti-abortion propaganda in dark romance and mafia-ish stuff. But yeah, it just hasn't been my experience in historicals. So I think sometimes claims that pregnancy is itself inherently anti-abortion propaganda are That's pretty exaggerated in my experience.
Emma
The Goodreads reviews of Devil in Disguise. I've not actually read this book front to back. I've picked up parts of chapters in it, but I read the Goodreads reviews as they were coming out when the book was published. And it really illuminated some of the takes that I think not just older romance readers have, but maybe people who came up with Lisa Kleypas, who maybe have been reading Lisa Kleypas for longer and are... I don't want to describe as anything to a generation specifically, but they were saying Even as it was coming out, they're anticipating. They're like, I won't be able to read this if Keir is... If Sebastian has children pre-Evie because it ruins the HEA of Evie and Sebastian. It's like, it seems almost like more magical thinking to think that Sebastian is a rake doesn't have a secret child. The whole thing in Devil and Winter is like, Sebastian fucks. It's like he has so much sex. And also, if Keir has this magic sperm, you imagine Sebastian also has magic sperm that's very virile. So it's like, this is just... The world building is weak, but also people's reaction to it really illuminated like, oh, people really hate some things that are...
Emma
It comes down to a lot of misogynistic talking about in some of these reviews where it was Evie is not really his happily ever after if he had a child with some other woman. I couldn't believe that I was reading that, and it was early in my romance days. Now I'm less surprised when people have bonkers takes about what is needed in order for a happily ever after to be real in their mind. But it did surprise me.
Beth
Yeah, I'm no longer surprised when romance readers have these conservative takes where I feel like a lot of the struggles that we are all having with how romance readers react to pregnancies, it's like they want things done in a particular order. How dare Sebastian have a baby with someone else? That's not part of the perfect vision of you only have babies with your one true love and stay married to that person or have them in the baby log.
Chels
Do you not love Lord of Scoundrels? Who are you?
Sanjana
It's interesting, that line about that line about Sebastian's virility. That is the epilog, essentially. Sebastian is so pleased with himself that his son has demonstrated proof of their generational virility by impregnating an infertile woman, essentially. It's not amazing in context or out of it, to be honest. But a rake is going to rake, I guess.
Chels
It's like aristocratic super sperm.
Emma
That's one of my least favorite characters of all time. My hatred of him only grows the further I get away from reading the book because I only think about his negative qualities.
Chels
Why would you say something so brave and yet so controversial? I actually don't mind him that much, but I don't... I don't know. That book tanks for me in the second half, but I like the first half. Yeah.
Beth
Not that anybody asked.
Emma
Devil in Winter is not even his worst presence. I hate his presence in every book that's not his. I'm like, Please leave me alone. Go away.
Beth
Yeah, a lot It's a fan service, I feel like. So we're going to talk a bit more about common pregnancy plots. Since this is a historical romance double podcast, our conversation will focus, obviously, on how this is handled in a historical setting or maybe pregnancy plots that are more unique to historicals. We're going to start with unplanned pregnancies because I think these can have different consequences in historicals. People are dealing with less effective birth control methods or perhaps more severe social repercussions for having a baby outside of marriage. Honestly, we built this category around The Rakess by Scarlett Peckham, which has an unplanned pregnancy, but there's a lot of thought and care that happens between the couple on how to avoid pregnancy before that happens. Sera, the heroine, It's been a minute since I read this book, but if I remember, I think she keeps a calendar of her cycle. So that's what birth control method she uses. And then when she initially approaches Adam about an affair, she stipulates no penetrate of sex. Of course, best laid intentions go right, and Sera gets pregnant, I think about halfway through the book. I particularly like the storyline because Sera is opposed to marriage, yet her future child will endure some stigma since she's born outside of marriage.
Beth
So I think having a baby raise the stakes and puts pressure on Sera to go against her previously held beliefs and wishes. So that's why I think Peckham pulled this off really well. Other books we like to talk about consider birth control and how to navigate a sex life where one partner might not want kids or simply not want to get pregnant.
Emma
Yeah. So I can talk about the Countess Conspiracy with this because something... I guess that comes up a lot in the discourse, especially in contemporary romance, they talk about, is birth control a deal breaker for you? Some people really like the performative, Oh, I'm going to pull the condom out of the box now. I'm putting the condom on. Aspect of a scene. And they're like, I won't read it if it doesn't happen. Though we also know some readers really hate the condoms. But in the Countess Conspiracy, or at least in historicals in general, my reading when I read it is like, why are you having penetrative sex? If there's a... We cannot have children for health reasons, for whatever reason. Romance that is so predicated in its marketing, it's like, Oh, we value female pleasure. We value women enjoying It's like, Well, then why are we valuing penetrative sex as part of the emotional arc so much? Because that's not everybody's favorite part. Then in the Countess Conspiracy, Violet has had lots of pregnancies, and her doctor has told her, If you get pregnant again, it could kill you. She's had all these miscarriages that really affects her health very acutely.
Emma
This was a huge issue in her first marriage because her husband really wanted her to get pregnant. And so he continued having sex to her to the point of basically non-consensual interactions because he was like, He didn't if she was going to die by having another miscarriage. So when she gets with Sebastian, she's really afraid of being able to tell him, Hey, our sex life will look substantially different than what you're used to because Sebastian's a rake. And it's a big part of how they discuss their relationship is that they will do everything in their relationship, both not to have kids and have children, but also to not have Violet ever be pregnant. And it seems like very mature and also responsible and doesn't rely on any narrative, conceit to get through it. But I love the way that Reproductive Health is talked about in this book. It's weird to group it with... I guess it's not weird, but I think some people might think it's weird to group it with a pregnancy book because the whole thing is that she's not getting pregnant. But I think if you expand pregnancy to reproductive health, then you can get the count as Conspiracy in there and also talk about pregnancy as plot much more neutrally.
Emma
What are we doing with the health aspect of this? I think Courtney Milan really pulls that off in The Countess Conspiracy.
