This is an excellent article* from the New York Times on ‘Mommy Makeovers’ or plastic surgery packages aimed at mothers. It’s happening in Australia too. The ‘Yummy Mummy Conspiracy’ is after you and it is not about making you feel sexy – it is about making you feel bad about your normal appearance in order to convince you to spend money to ‘fix yourself up’. You are never supposed to escape the mind-control of beauty marketing, not even when you’re completely absorbed in your baby. (Mind-control conspiracy? Check out the number of women’s magazines that have included references to this popular Australian plastic surgeon).
Image: credit to the wonderful Shape of a Mother for this photo from a mother with a cute bra and three children.** Brava!
Reader, your body is probably perfectly fine as it is but if you choose to get cosmetic surgery for yourself then that’s your business (and absolutely none of mine), but if you’re in the business of making women feel like they need surgery for their lovely, normal bodies then that’s another thing entirely. The plastic surgery side of the conspiracy is about making you think that your body is abnormal and that it requires painful and potentially dangerous surgery. (You forget that women can die from these surgeries but they do. A colleague of mine saw her sister die from complications around liposuction leaving behind two small children).
Feel bad about yourself? I know it’s challenging to like and accept your scars, and your skin tags, your sags and bulges, and your stretch marks too. We don’t spend nearly as much time celebrating mothers’ bodies and the amazing act of bearing children as we do telling everyone how repulsed and disgusted they should be by any body that isn’t young and sleek. Remember they will spend a lot of money to make you feel this bad because they stand to make a lot more from you spending your way out of such a sense of desperation. By the way… your post-pregnancy breasts and tummy are NOT deformities! Your body is perfectly fine.
Mothers particularly, but really all women need to arm themselves by revealing the deception, building their self-esteem, developing realistic expectations of ageing, and valuing themselves and other women for more than our conformity with youthful definitions of beauty.
Again, read the NYT article, it’s terrific.
In 1970, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the seminal guide to women’s health, described the cosmetic changes that can happen during and after pregnancy simply as phenomena. But now narrowing beauty norms are recasting the transformations of motherhood as stigma.
Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.
If marketing could turn the postpregnancy body “into a socially unacceptable thing, think of how big your audience would be and how many surgeries you could sell them,” she said.
* I know some feminists don’t like this article because it’s elitist in focus and not outraged enough, however I think the article walks softly and delivers a good whack.
** From the mother in the photo – “I was blessed to not have to deal with stretch marks but this body I am in now is not the one I recognize. I am working on getting it back to a healthy shape. I care not for numbers and weights, but rather the feeling of being healthy. I spend all day loving and playing with and teaching my children. Only about 5 minutes looking at the body they have given me. At first I recoil and think who is that person in the mirror… an then I remember it’s “mama”… it’s ME.”
[...] I’ve put a link to this article here [...]
and brava to you too. good post.
Too right. Excellent analysis.
That article was great, as was your post. I’ve actually been having an email discussion about it with a friend of mine who is a doctor (general medicine). She says that it’s amazing how many mothers come to her for an opinion on cosmetic surgery to “repair” pregnancy/birth related body changes – even their vaginas!! It’s so sad that so many women cannot appreciate their bodies, especially after producing children and milk. I’m glad I’m not one of those women!
Cori – sad, absolutely, but not very surprising, is it? The rapidly circulating Onslaught video (posted on by bluemilk today also) is a great illustration. Women’s bodies are okay one way, and one way only.
Part of the problem I think is also that we don’t SEE other women’s real, naked bodies very much. Men pee out in the open, we’re tucked in stalls, men walk around locker rooms buck naked, but (at least in the US), women cling to their towels. You’ll think I’m lying, but I walk around buck naked all over the gym and see it as a public service — see this cellulite, ladies? This is a real body.
BTW blue milk, you have the most beautifully written posts around. I know I’ve mentioned this before on here (the post when you helped the woman get an ambulance), but I think it daily. Thanks!
Ahhh. MILF culture.
Mom, you make such a good point. We never have the opportunity to see real women’s bodies, and when we do (rarely) we see those women torn to shreds for having the audacity to show off their true selves! It’s ridiculous.
nice post.
i recently had a long and slightly painful conversation with a mom-to-be. at 7 months she’s gained about 15 pounds total. granted, she’s very fit and continues to run…but her doctor says, “eat more!” i agreed. especially after she revealed to me that the baby doesn’t move very much.
it turns out, she’s not eating enough because she’s worried about losing it once the baby’s born. she kept asking me how i lost my weight. my response, “i had knee surgery and then lost my husband. it’s not the way to go. besides, my body my look pre-pregnancy slim to you, but it’s not the same body it was. yours will be different too. i sag where i never sagged before. i have stretch marks. i have quickly deflating breasts. get over it. your body will be different. eat.”
i was, at least, a little kind and didn’t tell her that her vagina will be different too. welcome to a whole new world of sex.
