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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Wacky names! Baby "bumps"! The "most anticipated baby in the world"! Why do we salivate over spawning celebrities?
Jul 31, 2004 | Gwyneth's Apple, Helen Hunt's MaKena Lei, Debra Messing's and Cate Blanchett's respective Romans, Marcia Gay Harden's Hudson and Julitta, Heidi Klum's Leni, Courteney Cox Arquette's Coco: They sound like a roster of best-of-show dogs at Westminster, but are actually another set of well-pedigreed puppies. They are the babies whose entrances into the world have recently provided the entertainment media with its hottest storylines.
For more than a year, we have been drowning in the most intimate details of celebrity pregnancy. The big four entertainment weeklies -- People, Us Weekly, Star, and In Touch -- have read like high-gloss versions of "What to Expect When You're Expecting," if that childbearing classic were littered with cheerful arrows pointing to the "bumps!" on otherwise lithe famous bodies. The bumps turn to bellies bulging out of Juicy Couture waistbands before our eyes. Heavily pregnant stars get gussied up and lumber precariously down awards-show red carpets. We know how much their offspring weigh, whether they were born vaginally and with the help of an epidural, and which PoshTots products they were showered with upon arrival. Stretch mark for stretch mark, the gestations of the rich and famous are more intimately dissected than the gravidity of our own closest girlfriends. But when magazines chock-full of actual baby news begin to splash their covers with panting headlines about the potential pregnancies of Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, and poor beleaguered Jennifer Aniston, perhaps it's time to step back and consider what it is that's keeping our heads stuck so firmly up these women's birth canals.
"A baby boomlet happened in Hollywood. A lot of famous women came of age and had their babies in the last 14 months," said Martha Nelson, editor in chief of People, which in June broke the news that Julia Roberts is expecting twins. "We've long known that stories about celebrity life events are catnip for readers," said Nelson, who acknowledged that the cover bearing Roberts' announcement sold well, "as you would expect of major life news from one of the country's most popular actresses. It's not exactly rocket science."
Nor is it news that we -- as a human race -- have an insatiable appetite for voyeuristic narratives. Bring us tales of your engaged, your married, your drug addicted and your anorexic, dying to binge and purge. Pregnancy is special. From Henry VIII's bloody wait for an heir to the birth of Chastity Bono, the replication of rich and powerful genetic material has held a special place in our cultural imagination. But we haven't always wanted to look at it. We are not far from the days when dads did not crouch in delivery rooms with video cameras, and Lucille Ball was not allowed to say she was "pregnant" with Little Ricky. Norma Broude, professor of art history at American University, said in an e-mail that images of pregnant women "have largely been a taboo in Western culture," until artists like Alice Neel, who painted her expectant daughter-in-law in the 1970s, re-envisioned the pregnant body as beautiful rather than dirty or shameful.
Three decades down the road, the images aren't shocking; they're ubiquitous, and they signal that high-profile mothers-to-be have shed anything resembling shame about their condition. Paparazzi photographers caught Hudson stuffing her pregnancy-bloated face with food in public well into her third trimester; she's since spoken publicly about how great her sex life was while she was expecting. A high-end fashion photographer immortalized Paltrow's swollen tummy for the June cover of W magazine. A photograph last week of Courteney Cox Arquette's taut thigh muscle was evidence that she is back in shape a month after her daughter's birth and proved compelling enough to get plastered in newspapers. Mary-Louise Parker thanked her new baby for her ample breasts at the Golden Globe awards show in January.
