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The Cult of the Yummy Mummy
Having a baby can be a stressful time, but the pressure on pregnant women today is ridiculous. It is more or less expected that a girl will have a perfect orgasm followed by a perfect pregnancy and a perfect birth to produce the perfect child. As if that is not enough of a burden, now a girl must also look drop dead gorgeous while she is doing it. This is the era of the totally glam mum known as the yummy mummy.
Previous generations of Aussie women were not expected to be sexy, pert and pouting when pregnant. Back, way back in the fifties and sixties, my mother’s generation of young Aussie women had their problems. Their only career options were housewife and mother. But in there were comfort zones built into the womanhood package.
In those days a young girl was allowed to have ‘puppy fat’ as a child. After the ‘puppy fat’ stage she was meant to mature at 16 into the full bloom of womanhood and make her début. By 18 she was expected to be engaged. She was married at 20 and then moved down the pre-ordained route of first child, fat ass and sensible shoes. But you can see the advantage for a woman of my mother’s generation. All up a girl was only expected to look good for two years. Tops. Now women are expected to put on the pert-pouting-sexy-babe act 24/7. And women are meant to do it all of their lives.
This is the image pressure women have to battle today. But there was, up until the last few years, one small loophole in the womanhood contract. For my Baby Boomer generation a pregnant woman or a mother who had, you know, just given birth 3 minutes ago didn’t have to look sexy. When I was expecting my first child 25 years ago a pregnant woman might be described as wholesome, blooming or fullsome. We wore comfy shirts the size of circus tents and we were grateful. That’s gone. Now pregnant women are expected to be ‘yummy mummies’. They’re meant to look like Liz Hurley, Victoria Beckham, Elle or Kate Moss, who may not have to dress themselves let alone their young children.
Pregnant women are expected to be full-on fashion players and parade in skimpy, bare-belly boasting sleaze wear. God help us, it was hard enough before you had children to look like a sexy piece of spaghetti and nigh on impossible during and after the invasion of your body by an alien life form that turns your boobs into bowling balls, your stomach into its own personal kick-boxing play dome and your bum into permanently inflated twin-action air-bags.
Then there is the whole birth business. Every time I see an Olympic weight lifter straining in, say, the lift and jerk event I think ‘easy’. When giving birth a woman may have to strain like that for, maybe, 10 to 12 hours and then squeeze the hammer thrower from Trinidad and Tobago out her lower anatomy. Or that’s what if feels like. Having gone to all that trouble for the little mite it then spends the next year or more waking you up at night to throw up on you. You feel about as sexy as a sock full of porridge.
As if this image pressure were not enough, then there is also the expectation that a girl will be a perfect mother. Everyone, it seems, has to tell a new mum what she should eat and drink and how she should act and think. Having babies today has become a (sexy) tight rope act
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