Sanjana
I love that book.
Emma
It's so good. It's so good.
Beth
Haley has told us if we ever talk about it, that she has to be on here. So maybe a future episode.
Chels
Haley. Hi. Hello. I know you're listening. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah, that book is great. I was thinking, too, about a contracted spouse for the Prize fighter, while you were talking. That's not really a book where there are these... The stakes are a bit different because the main woman character in that book is a male impersonator. So getting pregnant would fuck up her career. Theodora. Yeah, Theodora. And then she has a marriage of convenience, and the man Clem that she marries doesn't think that he... He's not even thinking about having sex with her until it happens, and he's like, Oh, actually, I really like her. Let's do this. But he needs to go get a condom now. And it's a big ordeal. You have to go multiple places. Speaking of that, I think I'll talk about Black Silk again later because I love it so much, and it fits a few of these briefs. But Graham in Black Silk, he's a Victorian aristocrat, and he has this internal monolog about condoms. There's no on-page condom use on the book, like how Emma was talking about how some people were like, We need to see it demonstrated.
Chels
Judy Cuevas, Judith Ivory uses, The characters are thinking about this. Just because you might not necessarily be seeing it in action doesn't mean it's not a thing that's happening here. But yeah, anyways, this is his quote, In the course of this portion of Graham's education and bookstores, he learned to ask for French letters in England and English hats in France. It amused him, even now, thinking of the distinction. Aside from the national slur each country intended, these images also unintentionally revealed each country's national character. No matter what they called it, the English imagined the item neatly wrapped up, out of sight. The French envisaged it on like a jaunty cap. There were other names besides sheath. If a gentleman bought these conveniences at a more sorted establishment, he might have to use the dirty name. It's like C-M. Even the most salacious literature never wrote the word out. Graham wasn't even sure how to spell it. Condim? Condam? Condom? But he knew how to say it in several languages in a dozen euphemisms, up and down the class system, on and off the continent.
Beth
I love that. It's like you couldn't say the word condam because it reminds me of my grandma telling me that you didn't say the word pregnant. When she was little, if a woman was pregnant, it was just like everyone knew, but no one said the word out loud, which feels relevant. I don't know why.
Sanjana
I think some historicals will talk about a talk around the word pregnant. They'll use in confinement or unrest. They use all sorts of euphemisms. So interesting.
Beth
It took me a while to figure out that confinement meant pregnancy. I was like, Wait, what does this mean?
Sanjana
They Who just go to prison for a few months?
Chels
Going on holiday, taking a rest.
Sanjana
What is rolled out to seaside?
Chels
Oh, seaside.
Beth
Okay. Another more popular pregnancy plot that I think historical romance touches on is questions of legitimacy because you have property and these great houses and who's going to end up inheriting what. Legitimacy might seem straightforward, but people couldn't do a DNA test. So often if a child was, quote, legitimate, it was more about timing and if a baby could realistically be legitimate. I think also tied up in this can be maybe some cheating or potential cheating, and then the emotions all bound up in that. And then I think you also can have some arranged marriage plots because you need to legitimize a pregnancy.
Chels
Oh, my God. Is it Whitney, my love time? It is Whitney, my love. Oh, thank God. So I talked about Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught in the miscommunication episode and have since had another round of reckoning with it. The conflict is so circular. Every time Whitney and Clayton are at each other's throats, it feels like you're back at square one. The final anguish between this couple is that Whitney and Clayton, after enemies, all this, I don't know, all these things that are happened, they're back together, they're married. And then Clayton learns that when they were separated, Whitney wrote a note telling him that she was pregnant at a time where it would have been impossible for him to be the father. So Whitney wrote that note out of desperation and ignorance. She didn't know how babies were made, so she didn't know that what she had previously done with Clayton would not have resulted in a pregnancy. But she also really wanted to compel Clayton to come back to her, and she was too prideful to beg, so she thought the potential of her being pregnant would bring him back. She rethink the note after she writes it.
Chels
She never sends it, but he discovers it much later and starts to think that his child with Whitney is really someone else's, and that she has only married him to pass off the baby as legitimate. I've come around to this plot, even though I know it's exhausting. By the time you get to this conflict in the book, you're probably pretty winded by the entire story. But McNaught really pulls through in making you be really invested in the Westmoreland dynasty by the end of the book. And I know that's something that's weird to say out loud, but just trust me on this. So rereading it with that knowledge justified it for me. Your mileage may vary. It's one of those things where it's like, Ah, this exists. And I think I can see how people would feel completely different opposite ways about it. I feel both at the same time. And then, yeah, I said I would also come back to Black Silk. It's today is my day of return. So the initial conflict in Black Silk, so what opens the book is a very, very pregnant woman confronting Graham at his club. So she's lower class, and she says that he got her pregnant and demands that he do right by her.
Chels
She actually takes him to court, And Graham knows that he isn't the father of the children, their twins, because he has never met the woman before. But besides the lie, he's also deeply frustrated because his lecherous reputation is the result of people interpreting true events with the least charitable interpretation. People are primed to gawk at him and dismiss him as a thoughtless CAD. So Graham gets tired of the lawsuit. He's eventually like, Fuck it, sure. These babies are mine. And has a very generous settlement with the young woman. Later, she dies by suicide, and Graham finds himself responsible for these two children. He treats them like his legitimate children, and I mean that negatively. He's uncomfortable with his role as a father and avoids physical proximity while also admitting to a love that he doesn't really know what to do with. The babies are very ill, and one of them dies, and this is where Graham tells his love interest, Submit, what an unspeakable mess life can be. And I think this line is why I will never, ever rail against imperfect pregnancy story lines. This is life. It's often surprising and cruel, and things happen in ways that you didn't a lot for.
Chels
In a perfect world, pregnancies are orderly, always expected, always wanted, always were prepared for. But that's often not the case.