It’s a strange struggle, the post-baby body acceptance thing. Never having been bothered by my body before, except for a period of illness and Oh My God I Look Like A Rake, I’ve been fine with my body how it was. And mostly I am now, except that none of my old clothes fit me, and I don’t know what suits me, and I can only wear separates because of the breastfeeding. So now that I’ve started shopping for new work clothes, (because I’m giving up on ever fitting into my old wardrobe of things I loved and took years carefully acquiring) I find I have to try on every pair of pants in the shop and twelve shirts before I find something that’s right.
Oh, and I’m so glad that my midwives didn’t weigh me during pregnancy.
Oh Bluemilk… I think society has seriously lost its mind! “Pooch”, “Deflated sacks”, and other harmful words when describing a post-birth female body… it pains me to read those words in print. And trying to grasp a fellow female sister stating such things about herself in an interview. What the hell happened to you so that you have stooped to such low-self esteemed levels adding to an already overpiled pile of BS I can only imagine? Why oh why?!
I think what’s in order here are some Dear Mr/Dr Huffaker letters of coomplaint. I would like to see all the Dr’s… specifically the Mr Stoker’s, Mr Lloyd’s, and Mr Huffaker in all their physical glory. Their sagging ball-sacks, penis sizes, beer-bellies, hairy arses, bald-heads; etc. Can we find a “cure” for these unsightly slacks?
I no more want to see the hyped promotion of the icky “metrosexualized male” than constantly driving this message that women need to be hyper-vigilant about their “looks”. Please ladies- STOP!
And it’s really quite laughable when you take a look at these websites like amommymakeover, look at that “quiz” will you, and those “before & after” shots. One of them really looked PhotoShopped to me, a piece from here add to there, voila! I’m sorry, but I have to ask this question: what brain-dead moron will not seriously question who is pedaling this?!
My biggest concern since adult women feel so “deflated” postpartum, is what this message continues to drive into the minds of young adolescent girls who are already so saturated with such crud, eating disorders, overperfectionism, etc. Now Mommy can berate herself, starve herself, overexercise herself- all in the presence of not only her children, but keep promoting some zealous ideal that exhausts me just to think about.
I do wish Ms Singer of the NY times piece would have carried a much more balanced position and opinions/voices of other women who obviously are not buying into this sh*%t, not just ONE female counter opinion. Surely she could have dug up more; so I do wonder what truly was important here, was she stating that “Mom’s Job” is unnecessary, or in need of physical beautification and perfectionism. It’s no longer okay just to be a Mom, you have to wear those heels, tight jeans- and swing a couple of toddlers around with that overprocessed smile? I was left confused.
Then she had a blip, just a blip on the lovely ‘labioplasty’ and ‘vagioplasty’… gotta get one of those! I think American society can hardly stand in judgment over other cultures deemed “barbaric” in their practices of FGM- Female Genital Mutilation… we’re providing as well as promoting the same, only under a different insidious name and more upgraded procedure.
ARggggghhhh!
The use of terms such as ‘deformity’ and ‘abnormality’ by some in the medical profession to describe post partum bodies is so insulting to women who have been through, and often struggled with, the physical and emotional life-changing events of pregnancy and childbirth.
And labioplasties and vaginaplasties (or whatever they’re called) – after the pain of a vaginal delivery and maybe episiotomy/tearing, why the hell would you want to get something like that done to yourself? Just so your vulva can look like something in a Playboy magazine? Why don’t we see airbrushing and photoshopping of pictures of models as abnormal rather than women’s real bodies? Agh, it disgusts me. And yes tsaari, that article definitely needed a counter opinion.
[...] bluemilk wrote a fantastic post today on “Yummy Mummy: Can cause serious side-effects”Here’s ONLY a quick extractYour body is perfectly fine. Mothers particularly, but really all women need to arm themselves by revealing the deception, building their self-esteem, developing realistic expectations of ageing, and valuing themselves and other women … [...]
[...] it for granted (sorry body). If you prefer option B, I recommend the Shape of a Mother blog, that bluemilk introduced to me, kudos Shape of a Mother for showing us what real bodies actually look like. If [...]
[...] which mimic the fashions of the adult parent. The ‘yummy mummy’ phenomenon attests to the pressure on parents to be seen as young and savvy. Somehow, despite sexualisation being oppressively mainstream it has also successfully branded [...]
I love, love, love Shape of A Mother. It helped me so much with the post partum period.