“Men” is a film that doesn’t so much challenge the gender binary as it wallows in it. Harper’s ill-fated escape is infused with sharp shots of fertility idols and ominous biblical references; before being terrorized by a gang of pathetic and violent men, she eats an apple she picked from someone else’s tree. Garland, the film’s director, has said that “tumbling around” with ancient male and female symbols led him to the image of “a man with a vagina on his chest.” When that vagina spawns a succession of bad guys, making them all work like working parents and meowing babes, it reads like some sort of misanthropic final judgment, as if men abusing women is a grotesque but ultimately inevitable cycle.
The metaphor of ‘Resurrection’, on the other hand, comes out of nowhere. There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer belly like a womb. He does not need fillings or prostheses. He only claims there’s a baby in there, and he does it with such psychological intensity that Maggie starts to believe him. When I saw Roth’s wildly disturbing performance, I felt liberated from the reality of my own pregnant body, and a little won over, too. David’s claims are ridiculous, but so is pregnancy. While I’m naturally aware of the biological process by which babies are made, it still feels so supernatural that if you told me people get pregnant by eating live babies, I might believe it.
After going through decades of tropes of pregnant men, “Seahorse” — a 2019 documentary that follows Freddy McConnell, a British journalist and trans man, as he conceives, carries and gives birth to his first child — came as a welcome relief. Finally, the image of the pregnant man is freed from the distortions of comedy, horror and metaphors and presented simply as a human experience. As McConnell endures the physical and mental rigors of pregnancy, he also faces intense social pressures: he feels alienated from other men, patronized by women, ignored by drugs, and alienated from his own identity.
The opposition to gender-neutral language like “pregnant people” – and the claim that it somehow “effaces” women – is incomprehensible to me. It’s the encoding of pregnancy as the primary expression of femininity that makes me feel blotted out. The gender constructs of pregnancy work differently on McConnell’s body than on mine, but I identified closely with him. He describes pregnancy as a process, and that is enlightening. It’s not an extension of my personality. It’s just the wildest thing I’ve ever done.
For me, the most disturbing image in the annals of movies about pregnant men came at the end of “Men” — not the birth scene, but the scene that followed. During her horror weekend, Harper interacts with a friend, Riley, who becomes so concerned for Harper’s safety that she drives at night to find her. When Riley gets out of the car, we get the final reveal of the movie: she’s pregnant! If pregnancy represents disgust in a man, it is meant to signal the opposite in a woman – she must be nurturing, supernaturally understanding, good. I don’t know what to make of that, but I know how I felt: like the punch line to an old joke.