a feminist resource on pregnancy, birth, & parenting

The title of this post is a composite of quite a few deeply-felt statements that showed up in the data my writing students gathered in a recent semester. The class designed an interview-based project exploring fellow college students’ perceptions of pregnant women’s and mother’s bodies. (The course was on women’s bodies in our culture, and they chose the specific research topic themselves–much to my delight!) They came up with lots of interesting findings and analysis: for instance, on the idea of the MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck, for those of you who are too sweet to know already), perceptions of sex during pregnancy as unhealthy and/or just plain revolting, super-specific standards of ‘appropriateness’ for pregnant women’s and mothers’ clothing, and all sorts of related issues. But I want to reflect on just one general finding a bit in this post: essentially, that ‘Once she gets pregnant she shouldn’t try to be attractive ever again–her child(ren) should come first now (and forever! bwahahaha!)!‘ (Oh, crap, I missed the memo again. I so suck at this game.)

Several of my students wrote research reports focused on this one pattern in the data: over and over, students at our college insisted–as though of course everyone would agree, but why do these inappropriate mommies keep acting wrong???–that pregnant women and mothers shouldn’t try to be sexy or attractive because our priority ought to shift to taking care of our fetuses and then our children. And of course most parents put the wellbeing of our children pretty darned high on our lists. But, like, okay–three things:

1. The claim is that a mother’s priorities should shift instantly and completely such that her child is the center of her universe. Putting aside how troublesome we may find that requirement, this claim begs the question shift from what? It sounds as though, before parenthood, a women’s top priority should be … being sexy/attractive. Great. Screw happiness, self-knowledge, emotional/spiritual/physical well-being, friends and family, intellectual growth, academic and/or career success, and all that–just make your body appealing to men until you manage to get knocked up. Then stop. What’s particularly intriguing about this logical conclusion is that virtually no students at this college would ever in a million years say that–I am surrounded here by intelligent and ambitious young women–and yet a widespread assumption about motherhood (so few years away for many of them) is based in precisely that narrative.
2. Why are these goals in conflict, anyway? How are being sexually attractive and taking care of one’s children somehow at odds? When the logic behind this apparently-obvious assumption is articulated, it generally follows one or both of two routes: the ‘a mother should spend her time and energy on her kids, not selfishly on her appearance’ route and/or the ‘don’t set a bad example for your daughters!’ route. Which leads me to …
3. As a couple of my students noticed and mentioned in their analyses, this stance doesn’t even make any sense in the larger context of our data (or of our culture). You’re neglectful if you spend time trying to look/be sexy: but you’re also neglectful if you look messy or frumpy or (heaven forbid) fat, because ‘if you can’t even take care of yourself and look put together, how can you possibly be responsible for a child?’ You’re setting a bad example for your preteen or teenage daughters … by ‘dressing like a teenager’ (aka wearing clothes that are considered appropriate for your daughters anyway). If you’re a partnered parent, you’re already ‘taken,’ so it’s inappropriate/wrongheaded/mean to be ‘too attractive’ to other men: but A) you are a disappointment and failure as a wife/partner/woman if you become any less conventionally attractive to and sexual toward your partner after you become parents and B) somehow the you’re-’taken’-so-stop-being-sexy rule only takes effect upon pregnancy, not upon marriage/partnering. Weird, huh? In other words, unsurprisingly, the ‘what about the children?’ thing (along with all these other explanations) appears to be rationalization rather than actual reasoning.

Perhaps instead we’re seeing the effects of all-too-familiar cultural ambivalences regarding women’s bodies, sexuality, pregnancy, and ‘the mother’? And young adults who either imagine themselves as unaffected by those ambivalences or feel they’re not supposed to admit to them–but carry out their troublesome logic anyway?

What do you make of these conflicting demands on mothers in our society?

[image credit: photo by flickr user PinoyParis, made available under Creative Commons license]