The movie—about two best friends in search of the morning after pill—is now streaming on Hulu.
'Plan B' Is the Buddy Comedy of Your Feminist Dreams
The Superbad guys wanted to get girls drunk. The Dumb and Dumber duo were driven by love at first sight. Dirty Grandpa is about taking a sensual spring break trip with your grandpa. Plan B, now streaming on Hulu, is the latest road trip buddy comedy to join this lineup. And like those other movies, it is replete with hijinks, highway montages, and emotionally charged gas station visits. It is joyful, funny, and a little bit gross.
But Plan B also fits in another very specific sub-genre—road trip movies about women who race the clock, scrounge money, and furiously manipulate Google maps, all to secure basic reproductive healthcare. Our heroes’ destination isn’t the culmination of a life dream or erotic fantasy. They set their course in pursuit of a basic human right: to not be forced to carry a pregnancy.
Starring newcomers Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles, Plan B is the rightful inheritor of Unpregnant (2020), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and Grandma (2018), three road trip dramedies about women trying to secure medical abortions in spite of legal impediments, cost, and stigma. In Plan B, our protagonist’s goal is even more pitifully, relatably modest—to have bad, weird teen sex without getting pregnant.
Plan B differs from its peers in another hugely significant way: every celebrated “abortion comedy” (yes, these exist and are great) centers a white woman’s abortion experience. This consistency is not just disappointing, it’s also deeply misleading—two-thirds of abortion patients in the US are women of color. And the issue of access to birth control options doesn’t affect women equally. “Disparities in unintended pregnancy in the United States are related, in part, to Black and Hispanic women being overall less likely to use effective contraceptive methods,” Dehlendorf, et. al, write in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Without veering into PSA territory, Plan B rightfully re-centers women of color in the conversation about reproductive rights. “This feels like a joyous reclamation of the genre,” Verma tells Glamour. “You’re really seeing the depth of obstacles they’re having to deal with as women of color specifically in healthcare.” Moroles says she has always connected with funny, feminist movies like Plan B, but “I didn’t see myself. I think that’s the case for so many people.” Plan B shatters assumption that a mainstream funny, feminist story has to center at least one white woman.
Sunny (Verma) and Lupe (Moroles) are lovably loser-ish best friends at a South Dakota high school. Sunny is a virgin dork who masturbates to a human anatomy textbook. Lupe is a wake-and-vape preacher’s kid who is actually cool, and as such is destined to be bullied by her more basic high school peers every day until graduation. In sex education class, they watch a battered VHS tape that explains that a woman who has sex before marriage is “used up and damaged,” you know, like a totaled car! Miraculously, Sunny falls for a perfect boy at school—a feminist environmentalist cardigan-wearer with Chalamet cheekbones. Hunter (Michael Provost) wants nothing more than to listen to Sunny hold forth on Sailor Moon.
In a freak accident of poor decision making, Sunny loses her virginity on a SquattyPotty. (Look, we’ve all been there.) There was a condom malfunction, and now she needs the Plan B pill. But she can’t get any, thanks to the Conscience Clause, a legal loophole that allows healthcare providers to refuse reproductive care to patients if they claim doing so would violate their moral or religious values. Cue: Sunny and Lupe, in a stolen minivan, racing down the highway in search of a single dose of Levonorgestrel. It’s a very, very specific definition of “girl stuff.”
Plan B is Verma’s first major onscreen role (though she gave a scene-stealing performance in The Big Sick) and she said she instantly made the mistake of reading the comments on the trailer for the Hulu movie. Much of what she saw was along the lines of, “Who is this movie for? You can get Plan B at any drugstore.”
“It’s surprising that people think that their state is the only state,” she laughs, darkly. “There are many states where the Conscience Clause exists to this day, and it is way, way harder than we think, especially coming from liberal cities.”
Verma and Moroles recall that in the first week of filming in Syracuse, New York, they started chatting with women who happened to be passing by. The actors explained the premise of the movie, to which one of the women responded, “Oh! That just happened to me!” She launched into a story about how she had to drive hours out of her way for a Plan B pill. The reality is that the unjust, violent discrimination American women face as we try to acquire basic care for our bodies is more tragedy than comedy. But we get through it with humor, and rage, and a stubborn belief in our own unalienable rights.
“You have erogenous zones,” Verma’s character whispers to herself in the mirror, trying to psych herself up. “And a...a...pussy.” A pussy that deserves medical care and full human rights, and don't you ever forget it.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jenny Singer
