Quick, what’s the grossest thing you can think of?
If you’re anything like 86% of the world’s population, you answered “watching some gross pregnant woman give birth to a child.” If you are in the 14% of the population that said something else, you are clearly some kind of dangerous pervert. Nothing could be more disgusting than some sweaty, red-faced, bloated woman screaming at the top of her lungs as she pushes an 8-pound, squishy ball of bloody flesh through her lady parts.
Newborn babies are the grossest of God's creatures. Ask anybody.
But here’s the crazy thing: those out-of-touch crazies in Hollywood have their heads so far up their asses that they don’t realize that we all find childbirth to be so offensive. In fact, amazingly, they try to use it as bait for higher ratings on their television shows!
It’s true: oftentimes in an attempt to attract a larger than usual audience television shows will feature a main character (usually female) giving birth to a child (usually twins/triplets or somehow mystical/magical). The logic behind this timeless scheme seems to be based on the mistaken belief that the population at large for some reason enjoys the presence of babies or pregnant women in their narrative entertainment. One day when I am a network TV executive, I hope to disprove this notion by showing everybody that a television show can garner similar or higher ratings without resorting to this tired cliché, as most normal people tend to view pregnant women and babies with the contempt and outright disgust that they deserve.
There are two different kinds of television childbirths, both offensive in their own unique ways:
I know this is tough to accept, but Friends lied to you.
The Sitcom Birth
(boring, but not gross)
There is usually a scene in sitcom birth episodes where the audience sees the woman giving birth, which of course is overly sanitized and not horrific and terrifying as I imagine the actual childbirth process to be (purely an assumption on my part). And after about 2 minutes of watching some woman pant while a couple dudes yell “Push!” and “You can do it!” they pull a real live baby out from the sheet that has been draped over the woman’s legs so that you don’t see a vagina on television. (My theory is that the actress is actually wearing pants, or at least shorts under that sheet.)
So this baby emerges and it’s all clean and cute and all that. Sometimes it appears the baby is a year old or even older, its hair is all neat, it’s not covered in gross shit, and there is not even the mention of afterbirth. Amazingly, sometimes there is no live baby, just some kind of doll instead, if the show does not have a baby-renting budget.
Why do people enjoy watching this? The television show is blatantly condescending to you, assuming you believe that they just pulled a freshly bathed toddler out of a woman’s womb. I blame this kind of stuff for convincing idiot teenage girls that they want to have babies. They think they’re gonna have a couple of Olsen twins and that they will be able to brush the baby’s hair and pierce its ears right away, when in reality, they’ll crap out something that resembles an alien covered in blood that won’t be even remotely cute for months.
This is what actual childbirth looks like. I took this picture myself at a hospital earlier today.
The One Hour Drama Birth
(gross, but not boring)
On the more realistic shows they pull the baby out and it’s screaming it’s goddamn head off, sometimes they have to cut the umbilical cord, and it’s usually all covered in stuff (goo). 80% of the time there are severe complications, and 60% of the time the mother dies. I believe these percentages are in line with actual real-life statistics.
Also, occasionally the baby is born with mystical powers. (That aspect isn’t entirely realistic.)
Here’s where I’m confused: they use real babies for this, real young babies. Who gives their babies permission to get into this specific line of work and how much are the babies paid?
This is a serious question. Imagine if you had a kid who was less than 5 or 6 months old and somebody called you up and said “Look, we’re gonna need to use your baby for this thing, no big deal. First, we’ll smear it with jelly and fake blood, maybe even some cream cheese, then we’re gonna need to make it cry and while it’s crying we’re gonna have some strangers handling it under a bunch of really bright and hot lights while we film it. Cool?”
I may be overlooking something obvious here, so let me know if I’m wrong. I suppose it is possible they have been using robotic babies for these birth scenes, in which case let me be the first to say, “Bravo, Hollywood!”
But something tells me these are just actual babies, covered in goo and shoved under hot lights, forced to scream and cry while some Hollywood actor (who probably has herpes or some strain of hepatitis) struggles not to drop the greased up infant.
How big are the checks they are cutting to these showbiz parents? I would bet it’s less than $500 for the day. Does anybody have an idea about this? Please let me know.
This is not the only question I have about babies, by the way.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
They never show the afterbirth and they NEVER show the nurse administering a suppository beforehand either!
Giving birth on TV is just a lot of the mother yelling at the “father” at what a big asshole he is and how she wants to kill him for doing this to her.
This is something that ABC’s hit show Lost has made me think about a lot for a couple of years. The writers of that show seem to have an uncanny infatuation with lengthy child birth scenes. Not only is this painful to watch, but it also has prevented Lost from moving the story foreward in serious ways. This is a key indicator that Lost is jumping the shark in 24 fashion. Maybe the next season will kick off with an amnesia episode.
The Lost childbirth scenes don’t bother me so much, but they weird me out because one time it seemed like the baby they used was actually just born. It was small and gross… I think they stole it from a hospital earlier that day.