With only a few episodes of Girls left, it was as if Lena Dunham took on the personal challenge of breaking as many TV taboos as possible, especially in the bedroom. Showing naked, pregnant Hannah wasn't enough for this groundbreaking series, so the April 2 episode showed naked, pregnant Hannah having sex on Girls. Despite Dunham trying her darndest to change the landscape, the graphic and realistic nature of sex on Girls is still sadly pretty taboo on television and in movies. But HBO series isn't afraid to get real, and it upped the stakes a level by portraying pregnant sex on Girls. And while I never not expected Girls to go out with a bang, I'll say that Dunham managed to surprise me with her intrepid sex scenes once again.
The pregnant sex in "What Will We Do This Time About Adam?" came courtesy of Hannah's short-lived and bittersweet (or should I say sweetbitter?) reunion with Adam. While I had previously theorized that Hannah and Adam would get back together on Girls and hadn't necessarily viewed it as a bad thing, I knew in my gut something was terribly wrong with this scenario once it started to unfold. Beyond their general dysfunctional behavior, that's a testament to the writing of Dunham and Judd Apatow and the performances of Dunham and Adam Driver. Perhaps it was another goal of Dunham's to show these two characters having sex one final time before the Girls series finale, but while Adam and Hannah getting back together (albeit briefly) gave us pregnant sex on TV, it didn't help to develop them anymore as people — except to prove that you can't recreate the past.
As for the pregnant sex, it wasn't as remarkable as some other sex scenes on Girls except for the fact that Hannah is pregnant. It's a short moment with Hannah on top of Adam and the only reference to her pregnancy is when Adams says, "I kind of feel like we have an audience." As I racked my brain to think of another show or movie that has ever portrayed a slightly graphic sex scene with a pregnant woman, the only other pregnant sex scene that immediately came to mind was from another Apatow creation — Knocked Up. Sure, a Google search may inform you that the 2016 Brazilian film Neon Bull features a pregnant woman having sex in a scene that the website No Film School called, "the most unflinching sex scenes in cinema to date," but for the most part, the entertainment industry is not into showing pregnant women having graphic sex. Or, really, any sex.
The wiki TV Tropes has an entire entry called "No Pregger Sex" that documents the way movies, TV, and other forms of entertainment usually use pregnant women having sex as a joke — particularly the idea that the man's penis would somehow "poke" the baby during sex. Of course, intercourse during pregnancy is a totally natural and healthy thing — and that's where Girls' frank and uninhibited characters come in to help set the record straight.
Despite Adam being completely inaccurate in thinking that because he has "too much history" with Hannah that he should help raise her baby (as shown by them parting ways by the end of the episode), it opened the door for Dunham to portray the fairly uncharted territory of pregnant sex. Because although the entertainment industry wants to act like its otherwise, pregnant sex is a normal thing — even in abnormal relationships like Hannah and Adam's.