Beth
I love this journey that Graham goes on, because at the beginning of the book, you feel frustrated with him. You're like, Why won't she drop this lawsuit? What can he do to get out of it? But that he comes around to it is such a strong story line to me. This book is amazing. Yeah.
Emma
And I think it gets to that... They're not legitimate because they weren't married, but parental role as just... You can opt in or out in some of these situations that happens, especially when you're dealing with inheritance or legitimacy. Because we don't have DNA test, it's like the moment Graham says, Fine, fuck it. Let's drop the lawsuit. I'm the father. For everything that matters, he now is the father. He is legally the father. He's emotionally the father. There is no chance once he's admitted to it to go back on it because there's no concept that someone else will come and stand up for him. And I think it heightens the stakes, which so much of that's what historical is about, is raising the stakes. And he knows when he admits to it that he's like, I got to... Even though it's a lie, I'm going to go for it.
Beth
It's so true to being a parent. Whether your kids are biological or not, you opt in. Are you the parent? It's a lot more, I think, intellectual than people think it is. There's not this magic moment where you're holding a baby. You're like, Oh, yes. Or maybe it wasn't for me. They just handed me a baby and I was like, You're allowing me to take this out of the hospital? Yeah. So yeah, I love Graham's arc there. I think it's just very true to life. You just, fuck it. This is my kid. That's the moment for every parent, I think. I think...
Sanjana
Sorry, I'm going to go a little, I don't know, improv-y. Do it. But this point that you just made about parenthood is so fascinating to me. I was just rereading a section of a textbook I read for a gender studies class, and it was talking about how Western conceptualizations of the body filter things through the lens of biology. We filter everything through the lens of biology because of how we're taught. When we talk about pregnancy and motherhood and parent-child bonds, we're talking so much about things like oxytocin and the chemical makeup, and also this biological inheritance, genetics. But I think this social construction of parenthood and motherhood, specifically in a lot of these contexts, is just so neglected. This active choice that you have to make to just decide that this kid is yours, that you owe this child something, is so, I think, potent. I think also about something that one of my family members once said, where she was like... She's a physician, she's an anesthesiologist, and she I was like, I got the most intense wave of oxytocin I've ever had in my entire life after giving birth to my kid. And I still don't really know that I felt like, Oh, this child is like...
Sanjana
I don't think I felt the thing that people sometimes will wax poetic about with parenthood. Yeah. Because biology cannot possibly be the sole way that we understand pregnancy. And I think the reason why I'm coming to this now also is because There's so much discourse about the choice of parenthood at the moment of conception. And I think that obfuscates the temporality of parenthood, where maybe that's a choice that you just make a lot further down the line. And that isn't to say that choices don't have to be made early in a pregnancy or in this biological process for whatever reason. But I mean, when we're looking for the neat and tidy decision of moment of conception, I've decided to have this really neat calculation, it just is not possible a lot of times.
Beth
Yeah, I agree with that. Because I feel like some parents, you could be a shitty parent, but maybe something does pull you out to being a better parent. Maybe you get influenced by someone in your circle, or maybe you go to therapy or something. I like what you're saying. It's not a neat journey. And I think, we'll keep coming back to this, but I feel like people want it to be a neat journey, and it's just not.
Emma
I think some of the pregnancy discourse around, especially, contemporary novels where there's an accidental pregnancy, and that it's a one night stand or someone they're dating casually. It's like, well, the decision... I'm not in this position. I'm not a parent. But I think it's like, there are moments in your life where you have to think about it. We're like, Okay, I wasn't planning this. And this is true for every decision that you make. You're like, I wasn't planning this, but it's now a fork in the road, and I get to make the decision. And I think sometimes I see when people rail against pregnancy, plot as plot, they make it sound like it's something that happens to a female character. It is something that is done to a female character. Like, he got her pregnant. Now I'm done with the book. I'm DNFing the book. He got her pregnant. And then maybe think about... So one of my favorite books when it comes to inheritance and land fraud and pregnancy is A Lady Awakened, which we did our Blackshears series we mentioned there. So Martha is... She's trying to get pregnant so that she can commit fraud with the inheritance of her husband's estate.
Emma
She hires Theo basically as a stud to get her pregnant so that she can pass off this child as heir to the estate to prevent someone else from inheriting. And I think if you characterize that pregnancy as something that happened to Martha rather than something that Martha did, Martha would tear you a new one. She's making this decision, and she's the one... She knows the consequences. And so to group that book where Martha has not only self-preservation these decisions she's making. She's very actively making these decisions to preserve what she views as her community and something that has accepted her because she thinks that if she prevents the inheritance, she will be protecting women in her community. To group that with books that are like, Oh, I We're getting married in a marriage of convenience because you got me pregnant. They're not the same. I'm not saying one is worse than the other, but the pregnancy does not function the same in both of those books. I think some pregnancy plots can feel afterthoughts or tidy bows. We've talked about babylogues, where some people even call a baby logue a pregnancy book. The last chapter where it's revealed where they had children, they're like, Oh, it's a pregnancy plot, pregnancy trope.
Emma
But I think it's so flattening to talk about this in such broad strokes If a woman is pregnant, it's a type of book. That's too broad.
Beth
I like what you said about how Martha would come for you if you said this pregnancy happened to her. And I think maybe more broadly, that's how a lot of people are treating these characters. They're just women in real life, where they're infantilizing them. Maybe you weren't planning on it, but you're still an adult who can think through your decisions and be like, Yes, actually, maybe not this timing, but I do want this, so I'm going to go ahead with it.
Chels
Well, a lot of the discourse about people who are upset about this thing is that they think that the person who gets pregnant isn't punished enough. They think that there should be consequences in a way that makes it clear that it was bad the way that you did this. And I think if you spelled it out that way, they would be like, Oh, that's not what I'm saying. But that is what you're saying. It is what you're saying. You think that because things maybe are rocky, but they end well, that means that, Oh, it's okay for you to have this rocky path through life. Well, honestly, yeah, it's fucking okay. That's life. I just don't understand this position positioning of this lack of understanding or lack of care or lack of trust with the way that people are making choices, unable to pivot. Life happens in ways that you don't expect. Does that mean that you deserve to be punished? Does that mean you need to dwell on how much you hate yourself or how hard it is for you in every aspect in a way that is satisfactory for other people who think that you should have made better choices?
