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Looks
I have tried to resist talking about this but I have been privy to so much chatter about the new blog: Shape of a Mother that it is hard not to have an opinion. And why bite my tongue?
So the site, if you haven't lingered there already, encourages women to send in anonymous pictures of themselves, during and after pregnancy. The goal is to create a forum in which women can see the effects pregnancy has on the bodies of other women, feel comforted about the changes that have happened in themselves and just indulge an interest, a curiosity, a fear. . . you name it.
And there has been considerable comment on the images. Lori Leibovich (founder of Indiebride) wrote favorably about the site on Salon, seeing it as forum for women celebrate themselves and feel less shame about their bodies. Clearly, given how many people have submitted pictures, and how much press the site has gotten, this is a powerful idea that really does give women an outlet.
I'm not sure about it, though. Salon's letters quickly snarled up into a knot of self-righteousness, debating about whether stretch marks are badges of honor or signs of incredible indolence, whether American women put on too much weight during pregnancy, whether people should get pregnant at all given the horrors that beset the knocked up body.
Over the weekend, I caught a fragment of conversation (before I had to catch the Felix who was threatening to tumble down some steps) in which someone declared the site completely terrifying, making her more frightened than ever of what it means to be pregnant.
And so here's my problem. You don't really know the before and after. It is easy to generalize that "this is what happens when someone gets pregnant and it is nightmarish," because it is hard to keep in mind that the images are donated from a self-selected group of people who are willing to put themselves on display. As a result, these pictures tend to be extreme: people who look fabulous and people whose bodies can be scary- particularly to someone contemplating the unknown.
The thing is, being pregnant is weird. It is interesting and frightening being a participant in this internal science project. I always loved David Cronenberg's movies but all through my pregnancy I kept remembering the central plot point of Scanners. All of the monster-types are people who were born with a genetic mutation as a result of their mothers having taken a drug while they were pregnant. The drug ("Ephemerol") was a tranquilizer prescribed to make women feel more comfortable with the unnerving knowledge that a whole person is growing inside them.
Anyway, this is all to say that I don't need to look at anyone else to feel frightened or inadequate when it comes to my body- pregnant or not. I am not a pregnancy sentimentalist. I didn't let my doctors tell me how much I weighed- ever. There are extremely few pictures of me from those 40 weeks, just a couple from the baby shower with me in black, hunching on a dark couch and one other with the dog on top of my belly. Step aside, nothing to see here.
Shape of a Mother is obviously interested in appearances, but regardless of the philosophy behind the site, it is impossible to get around the fact that those women's images are as easy to criticize as they are to admire.
Pregnancy, while obvious, is private and all of these physical changes are also private things. The people who have submitted to Shape of a Woman have been gracious enough to let us see what happened, but their experience really has no bearing on me, or you, or anyone.
It's always going to be a mystery.
posted by Elise at 7:29 PM
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said...
You were spotted on a news segment shown on a Continental flight to Berlin yesterday! My globetrotting stringer wasn't too specific about what it was about--but now I have bookmarked the blog.
7/27/2006 5:48 AM
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