Testing the Waters

you will never catch me complaining about an actress on a tv show having an imperfectly concealed pregnancy or a character going on a sudden trip somewhere while her actress is on maternity leave. so many actresses (and women working in any other field) are fired, punished and pressured into making reproductive decisions for their employers' convenience & if i have to try a bit harder to suspend my disbelief then that's absolutely what i'm going to do if it means people are getting to exercise reproductive & bodily autonomy without punishment

My favorite writing of this was how Star Trek DS9 handled Nana Visitor's pregnancy. It felt out of character for her character (Kira Nerys) to get pregnant and it's the semi-utopian future, so presumably birth control works quite well and abortions are easily available. Solution: another female character gets pregnant, is injured in an emergency situation, and Kira agrees to act as surrogate. They effectively wrote this entire story line well enough, with implications for the dynamics between Kira and the biological parents, that I didn't realize until later that the actress was actually pregnant. I thought it was just an interesting plot line.

shoutout to everyone

this was going to be a very different text post before i pressed enter too soon, but you know what, nevermind. shout out to everyone. don't we all deserve it

what doesn’t kill me leaves a pit in my stomach that never goes away

um actually you can join the army at 16

but you need your mum to write you a permission slip