We can all agree that Wattpad may have impacted us negatively.
The internet undeniably has given us many things. New ways to talk to one another, places to find community, places to celebrate wins and commemorate loss. It also gave fifteen year old girls open access to every opinion on women, ever. And I must say, it has had negative results.
I cannot remember a time when I was not an avid reader. And when I was eleven or twelve, and had my very first handheld way into the internet, I quickly found myself being algorithmically led into online spaces dedicated to books also being read by girls my age. These places, typically on social media sites (like Wattpad; a website that has several negatives along with its positives), provided excellent ways for me to discuss the things I loved and hated about the content I was reading. And they still exist today, allowing young girls across the world to connect and discuss the things they care most about in the books that they read.
Recently, I fell down a rabbit hole looking at these online spaces; public TikTok accounts run by children, dedicated to in-depth discussions about the books they read in a matter of days. Instagram pages that repost and create their own fanart, websites dedicated to the fanfiction these girls pen in their spare time. At first, it seems fairly innocuous; they are girls in their teenage years reading about things that largely haven’t happened to them yet (after all, first love rarely is soulmate-level love.) But after a while, I realised a worrying pattern. Almost every single one of these accounts absolutely despises pregnant characters.
Whether the genre is contemporary romance, high fantasy, historical, or the new and ever growing in popularity ‘romantasy’; young girls remain adamant that the second a woman gets pregnant, the narrative is both ruined and she herself is irredeemably lost.
It’s sad, in all honesty, to see young girls believe that becoming a mother and remaining compelling are a binary that can never be crossed. I think it’s perhaps a consequence of what I like to call the ‘girlbossification of feminism’; the idea that a woman, if she is to be ‘strong and independent’, must swear off anything that could tie her to being a woman: Katniss Everdeen must hunt and hate dancing, Snow White must be a warrior queen, Tris Prior must wield a gun and shoot to kill. Obviously, these are children sharing these views (I don’t care to comment on adult women who share this view because frankly they’re old enough to know better), and I hope that they will grow and learn that pregnancy and motherhood should not mean being cast aside in favour of a newer, (younger), ‘stronger’ character.
I think that it goes further than simply seeing women as a binary: young and strong versus old and pregnant. People still associate pregnancy, parenthood and marriage as the ‘end point’ of a story- that characters go through the events of their book in order to get the happy ending of a spouse and children to care for. When an author switches this narrative, and asserts that a woman can both be a mother and continue to have a compelling narrative, people apparently short circuit.
It’s not the fault of these children, they’re being bombarded with misogynistic rhetoric every day, but the trend is worrying nonetheless. I am in no way arguing that you must enjoy reading about a pregnant character or you are a misogynist- of course you are not, we all have our preferences in what we read and if you don’t want to read about people becoming parents, that’s fine. But it is intriguing we never see the same utter vitriol given to the male characters that father the child the woman is crucified for for being pregnant with.
The idea that a woman’s narrative will end with being a mother makes me nervous. I am twenty, it isn’t unrealistic to suggest that I could be a mother within the next fifteen years. For the young girls running these accounts, it isn’t unrealistic they could be mothers within twenty years. Is that all we have left? Is that all we have until we are deemed completely and utterly disposable? And we never see this narrative with men! Romantasy boasts male characters who are in their five hundreds! (Admittedly, this is slightly funny). Romance routinely features ‘career men’ in their thirties or forties! Why aren’t they ridiculed? Why aren’t they cast aside?
It could be argued that young girls aren’t interested in pregnant characters because that isn’t their experience, but that is laughable when they are reading books about faeries fighting in magical wars, or people training in ‘war school’ on dragons (I don’t want to talk about Fourth Wing, I’ll gag).
The bottom line is: I can’t in good faith blame actual children for upholding misogynistic standards- they are teenagers. They are learning. My issue actually lies in the grown adults seeing these comments and agreeing. Publicly. Surely, as women that are apparently slowly edging towards an age where we will apparently expire, we should be telling these girls, these girls we always swear we’ll be kind to and protect, that no, you can become a mother and still be worth listening to. After all, did our mothers not stand back to watch how far we would go? Let’s not let ourselves fall short for them.
“‘Pregnant Woman’ (1948) – Moralis Yannis (1916-2009)” by Tilemahos Efthimiadis is licensed under CC BY 2.0