Emma
I'm thinking about what Sanjana was saying about the moment of conception as the way we prioritize the choice coming from. Because I think some people's response might be, well, so many people don't have choice, right? So that's been a lot of the discourse, especially around contemporary romance novels where people go decide to carry their pregnancy to term. It's like, okay, we're in this fantasy world where these people have access to reproductive health in these romance novels, but don't use it. They don't choose to have abortion. But also, it's like people don't have access to reproductive health now. And also, some of those people will be parents. If this is the world we live in and people don't have access to abortion care, they don't have access to birth control, some people who have sex and get pregnant will be parents. And why can that not be something that's depicted in a romance novel and something that's hard, but also something that can lead to a happy ending? I'm not sure. I don't think that that romanticizing lack of access to health care. I think it is reflective of the world we live in. And I think that's okay.
Emma
And it's also not every book. And I don't... Some people will jump to depictions of that as a conservative psyop, which that's a bridge too far for me.
Sanjana
I agree. And I think part of the conversation that I've seen recently is, I think one of the characters who's been really heavily discussed in a contemporary is also working a job where she just wouldn't be paid very well. And so the idea that she wouldn't talk about abortion for economic factors seemed, I think, a bridge too far for some folks. And that's what I'm like, well, poor people have kids. And they do have kids in Brooklyn. And they have kids in expensive places. I don't know. I live in a city where lots of people are struggling to make ends meet, and they make things work for their kid. It just is... Yeah. And I'm like, do we really need to go through the theater of having a conversation about reproductive rights in America in order for a pregnancy to exist? Does that discourse have to follow the logical loop that, say, I would make in this context, living in New York, being the underpin. I'm like, I don't think that I need to see that in a romance novel to understand what choices are or aren't available to me. I also don't know that...
Sanjana
This gets back to the, why does romance have to be didactic piece? I mean, it just doesn't. And that makes a boring So should we talk about Perfect Crimes?
Beth
Yes, please tell us about the Perfect Crimes, Marion Hayes.
Sanjana
So back to historicals. One of my favorite books about these complicated discourses of inheritance and pregnancy is The Perfect Crimes of Marion Hayes by Cat Sebastian. It's all about bastard sons and inheritance. And Marion, the main character, begins the book by killing her husband, which is not much of a spoiler because it happens in the first, literally, page. He is a Duke, and Marion simultaneously has been cultivating a flirtationship with this highway robber named Robb, who has been blackmailing her in really charming epistolary ways. He happens to be the legitimate heir to a dukedom Specifically the dukedom that Marion was under the impression that her child would inherit or that her family would inherit. There's a lot of mess here around inheritance. Rob doesn't want to be a duke. Marion's technically stepson, Lord Percy, Lord Holland. Percy, Lord Holland, who is one of the main characters of the previous book, The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, does desire the Dukedom. They're all in this rompy adventure across the English countryside. I wish I could describe the plot better. To be honest, Cat Sebastian's plots can feel a little aimless, which is not really a problem because I think the character studies are great.
Sanjana
But the thing I find really fascinating here is that it's one of the few books in historical romance that I've read that takes postpartum depression and birthing trauma really, really seriously. Marina in the Bridgertons, I think, is a really great example of maybe the inverse, wherein she is a deeply unwell side character, but mostly an inconvenience to main character's romance. She does fully have a postpartum psychosis that just goes undiscussed in the narrative. But I think the charm of Perfect Crimes of Marion Hayes is that it's a really playful, witty book, this rightful heir who doesn't want his dukedom, a step-brother who is found to be illegitimate, who does the Dukedom, a widow who is vehemently opposed to being pregnant again. And I think Marion and Rob, as the central couple of this book, make a lot of choices about how and under what conditions they have sex and in what way, because Marion is opposed to penetrative sex for reasons related to birthing trauma and also her past relationship with the Duke. And it's still a really hot book where they're doing things that I think are maybe practically what would happen in an environment where your reproductive options are limited.
Sanjana
She's just very aware of the toll that pregnancy has taken on her body, and she loves her child, but is navigating a lot of the mess that comes with... She's actually, interestingly, one of the characters who does make a choice about parenthood after the birth of her kid. She doesn't have a strong connection to this baby in the traditional maternal sense until later in the narrative. So there's a little bit of soup, but there's just There's so much interesting stuff in there. It's really worth reading, I think.
Beth
I love Cat Sebastian for her character studies. You're right, her plot's meander, but I always forgive her for it because just the perfect characterization always. I do like that in this book, I haven't read it, but I like that she touches on how scary birthing can be. And that can just be a legitimate reason that you don't want to have a kid. Maybe you do want kids, but having a baby scares you, then don't do it. That's a valid reason. I feel like maybe it's just I had this conversation in my brain pretty recently where it's like I was talking to a family member and he was like, I don't want kids. I think I'm a good uncle, but I wouldn't be a good dad. And I'm like, I think you would be a good dad, but all you have to say is you don't want kids. You don't have to justify it by telling yourself that you would be a bad dad. I think you would be great. But it's not like some child out there is like, oh, you. It's great. But I feel like I'm getting off the point here. But yes, Cat Sebastian.
Beth
I do like the birthing trauma. That's something that I think should go discuss a lot more. And it's interesting conflict, not in a didactic way, but this actually happens to people and is worth studying in fiction. Okay, let's go on to infertility, which I think is the most poorly done, probably. And I think I'm projecting from contemporary books I read, although we we just talked about with Devil in Disguise, where Keir's super fertility overcomes Merritt's uterine fibroids. But it can be done well. And so we're going to talk about a few books, starting with Chels again.
