Baby bumps?

I had never heard the expression "baby bumps" until I read this Salon story about the recent obsession with celebrity pregnancies. No one says "baby bumps", do they? Usually, the word "belly" will suffice--odds are that when you're speaking about a woman's pregnant belly, the person you're speaking to already knows she is pregnant. "Baby bumps" is the kind of cloying nonsense that makes me want to buy People Magazine and use it for toilet paper.
But once I got over the fingernails on chalkboard reaction I had to the term "baby bumps", I had even more to get irritated about. The question this article tries to answer is, "Why is there a recent onslaught of pregnant women all over the gossip rags?" The answer seems clear to me--we're in the midst of a media backlash against women, and just as celebrities are used to make the rest of us feel not attractive enough, not rich enough, and not talented enough, they are now being used to make women feel not pregnant enough. It's the logical extension of the nauseating Super Mommy interviews with celebrity moms that Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels mock mercilessly in The Mommy Myth. You know the articles. They're the ones where the talented and beautiful actress cradles her perfect baby and claims that nothing in the world is more wonderful than motherhood, that it's pure ectasy all the time. Lesson: if you don't want to be a mommy more than anything in the world and/or if you don't love every minute of it, then you are doing something wrong.
The onslaught of stories about how much celebrity women love being pregnant fits quite nicely into news cycles that are trendy right now. Young brides are adored in the gossip rags more than ever. Scare stories that push down the age at which women can consider themselves fertile get headlines. (Remember how not that long ago, we were all warned that if you have passed 27 without having a baby, you're taking a huge risk? I'm turning 27 in a month and I still get zits. Don't tell me I'm entering menopause.) And, as this story points out, that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt haven't started making babies yet is considered scandalous, as if there's something really unusual about a couple who wishes to be alone together for a few years before they start expanding the family. The message that they are sending out to an audience that is presumably mostly female is loud and clear. Girls, remember, while it's fun to put on fancy clothes and play at a career (like, say, actress), don't forget that your true calling is marriage and motherhood.
That sort of analysis is strenously ignored in this article. The writer only barely touches on it towards the end of page three, with a couple of sentences complaining about the requiste statements that the new celebrity mom makes about how being a mom is all-consuming and all-satisfying. But before the feminism gets all out of control, she returns to her main thesis, which is that the pregnancy stories are well-liked because women are catty and like to see beautiful stars get fat like normal women.
It's strange that this would be her theory, because the entire fourth page of the article pretty much refutes the idea that female readers are using pregnancy to cut celebrities down to size, since it's all about how pregnant celebrities are usually portrayed as radiant and sexy, far beyond what mere mortal women can pull off, especially while pregnant. If the readers really liked the pregnancy stories because they want to see Gwyneth Paltrow get fat and develop varicose veins, why on earth would they pick up a magazine that emphasizes pictures of how gorgeous she looks while pregnant?
But if I'm right, and the whole pregnant celebrity thing is just more of the same old True Womanhood crap, then the image of the radiant pregnant celebrity makes perfect sense. It's all about making pregnancy as appealing as possible while also setting up impossible standards for the readership to aspire to. They have a good reason to hype the idea that pregnancy is sexy. The woman's media has pushed the idea that a woman's primary goal in life should be as sexually attractive as possible for a long time now. By doing that, though, motherhood got seriously de-emphasized in the big money women's media, since getting pregnant is contrary to the sexy-at-all-times message. This is nothing more than trying to tie sexiness and motherhood together and thereby get a better grip on the female audience's attention.
The question of course is why? Why is there such a full-on press for women to be both sexy and perfect mothers, the younger the better? Are marketers evil people who are conspiring to hurt women? Of course not. They are trying to turn a buck and they are just as lazy as the rest of us. Women spend more money than men, so they are bound to get more marketing attention paid to them. I have no doubt that marketers long for the days when they could address all women with domestic imagery, as it made their jobs much easier. But now the market is fragmented. They can't assume as they used to that single and/or childless women would respond to domestic imagery with longing, and they probably have good reason to believe that married women and/or women with children don't respond to the constant onslaught of images of impossibly sexy single women. And, to make it more complicated, women jump around from one demographic to another. A loyal Cosmo reader of 3 years ago might have lost interest when she got married and had a baby, but that doesn't mean that she picked up a Ladies Home Journal subscription instead. Marketers have a good deal of interest in creating a single feminine idea that speaks to the insecurities of as many women as possible all at once, which in turn, keeps them buying the magazines and the products they advertise.
Enter the Sexy Celebrity Mom, a combination of the standard Good Mother imagery from Ladies Home Journal and the Sex Object imagery from Cosmo. The Sexy Celebrity Mom loves babies and being domestic, but she also knows that just because she's married and a mother (or mother-to-be) doesn't mean that she can relax a little in the man-pleasing department. Male sexual attention is difficult to get and hang onto (at least in the advertising world), and so it's doubly important to be well-dressed, well-waxed, and well-made up when you are pregnant. All favorite female anxieties are addressed in one fell swoop.