Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
What about that one episode of Red Dwarf
Having never seen Red Dwarf, I'm not sure what the episode was about. But from context I'm guessing it was about a dude getting pregnant? I figured there were examples I didn't know, which is why I put "almost" in there.

And pregnant men have their own unacknowledged problems in "supernatural pregnancy" stories. It's always treated as a hilarious situation: "look at the pregnant man, he's so fat and he's doing stereotypically pregnant woman things! Men don't do woman things, haha!" When in reality, a pregnancy for me (a man) would be horrifying on a number of levels, not least of which is the, ahem, exit strategy. And that's not even accounting for the body image issues that plenty of pregnant people in real life have, and are also treated as silly if they happen to men. Honestly, if memory serves the Futurama episode was actually one of the more touching ones I remember.

Hot take: Pregnancy stories should not happen in Sci-Fi, unless they're season-long arcs with lots of exploration of the pregnant person's experience, or treated like the actual body horror they would inevitably be (only in the right subgenre of sci-fi horror, of course). Otherwise, these stories always butcher the experience of pregnancy. It's a huge, complicated topic that changes everyone who experiences it in different ways, and its depiction in all of fiction is one of the most watered-down and disrespectful treatments of real life. Don't half-ass a fictional pregnancy, full stop.