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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Pregnancy is a point of entry into the otherwise inaccessible existence of someone much richer and more attractive than we are. "The thing we all do with celebrities is comparisons," said Janice Min, editor in chief of Us Weekly, who had her first child seven weeks ago. "You really have nothing in common with these people but in the same way that you want to wear the same shoes and carry the same bag as Kate Hudson, you also think, 'Do I look bigger or smaller than she did at four months?'"
And there is the illusion of girlish, giggly involvement, the false sense that if we're seeing these women in the midst of what we know is a private physical and emotional upheaval, then we must almost know them. "From a visual point of view people love seeing baby bumps," said In Touch's Wakeford. "When a normal person is pregnant people want to touch their baby bumps, and people want to see that even stars' bodies get pushed and pulled out of shape. It's not an evil satisfaction, like 'Ha ha, look, Gwyneth got fat!' It's like, 'Hey, I had to go through that as well!'"
No, of course there's no evil satisfaction. Except that the reporting style of some magazines does leave readers with the teensiest suspicion that all the feel-good, we're-all-in-this-together coverage of expanding asses and abdomens gone wild may be playing on other kinds of desires. After all, the July 19 Star cover story "Celebrity Flaws" featured images of Roberts' hairy armpits, Britney Spears' "flubby tummy," and Darryl Hannah's missing finger. It's the kind of thing that makes readers and newsstand registers purr, but leaves room for us to supply our own dastardly captions for images of the heavily pregnant. "Fecund fatties," perhaps? Couldn't it be that while we're patting Kate Hudson on the back for losing her 60 pounds, we're also taking diabolical pleasure in pointing out that the wispy Goldie-spawn gained 60 pounds in the first place? Might there be something backhanded in In Touch's Aug. 2 interview with Messing, showing "then" and "now" pictures of the "Will & Grace" star before and after baby weight? The captions read, "She's always been committed to being thin, but now Debra's priority is to remain healthy," and "Debra still has great style, but since the birth of her son, her look has become more casual and comfortable." In other words: Debra used to be a well-dressed twig. Now she's a heifer.
"Undoubtedly there's that aspect," said Star's Dolce about the expanding-body schadenfreude. "But realistically, I do think that pregnancy is a very positive thing. Like anything interesting there is a little of the wonder and a little of the imperfection."
Min said that the imperfections are an important part of the equation. "In our office there is this minutiae with which editors examine the pictures: Is she gaining weight in her face? Is that dress flattering?" she said. "When the enviably reed-thin Gwyneth Paltrow is suddenly carrying an extra 30 to 35 pounds, it's both gratifying and you root for her. It warms her up. Someone like Gwyneth Paltrow has been described as an ice princess but then wow, she's pregnant. So there's confirmation that she has had sex, and she gains weight, and you know she's going through this hideous experience in the delivery room. And all of a sudden it brings her to a level 'regular' people can relate to."
But bringing luminaries down to earth by displaying them as fertility symbols is a worrying habit. In her e-mail, art historian Broude wrote that the imagery of pregnant celebrities "may play a role in reducing the celebrity woman to the common denominator that she shares with other women" and that while that can be healthy, it can also "reduce her to her sexual role alone and deny her exceptionality and her power in the public sphere." Are these public mothers empowering, or do they make women feel inadequate and reinforce the idea that the only path to real success or fulfillment is through the womb? In post-baby interviews, beautiful, sleek women extol the joys of motherhood above anything else they've ever done in their lives. Forget power and recognition and professional achievement, they say, nothing matters more to me than my role as a mother. "After a hard day, the baby makes it all worthwhile," Blanchett told the BBC, while Hudson opined to Film Monthly, "You have a baby, you want to be a mum all the time all day long." Great, unless you're someone who doesn't want to be a mum all day long, or hopes that there's something else in life that makes it all worthwhile.
