James Cameron Wants Pregnant Women Sent To Fight In Wars
James Cameron made it a point to show Zoe Saldana's Neytiri character fighting while pregnant.
James Cameron is many things, a visionary director, an explorer of the deepest depths of the oceans, and perhaps even a misguided feminist. According to a source from Boundingintocomics. Cameron identified Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana, a character from his blockbuster Avatar films, as a feminist icon when questioned why he chose to depict her character as a warrior in active combat while six months pregnant. Cameron explained that he wrote the film this way “To go all the way down the rabbit hole of female empowerment.”
Avatar: The Way of Water contains multiple female characters who perform as hunters and warriors while pregnant, prompting Robert Rodriguez to inquire about the significance of this fact during a recent directors-on-directors interview segment alongside James Cameron. Cameron explained that he felt pregnancy was an important part of the feminine experience that men don’t understand or experience themselves. He argues that performing these rigorous tasks while pregnant would be both empowering for women and historically accurate, as women of centuries past were capable of being more athletic than we as a culture currently allow them to be.
Filtering the Avatar films through a feminist lens is an interesting choice on James Cameron’s part, given that the audience is not given a full understanding of the nuanced differences between the anatomy of the Na’vi and human beings. It is possible that the Na’vi body processes certain things such as pregnancy differently than real people do, especially seeing as the fictional alien race exists within a world where bonding with animals and sexual intercourse are both performed using tendrils within a ponytail. So, it stands to reason that perhaps their bodies are more equipped for battle during the gestation period of pregnancy.
Of course, James Cameron has made a number of seemingly odd claims lately, such as his comment that testosterone is poison and should be expelled from the body. Perhaps these comments establish a pattern of well-meaning but confused feminist-leaning tendencies in the famed Terminator 2 director. While we can all agree that it’s positive to provide more representation of women in film, maybe it would be best to get an actual woman’s perspective on the matter. Neither James Cameron nor Robert Rodriguez has ever carried a child to term, so it’s a bit odd that they feel responsible for discussing that process with one another.
Regardless of James Cameron’s perspective on the activities, pregnant women could and should be capable of, his second installment in the Avatar series hit theaters this week and seems to be opening to positive reviews. This hopefully bodes well for the film series, which Cameron threatened to cancel if The Way Of Water underperformed at the box office against its own enormous budget. If the series survives to see the third installment, maybe we’ll get to see newborn babies sliding out of the womb and directly into armed conflict!
As for James Cameron’s next move, there’s talk of an Avatar TV series as well as a Henry Cavill appearance in the fourth Avatar film, now that Cavill has been released from both Superman and The Witcher obligations.
