Director James Cameron Touts 'Avatar 2' Pregnant Warrior as 'Female Empowerment'

James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water pushed feminist boundaries to the max by featuring a very pregnant alien woman riding into battle alongside the men, an image the director touted as a sign of “female empowerment.”

Speaking with Robert Rodriguez in a recent Directors on Directors series for Variety, Cameron said he wanted have a “six months pregnant woman in battle” as a big ode to feminism.

“Everybody’s always talking about female empowerment,” Cameron said. “But what is such a big part of a woman’s life that we, as men, don’t experience? And I thought, ‘Well, if you’re really going to go all the way down the rabbit hole of female empowerment, let’s have a female warrior who’s six months pregnant in battle.’ “s”It doesn’t happen in our society — probably hasn’t happened for hundreds of years. But I guarantee you, back in the day, women had to fight for survival and protect their children, and it didn’t matter if they were pregnant,” he added.

Cameron further asserted “pregnant women are more capable of being a lot more athletic than we, as a culture, acknowledge.”

It should be noted that the battle scene wherein the pregnant character Ronal (Kate Winslet) fights alongside the male warriors did not actually have the kind of dire, existential stakes that Cameron characterized. The battle occurs in retaliation to humans killing a beloved whale, not a direct attack on the native village, in which case, the fight would strictly be about survival. See Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place as a realistic, woke-free, non-cartoonish example of this.

In the same interview, Cameron compared the pregnant woman warrior with the likes of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.

“I thought, ‘Let’s take the real boundaries off,’ ” he said. “To me, it was the last bastion that you don’t see. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel — all these other amazing women come up, but they’re not moms and they’re not pregnant while they’re fighting evil.”

Actress Kate Winslet also told Entertainment Weekly in an interview last week she thought it was “just so cool” for her character to be pregnant while fighting.

“Jim has so much admiration for women and pregnant women and what pregnant women are capable of, and how pregnant women are actually much more resilient and physically capable than I think often people give us credit for or would expect,” she said.

“The things we can achieve, I mean, my God, I don’t know a single pregnant woman who found out she was pregnant, sat down and did nothing,” Winslet added. “You just become kind of bionic; you feel like you are absolutely superhuman. And so for Jim to really harness that quality and ability and put it into its Na’vi form, it was just amazing. I loved that so much.”

If James Cameron and Kate Winslet’s comments are to be taken at face value, the two are literally suggesting pregnant women who rest to care for their bodies and unborn babies instead of going off to war have fallen short of their duty to society.