This is an article that is going to dig into the latter half of the movie mother!, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The latter half of the movie is where all hell breaks loose and things go completely off of the rails. To get into that is going to require a spoiler warning. If you don't want to know anything about mother!, then feel free to skip this article and come back after you've seen it.

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There are a lot of things about mother! that raised everyone's eyebrows. The scenes that people will likely look back at is the mother in question, played by, getting thrown around in a mob of people as she has contractions. They're going to talk about her baby getting passed along a group until someone snaps its neck and the next thing we see is a bloody body as people eat. We see her light the entire house on fire using oil and her burned body being carried as the Man, played by, removes a crystal from her chest and kills her. Those are the things people are talking about, with good reason, but one of the more disgusting moments of the movie happens around the halfway point. Also, since these characters don't have names and to avoid conclusion, we're going to refer to them by the actors playing them.

Lawrence and Bardem are fighting and she says he won't even fuck her. Bardem then proceeds to pin her to wall as she tries to fight him off. She says "no" but he doesn't stop. They have sex and that is the incident that gets her pregnant. There is a name for what we just witnessed on screen and that is called either marital or spousal rape.

Marital rape is defined as "the act of sexual intercourse with one's spouse without the consent of the other spouse" and is much more common than most people realize. It's hard to pin down exact numbers, since there are some places where it's not even illegal, but in the the only two studies, as of 2014, that talk about marital rape stated that "30% of adult rape cases were committed by husbands, common-law partners, or boyfriends" which is just astounding to think about. That is what took place, on screen, during mother! and there was not a single scene where the movie acknowledged how disgusting that is.

I am a member of the asexual community but I am open to having romantic relationships with a partner minus sexual intercourse. The idea of dying a virgin does not keep me awake at night, but the thing that does, the thing that has kept me from doing much dating at all, is the idea of spousal rape. The idea that my significant other could decide that we'd been together long enough and I somehow owe them sex is one of the main reasons I do not date. That is my fear and seeing it put up on screen without anyone acknowledging it does not help the matter.

One in eight women in the United States will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. The media has a responsibility to try and do better when it comes to presenting an issue that effects to many women and men in the world. And while some could disregard this as symbolism, that the movie was trying to present something disgusting, that doesn't change the fact that there is not a single moment where anyone seems to realize what just happened on screen. There isn't a moment of symbolism to show this violation, if anything, the movie glorifies it by not only getting Lawrence pregnant but that rape also kickstarting Bardem's writing again. The rape of his wife is one of the catalysts that brings hell down on their house.

That is what rape does, it makes the world around the victim feel like hell, but that doesn't become apparent until much later. The rape is brushed off as romantic or not worth acknowledging and as Aronofsky camera continues to loving pan over the hell he puts Lawrence through you get the sense that he doesn't see what he did as wrong either. If he wanted to go with symbolism and keep the violation in there, a shot of a bruise or blood on the sheets could have done that. It wouldn't have been any more messed up than anything else we see on the screen and would have least acknowledged that what we saw was not romantic, but a physical assault. The kind of assault thousands of men and women go through every year.