Pregnancy "Bumps" and Bodies: Another Way to Make Women Feel Fat

Just when you thought pregnancy might be a safe respite from society's constant bombardment of body image criticism and objectification, you realize that no, not even it is safe anymore.

Perhaps bored with its remarkable success in encouraging non-pregnant women to feel insecure about their bodies, the media has now turned to intimidating pregnant women into monitoring their "bumps," planning their "recoveries" from "baby bodies," and having extensive post-pregnancy plans for the single most important thing a new mother should worry about: returning to her slim pre-baby figure before society begins to shame her.

It's not even okay for a woman to defer from the social ideal of the ultra-thin when she's carrying (or carried) a child. Instead, she should see pregnancy as a brief and freakish (if necessary) aberration from the heralded state of thinness and should spend the bulk of her time following birth (birth! kind of a big deal!) obsessing about "getting her body back."

First there's the "bump" fixation.  The "bump watch" illustrates society's sick fascination with observing, critiquing, and placing demands and ultimatums on women's bodies. The bump is singled out because it departs from the expected standard of straight up-and-down thinness, and while it's celebrated until a woman's due date, it's expected to be gone soon thereafter, or the woman will become the object of ridicule. This fetishization of baby bumps is complimentary to the fetishization of women's bodies and their thinness, but more dangerous because it turns a baby, a pregnancy, into another body image focus and concern.

As Claire Mysko points out, the bump terminology also creates a "creepy stalkerish quality" in which it's okay to fervently monitor women's bodies, while assuming that all women's bodies are the same and will take on the same form in pregnancy.

Then there's the obsession with the "post-pregnancy" body which apparently should show no signs of having supported a pregnancy at all. OK! magazine exemplifies this with its choice to run a cover of a Photoshopped Kourtney Kardashian claiming to reveal her post-pregnancy diet secrets. The whole article was fabricated, from the slimmed-down body to the diet tips, and Kardashian was never even consulted. But as Jezebel points out, apparently the demand for post-pregnancy diet tips was great enough to risk running a story with almost zero basis in fact.

In an awesome, spot-on piece for The Daily Beast, Katie Gentile demonstrates how the quest to immediately get rid of a "baby body" aims to erase any signs of pregnancy, maintaining this bizarre, false, and arguably dangerous notions that a woman's body should always be young, thin, and perky, and that the need to maintain this body trumps the the need to nurture a new life. Pregnancy in this view is more a scar, a shameful departure, than it is a celebrated new phase and a step forward for a woman's body.

When we get to a point as a society where pregnancy is seen more as a diet-destroyer than as the giving of life to a new being then haven't we gotten really, really messed up somewhere along the line? Yes, I think so.

Do we really need any more criticism of women's bodies in the media, and shouldn't pregnancy, of all things, be about celebrating a woman's body and its power instead of obsessively demanding it squeeze into skinny jeans?

Photo credit: Mahalie