Celebrity gossip hounds are barking up the case of Megan Fox, who dared to emerge visibly pregnant in public on Monday without telling the rest of us who helped her get that way. Fox is technically still married to former 90210 star Brian Austin Green, with whom she has two toddlers, but she filed for divorce in August. So, interested parties want to know, how could she possibly be pregnant?
Contrary to the popular narrative of pregnancy, which goes something like “when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, they hug each other real tight and make a baby,” many pregnancies—40 percent of all U.S. pregnancies, in fact—happen outside the institution of marriage. And contrary to the popular narrative of divorce, which runs along the lines of “when a mommy and a daddy fall out of love with each other, they cut off all communication and certainly never sleep together again,” a marriage in limbo doesn’t preclude the possibility of another child.
Fox had an even better answer for those clamoring for a peek at a paternity test: not your pregnancy, not your problem.
In response to rumors that she had conceived with prominent performance artist Shia LaBeouf, New Girl co-star Jake Johnson, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 co-star Will Arnett, Fox posted an Instagram collage of the suspects captioned with the hashtag #notthefather.
For a glorious 24 hours, the possibilities were endless. Maybe Fox knew the father’s identity, or maybe she didn’t—and maybe she didn’t care one way or the other. Maybe she’d had a secret affair with a politician, or an ex–child star, or a derrick hand from the Yukon territories. Maybe the fetus had three parents, and maybe Fox wasn’t one of them. We even had reason to hope that Fox might, as Jezebel put it, “pull a January Jones” and keep her future progeny’s paternity a secret forever.
But sources gonna source, and it didn’t take long for them to out Green as the alleged second party to Fox’s pregnancy. “Of course Brian is the dad! [He and Fox] never stopped loving each other and they will never stop being devoted parents to their boys,” some very enthusiastic informant blabbed to People. Others confirmed the story to E and TMZ, the latter of which reported that, since Fox was the breadwinner in the Fox-Green family, she’ll owe Green a fair amount of extra child support once their third offspring comes to be if she moves forward with her divorce petition.
So the mystery is over, as is Fox’s short-lived subversion of the prying, normalizing forces of the Hollywood media complex. Now it’s onto the midpregnancy indignities actresses must endure! In an interview with People about her third pregnancy, Fox said there were few healthy options on the TMNT 2 set, so she just ate a lot of rice cakes and almond butter. Because she was both pregnant and training hard to keep in shape for the film, she lost weight and was constantly hungry. “I’m always in the process of having a baby and looking like I didn’t have a baby,” she said. That’s the essence of celebrity pregnancy: Try as hard as you can to conceal the physical signs, and once they appear, tell us everything at once.