Chels
Another Return. Another Return, yes. Another Return. So I'm going to talk about A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant. It's one of my favorite romance novels ever. And there's a very specific and acute sadness to Lydia's infertility. Will is a war veteran, and Lydia is a courtsan when they meet. And Lydia's protector very callously announces, right in front of Lydia, that her appeal is not in her beauty because she's not beautiful, but in her infertility. He doesn't have to worry about bastard sons. This is a very dehumanizing way to speak about Lydia, and Will immediately recognizes it and calls it out. Although, Lydia doesn't appreciate his country because it has more to do with soothing Will's conscience than it does to actually help Lydia's circumstances. When Lydia and Will become a couple later, they have the conversation around children again, and Will says, Yes, it's sad we can't have kids, but really, I just need you and nobody else. Will absolutely backs this up and picks her over the entire rest of his family, and it's very fraught, but it's also extremely emotional and romantic. It's like one of those things where it's like, yes, it's sad that we can't have kids.
Chels
I would have liked to have kids, but I want to be with you more than I want someone else's child. It made it even that much more romantic to me, that it's not like, oh, Will just doesn't need that. He doesn't think about it. Yeah, in his mind, he probably would have, but that's not how his life ended up, and he's happy with how it is anyway.
Beth
It's so romantic. More of this, please.
Chels
I was just reading that back. I'm like, why am I tearing up? I read it so many times. It's such a good book.
Beth
I think this is something that Sherry Thomas does quite well. And I think Emma brought this up. I was reading the Luckiest Lady in London, I think. And she pointed out there's a part in the book where maybe the relationship could be solved with a baby, but Sherry Thomas doesn't go down that route. And I think she does that pretty often. She's very invested in making sure that this couple is cemented together. They want to be together just because they love each other. And I feel like in Not Quite A Husband, Briony can't have kids. And I think the temptation would be there even more than any of her other books because it's like, he cheats on her. It's a big wrong that happens in this book, and it just would be extra cute for them to have a baby lock. But it's nothing like that. It's just more romantic, I think, that they really want to be together because they love each other, like Lydia and Will.
Emma
I'm thinking about it. I think way people talk about pregnancy, some people talk like pregnancy is a punishment. But I think I get more frustrated when people... I think sometimes evil characters are infertile. Oh, man. It's written like a punishment. I'm thinking about an Elizabeth Hoyt book where infertility, the way that it's talked about, it's a woman who is a widow, and her husband has been cheating on her the whole time. And he's accusing her of being infertile the whole time. He said, Why can't you get pregnant? Why can't you get pregnant? And it seems like the whole book I was reading, it's The Raven Prince. The whole time I was reading it, I thought, Oh, it's going to be revealed that actually he was infertile. And when she gets with whoever the love interest is, they're going to be able to have a baby. And it's actually wasn't her fault. I was like, That was the beats I was expecting. But then, Hoyt does this thing where the heroine basically outs her husband's or her dead husband's, mistress. She outs her his mistress as having an illegitimate child. She sees the child and sees like, oh, he looks just like my dead husband.
Emma
So she reveals it. And so she punishes this woman for being a mistress. And it was even So actually no widow is infertile, but it's like the heroine has all this anxiety about being infertile. So it is talked about in the book a lot. But it felt like the plot point... Like, Hoyt couldn't even do the predictable plot point because she needed to have this evil woman be punished with an illegitimate child. And it's like that was frustrating to read. I almost rather read the perfunctory natural beats. I'm like, Oh, the husband was evil and infertile, but actually we need to punish the woman. But I think, yeah, the... Sometimes there'll be side characters who... Their lack of children is suspect. That's more frustrating to me, I think, than even pregnancy sometimes.
Beth
Yes, that's a good point. So Secret Baby might be one of the more polarizing kinds of story lines. For whatever reason, be it safety or something, the female main character hasn't informed the male main character that she was pregnant or had his baby or she is pregnant. We actually had our time coming up with more secret baby plots in Histrom, although I feel like I have seen this in contemporary a lot. I wonder if this is due to their having to be a more immediate solution or greater social consequences for keeping a baby. If you hid and kept a baby now, there isn't the same pressure. Although it feels like there should be more of like... This feels like it could be a Histrom plot and maybe a little bit goofy in contemporary. It's surprising that it happens in contemporary so much.
Emma
There has to be a window of pre Any social media post single mothers can have children without being asked who the father is? It's like 1995 to 2005 is our window of secret baby without it being goofy.
Beth
Right. At what point is it considered historical romance? What if I wrote a book now but said it in 1995, but it's secret baby? There's no social media to out the character.
Emma
Al Gore is vice president.
Chels
And he's the father.
Sanjana
I'm reading it. I'm going to read it.
Chels
Oh, that's so funny that you were like... Because I was thinking about this when... About secret babies, because a lot of the secret baby plots that I've read happen in Bodice Rippers. And what is the reason that you would not tell anyone who the father was? And a lot of the time it's because that father is going to hurt you, maybe, or use that pregnancy to do something bad to you, which is one of the examples that I came up with. So that's Lily by Patricia Gaffney. It is a bodice ripper. And I know we had our Wickerly episode. So just a note to Wyckerley fans. Lily is a frustrating read in a lot of ways, but it is a very unique set up for the secret baby, which is technically a secret pregnancy and not a secret baby because he finds her before she has a baby. But it's the same. The hero of the book, Devon Darkwell. That is his real name, is awful. He should be a superhero. He's so good. It's so metal, the guitar rift.
Emma
What do you mean Devon Darkwell is evil? I can't believe it.
