The Pregnancy Pact

They look more like a crack squad of all-pregnant assassins, y'know?

I once got a bit riled up that black people had Black Entertainment Television, while white people had no channel of their own. My friends quickly reminded me that all the other TV channels could be considered White Entertainment Television, that black people probably earned their own TV channel through 400 years of slavery perpetrated upon them by white people, and that a white people only channel would probably devolve into racism pretty quickly, as groups of exclusively white people so often do.

So basically, I had what I thought was a great idea that nobody else had come up with, only to realize that nobody had come up with it before because it was racist. This sort of thing happens to me all the time.

The closest we’ll ever get to WET (got to work on that name…) is Lifetime, the women’s entertainment channel.* The programming here has a decidedly female touch – nearly every ad is for fat free yogurt or microwavable teriyaki that you can take with you to the office with only five grams of fat, and the only movies they show are Thelma and Louise, Pretty Woman, and Steel Magnolias.

*Initially, I also demanded that there be a men’s entertainment channel, until I remembered SpikeTV, which is pretty much World’s Wildest Police Videos and Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, both of which would be fine if they didn’t act like sitting around watching Jean-Luc Picard was the most powerful expression of one’s manhood.

Every channel targets its programming and ads to an audience, though – there’s nothing wrong with that. Do you want to see Soul Plane? Then you turn on BET. Do you want to see ads for online dating services? Go to SciFi. What makes Lifetime so great is that they churn out countless Lifetime Original Movies, all with the exact same production value and, inevitably, the exact same proportions of melodrama, poor acting, and royalty free synth-pop in the background.

On Monday night, I was a pretty busy guy. I had to pull together a couple of presentations for two different classes in addition to studying for a midterm the following day in J396. So when I went down to the kitchen to grab something to eat, I didn’t intend to take more than a few minutes away from my work. But then, I heard Bret and Jack yell at me from downstairs:

“TRUMAN! GET DOWN HERE! PREGNANACY PACT ON LIFETIME!”

And suddenly, school was the least important thing in the world.

In 2008, a high school in suburban Massachusetts gained national notoriety when its teen pregnancy rate spiked to four times the previous year’s number. The principal made an unsubstantiated claim that several girls had entered into a pact to all get pregnant together, and afterwards no amount of factual evidence from any of the involved girls would dissuade the mass media that they had done anything but agree to all catch the same STD at the same time.

And honestly, who can blame the media when there’s a name like ‘pregnancy pact’? I mean, the principal didn’t say ‘pregnancy agreement’ or ‘pregnancy contract;’ he went right for the alliteration. He was probably a journalism major.

Lifetime, seeing the opportunity to throw together a movie with women in it, quickly jumped on the story. The movie, which premiered on Monday, was pretty much everything we could have hoped for – slow pacing, C list actors casting doughy glances back and forth, and a decidedly milquetoast debate about the ethics of providing contraception in school.

Lifetime makes these movies in order to put a lot of content out there in which women are strong protagonists, in order to make up for the bulk of mainstream entertainment in which women are relegated to the position of ‘squealing pair of tits.’* I can see why they do this, but if you’re looking for a film that casts women in a positive light, The Pregnancy Pact is not it.

*In case any women reading this are determining whether they want to sleep with me or not, both Firefly and Battlestar have a pretty good cast of female protagonists. This, I hope, makes up for the fact that I love The Shining, wherein all Shelly Duvall does is cook or be scared.

Essentially every woman in this movie is shortsighted and stupid. The protagonist among the pregnant girls, Sara, joyfully tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. Her boyfriend didn’t know about this pact – he’d been under the impression that he was merely boning a non-crazy girl. Her boyfriend starts to panic, and Sara rationally explains that they can get married and stay in town forever, just like her parents did. When he, a promising college-bound athlete, doesn’t like that idea, she seems confused, as though the willingness of her boyfriend to throw his life away was the one element of this plan she’d forgotten to consider.

At one point, an investigative reporter interviews a group of the pregnant girls, who gleefully talk about how their babies will be best friends all through school, “Just like us!” In spite of repeated warnings from parents about the difficulties of childrearing, they blissfully maintain their glowing opinions of motherhood, right up until they start having the babies and realizing that the only thing worse than having something huge come out of your vagina is then taking care of it for the next 18 years.

Seeing the girls realize what horrible mistakes they’ve made is as close as we get to any real resolution in a movie that consists mostly of huffy arguments and hormonally-charged tears. When Sara, eight months pregnant, goes to surprise her now ex-boyfriend at college only to see him with a non-pregnant chick, I couldn’t help but cheer. When we see the other girls in the pact miserably raising their bratty children, it was like the payoff for sitting through the past 90 minutes of their stupidity.

I just can’t shake the impression that the night before shooting, a bunch of chauvinistic men broke into the studio and altered the screenplay so that the ending would say, “Ha! Shame on you, women!” I guess it’s just difficult to make a movie about pregnancy without seeming sexist; Knocked Up was accused of making women look shrewish and shortsighted as well. That being said, pregnant women aren’t really known for being paragons of reason and clear thinking.

My hat goes off to you, Lifetime – in the future, maybe just show Soul Plane instead.

Truman Capps is going to make a documentary about the Oregon Marching Band called The Chlamydia Pact.