I’ve been meaning to make this post for a while anyway, but Paige’s comments this morning about pregnancy bellies make it as good a time as any. She quotes a post from Laura Wood (she left off the link, so I don’t have it to share) in which she (Wood) bemoans modern trends toward pregnant women showing off their bodies.
I have two different (but not mutually exclusive) opinions on this, and I think both are very important in their own right. First, I have seen some real problems with this. Shortly before their baby was born, Clark and his wife posed for exactly the kind of pictures that Ms. Wood blasts. Now, I don’t have any particular problem with these kinds of pictures. Pregnancy is a normal part of life, and a part that can be incredibly beautiful. But these particular pictures had a twist. First, Clark and his wife are very Southern Baptist. Remember, this is the guy who covers his eyes at nudity in movies. The poses in these pictures are the kind that they’d both be out bitching about in any other context. There are several in which her breasts are barely covered (in order to expose the belly), a couple in which she’s basically only wearing a sheet, and a couple in which he’s holding her from behind with his hands on her belly as you can clearly see the unbuttoned and unsnapped jeans. All fair enough if the photos were taken for personal use. They were posted on Facebook. The other problem I had with this photo shoot is how clearly and utterly pedestalized she is and how beta Clark is. These photos are all about making his wife the center of attention.
In other words, there are two basic problems. Because it’s “all about the baby and motherhood” women get to exercise their inner sluts and attention whores in ways that would be completely socially unacceptable in other contexts (at least for these particular women). They get to be skanks while pretending not to be. For a large portion of our population that’s really not an issue anymore – but for many “religious” women it still is. The other problem is that it’s another (often very expensive) item that’s all about the woman. “I’m pregnant, you should be catering to my every desire.” Groan.
Modern American women are wimps when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. Yes, I’m a man and I said it. Let forth the feminist wrath. I’ll say it because I’ve had the very good fortune to find myself with a woman who is not a wimp about it. Don’t get me wrong, she’s no hero either (sorry honey). You want to see a hero in pregnancy and childbirth? Look at frontier women or nomad women, the kind who do real, physical labor all day in the hot sun right up until the moment they give birth – and then a few days later they’re out doing it again. Pregnancy is a natural part of human life. You’re not sick. You’re not injured. You don’t have a “medical condition.” You’re just pregnant. Yeah, you’ll get tired more easily. Your back will get sore because your center of gravity is completely off. You’ll have some other issues thanks to hormones. Yeah, there are even a very few women who are actually defective (defective in the sense that their bodies don’t quite work right) in some sense and have truly serious issues while they’re pregnant. But by and large, the female body was designed to do it and does a pretty good job of it.
But in modern America pregnancy has become an excuse for a woman to be worshiped and pedestalized not just by her husband/boyfriend/baby daddy but by all of society. “I’ve got a craving at three in the morning for a triple chocolate dunked Oreo and lard cheesecake – GO GET IT FOR ME NOW!” OMG, you’re pregnant! Can I wipe your ass for you? As I said, I was extremely fortunate that my wife wasn’t like that at all. In fact, she got extremely annoyed by everyone treating her like a baby.
Pictures of this sort are just another symptom of that. It’s not about the baby. It’s all about the attention whore mother. Babies should be a celebration, I agree. But you’re not a goddess because you managed to spread your legs and let some guy squirt a little bit of jizz in there. You’re just a woman – like the billions of other women who have done it before. I only put it that roughly because so many pregnant women need to get their heads out of their own asses so that we can get back to celebrating the baby, the birth and the miracle of life like we should be.
Now, with all of that said and done…. my second perspective. Pregnancy is a natural part of the human condition. A lot of people find it gross. I never really understood that. It’s not a fetish for me or anything, but frankly I find pregnant women to be beautiful in their own right. There’s a distinct difference between a pregnant body and a fat body. Fat bodies are gross. Pregnant bodies are not. Unfortunately in this day and age of obesity, most women I see are actually both. And women who are fat and pregnant… yeah, that’s pretty gross, too. And as I’ve mentioned before, when a woman you love is pregnant with your own baby and happy to be… that’s really damn hot.
My wife, however, does have a bit of a pregnancy fetish. As far as I know, she’s only ever admitted it to me. Even with me she gets embarrassed to talk about it. But as I’ve told her a million times, I’m willing to bet that this is an extremely common fetish for women. Duh, it makes an awful lot of evolutionary sense. And as Athol loves to remind us, sex is all about making babies.
Like I said, it’s not really a fetish for me. But you know what? When your wife reveals a fetish, roll with it. Milk it. Use it for all you can. So when we’re out in publicly, we quietly cheer to each other when we see cute pregnant women who are actually not fat. We talk about it when we tease each other. We talk about it in different ways when we’re actually having sex. Hey, it works for us (most of the time, anyway).
But especially these days, I suggest an alpha framing for men who go this way. It’s not just about her. Talk about showing her off in a “look what I did” kind of way. Talk about her belly as being your way of marking her as yours. I got the double bonus of luck – my wife was talking about things that way before it ever occurred to me and before I ever knew about Game. What can I say, she really did want me to Game her all along.
Oh, and women like Ms. Wood who rant about disgusting baby bellies are largely the same liberal feminist idiots who are against children and population growth anyway. Somehow these same women, who would kill any man who suggested that a woman should stay home, want to keep their fellow women from breast feeding in public and don’t want to go anywhere where they might run into somebody’s “screaming brat.” Don’t worry. These women may be proof positive that women are more misogynistic than men, but they’re also sowing the demographic seeds of their own irrelevance with their anti-child ideals. And frankly, she’s mostly jealous because she doesn’t have a pregnant belly of her own.
