One of the biggest issues women face with motherhood today is societal influences. One example that immediately comes to mind when I think of mothers struggling with societal influences is Season 7 of American Horror Story: Cult.
In this season, two of the main characters, Ally and Ivy are gay partners who had a child using a sperm donor. Throughout the season, they are constantly scrutinized by hateful members of their community, later discovered to be members of a malicious cult, for being gay and raising their son together in a household that is accepting of gay partnerships.
One of the mothers, Ally, suffers from many irrational fears and phobias, one of them being clowns. Ally’s wife looks down on her for having a mental illness, as does the rest of her community, which can be seen when the police respond to her calls about clowns breaking into her home. It turns out that the cult is using Ally’s phobia to torment her, which is another way that audiences can see the lack of support towards a mother suffering from mental illness.
When Ally and Ivy’s son begins to receive harassment from the clown cult members, it is assumed that Ally’s mental illness has begun to affect her son as many people think that he is suffering from hallucinations brought on by his mother’s episodes. As a result of her hysteria, Ally’s son is taken away from her and placed solely in Ivy’s custody who has moved out of the house by this point. With the removal of her son, we again see a woman with mental illness struggling with motherhood.
We also see the idea of media influence on children when Ally and Ivy’s son is reading a clown comic that seems to intensify his growing phobia of clowns. It was reported in a study done by Pew Research center that media influence is one of the most common societal influences that mothers struggle to deal with when raising their children. It is also shown that Ally struggles to control this media influence over her son as every time she tells him to stop reading the clown comics he disobeys her and reads them anyway.
A different motherhood struggle that can also been seen in this season is the internal struggle that Ivy goes through when she can’t carry her son herself due to her endometriosis, leaving Ally to bear their son. We see a resentment build in Ivy throughout the season as she begins to feel a detachment from her son because she was not the one to birth him herself. Society places so much importance on natural pregnancy and doesn’t always recognize other options like surrogates or adoption, which gives many women a feeling that they are not fulfilling their biological duties.
Ivy and Allie are both mother characters who represent two different struggles of societal influence that many mothers face in the real world, and together they represent the struggles that the LGBTQ community faces when it comes to motherhood and societal influence.
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