When you had your most recent child were you thinking to yourself “wow, all of a sudden I’m noticing that our culture is really into babies” or do you think that this onslaught of the obsession with all things baby is just a new American fascination? Five years ago would a glossy tabloid do a “who’s cuter” cover with the daughters of Christie Brinky and Cindy Crawford? I think not.
Along with things like the unstopping scrutiny of what the rich and famous’s offspring wears, the media also is also obsessed with these nubile creatures while they are still in utero with the newly popular baby bump watch.
Lenore Skenazy from the The New York Sun (yeah, I don’t read that either…thanks for doing the dirty work for me Jezebel!), did a story called Our Baby Bump Obsession. The glossies (US Weekly, People, Life & Style, Star etc) see as “nine whole months of pure tabloid gold”. Skenazy mentions that "It is an event with the potential to carry a lot of stories — the bump, the birth, the name, the baby shower — as opposed to a one-time DUI," a psychotherapist, Rebecca Roy-Jarboe, said. And since we're so involved with celebrities' lives already, their babies are almost "our babies," she said. Nine months of content, not a bad way to mine those stories. And in every issue of every magazine, every day, every week and every month there seems to be a constant stream of baby bumps and general babyness.
But babies aren’t all hugs, kisses and cute as kittens to each and everyone of us. In Jezebel’s “I Am F*cking Sick & Tired of Baby Bumps” Dodai wrote “all women are supposed to have BABY FEVER. I hate, HATE the predisposed notion that the lack of a Y chromosome means I must involuntarily drool at the sight of an infant. Cute babies are cute, but some of them look like undone suckling pigs that need to go back in the oven.”
She continues to say “But the tabloids seem to think we all have BABY FEVER, that no woman is immune, that if you have ovaries then you're gonna want to hear about someone else's. I'm not into babies! Hopefully I would be, if they were mine, but they're not! They belong to rich people I have never met. And the only thing worse than being expected to give a crap about a random kid is giving a crap about a random maybe-possibly pregnant woman!”
(click here to check out her whole rant)
I actually love a good baby bump watch, but it has gone to the extreme. Any woman of child bearing age who happens to let an oversized bag swing in front of her belly, wears one of those popular trapeze tops, or just had too much lasagna at lunch, well then she is immediately put on the baby watch list.
So are we obsessed?
via Jezebe
and New York Sun