Chels
Well, he is. Yeah, he is awful, just awful by design. He's always lying and scheming and putting Lily into increasingly uncomfortable situations. She's a lady in disguise as a maid, and in the climax of the book, someone frames her for shooting Devon's brother. So Devon threatens to hang Lily, and when she gets away and tries to marry someone out of desperation because she realizes she's pregnant, so she's trying to marry someone before she starts showing or anyone notices. So she's trying to marry this other person, Devon shows up to the wedding and tells everyone that Lily isn't a virgin. So then Lily just spends months living on the moors with a reclusive artist who eventually dies, leaving a pregnant Lily alone with her dog. So there's an obvious reason not to tell Devon he's going to be a father. Like, this man is trying to kill you and ruin your life and has demonstrated in every conceivable way that he sees you as a warm body and not as a human being. So So my second example is not a Baudice Ripper, but another historical romance. This is actually the first one I think of when I think of Secret Baby, is Destiny's Surrender by Beverly Jenkins.
Chels
So it starts with Billy and Adrian together. He's a wealthy man And she's his courtisan, and they have a very loving and easy camaraderie that is incredibly sweet and very moving. Adrian is of the mind that he's going to marry someone of his own station, so he stops going to see Billy. Much later, she shows up on his doorstep with her child in tow, informing Adrian's mother that he is the father. So it really makes sense that their lives would diverge after the pregnancy. Billy only shows up to Adrian's out of desperation. In her mind, her love for him can't really overcome these social factors. Adrian's mother has other things in mind and forces the issue, having them both marry. What's interesting here is that the baby is the glue that is tying this relationship together, but Adrian and Billy have to start zero, and they've already lost that easy camaraderie that they had in the beginning because the context of their relationship changes. So a baby doesn't solve anything. It just is a restart, but worse. So It's interesting conflict.
Beth
It is really interesting. And I like that they start off in like, they know what their relationship looks like working well together. They have worked in the past, and now they're not working so well anymore.
Chels
Yeah. And And Adrian is just like, I think when she comes with the baby, he's like, That's not my baby. And everyone's like, That's your fucking baby. And so he's not really someone who is stepping up to be a great father. They have this... So this sweetness that you see at the very beginning of the book, it is so incredibly tender. It's one of my favorite. The way that this book starts, I think this book is famous for starting with an orgasm, but what I really remember is just how cute they are together. And then boom, reset, and you meet Adrian again, and you're like, Who is this man? And I like that. I like that Jenkins was like, All right, well, he's a little bit of a dick when he's outside of this relationship, where he has to own up to his responsibilities, and he needs to actually talk to Billy as a person outside of this tiny room that you've been seeing her in for years, because she's a cortisana, because she's trapped.
Sanjana
Yeah. Fine.
Beth
What's also part of her job to make him happy? Have a nice time together. So, yeah, I think that I like this for Jenkins because I'd say most of her conflict is normally outside conflict, where it's like, there's a slow coming together of the couple and building of sexual tension, but she's very much a third-act kidnapper as opposed to a third-act breakupper. So I really like... I want to read this because I want to see that side of her.
Emma
I never thought about Jenkins and Kleypas being similar in that way, but they're- They are. They totally are. Like a third... Like a carriage is coming and someone's going to be in it.
Chels
Someone has a gun.
Beth
It makes sense. Did they start together in the '90s, at the same time? Are they contemporaries?
Chels
No. Kleyaps... Kleypas. Is a little older? Kleypas started writing a decade earlier. So Jenkins's first book came out in '94, and Kleypas was like, 85.
Sanjana
I love that you know that off the top of your head. That's really bananas. I know no one can see us, but I need you to know that Chels just whip that out of literally thin air.
Chels
I have a problem.
Beth
No, it's great. It's so helpful because I'll It keeps us honest. I'll give the most vague information to Chels, and they will come back with a very specific answer. Sanja and I, do you want to tell us about Nobody's Baby But Mine, which I feel like Susan Elizabeth Phillips, the way we've been talking about her, she feels historical to me.
Sanjana
Yeah. I know it's not like a... Susan Elizabeth Phillips still writes and still writes contemporaries. But my contribution to Secret Baby is always that you have to read Nobody's Baby But Mine because it was one of those books that unlocked my brain. It's so outrageous. And I think when we talk about what are the conditions under which you would keep a baby a secret, this one is so fun because the basic premise is that the main character, she's a genius, but she's been very socially alienated because she's a genius, and she decides that she wants companionship in life and she wants to have a child. But she's decided that her child has to be stupider than her because otherwise that child won't be able to socially bond with others and will be as lonely as she is. So she makes up her mind to have a child with someone who she deems to be not intellectually on par with her. She's at a bar, sees a football player on TV, and is like, Yeah, that one. Little does she know that this football player who's a famous quarterback is... He graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern or Duke or something, like some really nice fancy school.
Sanjana
He is a proper intellectual... And bio something? I can't remember the details off the top of my head, unfortunately, but a little trivial. The point is that she does badly attempt to seduce this man who And ultimately ends up sleeping with her out of pity because she's so bad at it. And then she gets pregnant after a few really awkward attempts. And he has all of this family baggage around illegitimate children. And he's this Southern boy who's like, no, my child will grow up with me. I will share custody. And her plan was always just to get pregnant and flee. She was never planning on raising a child with this person. And it doesn't have to necessarily do with him as a person. She was just like, I'm going to do this on my own. He's just a convenient stud horse situation, which he doesn't accept. The whole book is so outrageous, but it's so good. It's just so much fun to read that I just think you have to do it at some point. Yeah, that's the thinnest veneer of what happens in that book. There's also a fantastic B-Plot romance. It becomes a whole thing.
Sanjana
There's a little bit of a kidnapping involved in this one as well.
Beth
Exactly. She's historical, basically.
Sanjana
She is. She does have the historical stakes, where you're like, what is going on? It's really good.
Emma
I could picture this in a ballroom very easily. A woman being like, I want the Himbo Duke. But also, quarterback, that's not the position you go for if you want an idiot. They're famously intelligent. They take a test.
Chels
You say that, I didn't know.
Sanjana
Famous to who?
Emma
Exactly. She doesn't either.
Chels
He has a Southern accent. She's like, not smart. Which, hey, hey. Exactly. That's what you get.
Beth
Class conflict? That's, again, historical. She's going off someone's accent? That is like such a British thing.
Sanjana
It reminds me of that one Sherry Thomas, where he's cosplaying as community fool. His at Night? Yeah. You're right. Devere. Is it Vier? Markus is DeVere? Yeah, it's Vier. And she's like, I'm going to use this guy for all he's worth. And he's like, She's interesting. And she's like, as he's cosplaying court jester, I guess.
Chels
He's just like dribbling food on himself. I can't get over that book. Sherry Thomas, The Woman You are. Amazing.
Emma
I just looked it up because there's a test they give them during the combine for football.
Emma
And I was like, What position gets the highest score on the intelligence test? It's not quarterback, it's offensive tackle. So I was wrong. Actually, now that I think about it, I think quarterback intelligence may be a racist dog whistle now that I'm thinking about it, because quarterbacks sometimes are white, or a white intelligent quarterback. But offensive tackle gets the highest score on the Wunderlic test, which is what they give them during the combine to test their intelligence. They're the big ones who stand in line and they run straight up the people who are trying to catch the ball.
Chels
Do they do intelligence tests for Is that a normal thing?
Emma
It has to do with the draft system in football. They do the combine, which is where they graduate school and then they go to Indianapolis and they do basically field day for grown men. That's cute. And one of the events is the Wunderlic test, which is the intelligence test. So it's been around since the '60s, I think.
Chels
That's crazy to me.
Sanjana
I'm delighted by this news. This is so good.
Chels
I think that's fun.
Emma
That could be a romance novel. They They have famously high scores, especially commentators. There's Ryan Fitzpatrick, who went to Harvard. He has a famously high score on the Wunderlic test. It's real. She knows for football.
Beth
I feel like everyone this episode is learning about what everyone's interests are. I also do the same thing to Emma, where I will word vomit something sporty related and hope she just catches what I'm trying to get at and pieces it together for me.
Emma
It is what I feel like this is a situation where I'm not often the person who knows the most about sports, but on the podcast, I'm the expert. It's great.
Chels
Just looking at all of us on the screen. If you showed someone a picture of me, they would be like, That makes sense. Okay.
Beth
Let's move on to the last one, which is miscarriage. I think in this discussion, we'll talk a little bit about content warnings, because I will see sometimes on Reddit or Twitter people asking, what do you guys think about using pregnancy as a trigger warning? And most people settle on miscarriage. I know we've been coming for romance readers, but there are a lot of people who are also uncomfortable about, yeah, maybe we shouldn't say trigger warning for pregnancy, but miscarriage is always the one people land on. So we'll talk about that. And I really like this as a plot point. I I don't think we talk about this in life very well or offer proper support to people. And honestly, I think it's an interesting conflict or just struggle to explore in fiction and how that would affect a character.
Emma
Yeah, I think this is the plot that is the thorniest to discuss in conjunction with how cruel people are to pregnancy plot lines for me. Because unlike the idea of someone being upset by the very existence of a pregnant person in romance, which seems to come from a place of cruel disgust, this one is narrower. I can imagine a very good faith reason to not want to read miscarriages depicted in romance. But when people call for blanket, universally used trigger warnings, I'm still unsure. I just think about trigger warning, colon miscarriage would be a huge spoiler for Forever and Ever, which one of the Wyckerley books. Part of that book is so... It's so important that Connor and Sophie are choosing together despite not being bound by a child anymore. And I think being able to go into that book without knowing what's going to happen between the two of them. Because when you're reading the book, you think that the pregnancy is going to affect the relationship in one way, and then losing the baby affects the relationship differently. And you don't go on that arc. I think if you know the moment Sophie gets pregnant, that she will not be having the baby The discussion of this plot line really reminds me of the bodice ripper discussion.
Emma
When you talk about it positively, like anti-bodice ripper readers will disclose trauma to you. You're talking about a bodice ripper, and they're like, Well, this is the reason that I can't read bodice rippers. And they use it as a trump warning for content. My trauma means this content shouldn't exist, period. Which assumes that, one, no one has ever suffered sexual violence or miscarriage would want to read those plot lines. It also assumes that the person speaking about the book positively has not experienced that trauma, which it's like, you're disclosing to me, but also I don't owe you information when I'm talking about these books positively. But readers who get something out of these plot lines shouldn't have to disclose that trauma to a wide public unknown audience to earn the right to be able to read and then recommend these books. And I also think it's telling that miscarriage, the discussion about miscarriage in romance is like an asterisk on the pregnancy discussion. I think it's used differently narratively. It has different demands for how we talk about the characters, how the author handles the characters. And miscarriage is not a subset of pregnancy to me.
Emma
It's its own thing, but maybe it's under the umbrella of, again, reproductive health. I think that may be a more useful way of talking about how do we talk about reproductive health in romance. Again, talking about it more neutrally, I think people come at the miscarriage discussion really with their hackles up, and it creates a lot of cruelty to each other, which in This is a topic that I think we should really try to be kind to each other about. So that's some rambling thoughts about a miscarriage. And ultimately, just be nice to people. It would be a goal, but that's...
Chels
You're asking a lot.
Sanjana
It's interesting because I think And I don't know I've been, I think, a part of online romance community for a few years now. And this engagement with anything, but miscarriage in particular, there's just a lot of assumption that the person that you are engaging with or criticizing must be stupid or must be ignorant. And any discourse that you enter that is predicated on the idea that the person you're talking to couldn't possibly understand what you're talking about is automatically one where nowhere, there is no safe ground to reach. There's nothing interesting to be said. I think sometimes when people do this disclosing trauma as a trump card thing, it's like, what do you think you're accomplishing with this? You want to end a conversation rather than to start something or open it, which is just unfortunate, and maybe not specific to miscarriage, but happens a lot with really charged topics like this. I think it also comes up with non-consent, with anything in that realm of a fraught thing that happens to real people in the real world. I think also to the point about trigger warnings, this flattening effect of trigger warnings is really interesting because it just doesn't capture the extent to which any phenomenon occupies the plot of the book.
Sanjana
In Lord of Darkness by Elizabeth Hoyt, the off-page miscarriage is the instigator for the main characters Godric and Margaret's marriage. Megs becomes pregnant by her lover who is killed shortly after she conceives. Her brother blackmails Godric into marrying her to preserve her honor. But a day after their wedding, once she retires to the countryside, she miscarries the very reason she married a stranger. The book is rife with passages about how both Godric and Megs are mired in grief for different reasons. But she's determined to bring life back into the world. Much of her grieving the pregnancy loss is not explicitly addressed on page, nearly as much as the loss of her former lover is. And arguably Godric is the character with a less worked-out relationship to grief, given that he was also married to a woman before who passed in a really tough degenerative illness. Huge swaths of the book are actually just devoted to Godric being a vigilante in St. Giles, which is, he's very Batman on a budget. One of three. Yeah. One of three. They're all theater kids. That's it. They're just theater kids with capes.
Emma
It is wild to read these books out of order and you're There's another one? There's another Batman? This series made me want to read books in order because you can read it out of order, but you'll never know who Batman is.
Chels
At what cost?
Sanjana
It's a little bit like Sisterhood of the Traveling Vigilante. And he's dressed like a Harlequin.
Emma
It's so good. So he's wearing diamond-colored pants the whole time.
Chels
It's nuts. I had to Google Harlequin when I first...
Sanjana
I was just like, Oh, okay. I was imagining a little bit more of a chic Fantom of the Opera because I was choosing to just neglect any description on page. But if I looked really closely, that is a man in tights jumping. But yeah, so Miscarriage and the Desire to Become Pregnant are, again, for Megs, at least, are central, but they really aren't as difficult and damaging to read as one might expect if you just see trigger warning Miscarriage. And I think there are other- You might be okay with the book, but you would be maybe put off by the trigger warning.
Beth
Yeah.
Sanjana
And I'm like, how fair is that? I'm not saying that you have to read this book, but it's just flattening.
Emma
And I think about, like you mentioned, Marina's plot in to Sir Philip with Love. And I don't get upset by books. Sometimes I build myself up a little bit with like, bottom rippers. I think like, oh, this is going to be so upsetting. I can't read it. That very rarely happens to me, I think, because I let myself take breaks. But Marina's plot in To Sir Philip With Love had me go sit in a closet and be upset a little bit. I was like, I'm so distraught over Marina. But that is also a... I don't think people would look at that book and describe it as a pregnancy book because it's not between the main couple. Eloise, I don't think she gets pregnant by the end of the book. I don't remember. But part of it, part of the reason that that book is so upsetting is because I felt like Quinn does not deal with what's happening to Marina. She's totally a side character. It's only an inconvenience. And so a book that actually dealt with postpartum psychosis or a miscarriage or any trauma about carrying a child would be less upsetting to me than the way that Marina's story ends.
Emma
But that book, I see people not thinking to give a trigger warning for that book while with the Lord of Darkness thinking, Oh, because female main character has a miscarriage, this one gets labeled miscarriage. Yeah, and it just... You wonder at the utility of it. And it's like, what I needed to do with To Sir Philip With Love was put the book down and give myself distance and be like, I'm not going to read this book. The book needs my consent to keep reading. And I revoked it and didn't finish the book.
Beth
I think what's so frustrating about that, it's a book that more approaches it and it's like, I'm going to do a discussion about miscarriage or a discussion about grief, and I'm going to have my characters actually reckon with it. I'll see a lot of backlash to a book like that, as opposed to this careless treatment of Marina, where it's not discussed at all. It's just an afterthought. So I get really frustrated with how some readers will come for books that are actually engaging with the ideas versus the ones that are just glancing over it. Final thoughts. It was a lot. This was a frustrating... Not between the three of us, but we would see something terrible about pregnancy and then put it in the group chat and just be angry about it. So now everyone can be angry with us.
Chels
We're all trad Wives? Yeah.
Sanjana
Can you believe it? First, I'm hearing of it.
Chels
We have an announcement to make. We're all making cereal from scratch.
Sanjana
It's also not a fully formed thought, but it's so interesting that there's so much debate online happening right now about what constitutes a trad wife. And to some extent, I think you do have to make space for the fact that Trad Wives are intentionally manipulating ideas of how clear that is, the porousness of their performance and the political endeavors that they have. But the existence of a pregnant person does not constitute a trad wife. You have to... Or me saying that it's important to care for children does not constitute me being a trad.
Beth
I'm really silly.
Emma
Yeah. And I think about how hard it is to exist as a mother online when you're... I have to think about KC Davis, the discourse where She said she doesn't do imaginative play with her children. Oh my God. And people kept trying to cancel her. Yes. And it's like... Again, I'm not parsing the comments of who's saying that pregnancy and romance is disgusting and who's saying KC Davis. It's like, it should be pilloried because she doesn't do imaginative play with her children. But I imagine there's some overlap discourse of people who believe this. It's like pregnancy is disgusting, but also there is one exact way to care for a child in a loving way. And it's so tough to be the person who's caring for children. Why can't we just be a little nicer to everyone? I think KC , her point was saying, Mom should be able to exist in their own bodies some part of their day without being beholden to a child's whims, which is like, I don't think that's a radical take. We want moms to also continue existing and not burn out. So, yeah, just operate with more kindness.
Beth
I feel like I could see those same people being like, And self-care is So important. Moms need to create space for themselves. How do you think that happens?
Chels
Bath bombs. Yeah. Sephora trips.
Beth
Yeah. It's about consumption, guys. Okay, well, thank you so much for listening to Reformed Rakes. If you enjoy the podcast, you can find bonus content on our Patreon at patreon. Com/reformedrakes. Please rate and review us on Apple and Spotify. It helps a lot. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram for show updates. The username for both is at Reformed Rakes. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time.
