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Pregrancy is supposed to be a blissful time, but what if it isn’t?

There is a myth that pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding are ‘natural’ and therefore ‘easy’ for all women regardless of their race, sexuality, religion, ability, age, or socioeconomic status. This is the paradigm that has substantially shaped my views around reproduction.

I was not prepared for the difficulties I encountered during my pregnancies. I expected pregnancy to be a blissful time when I would glow and grow and connect with my baby and make plans for the future. I did not expect to throw-up around the clockmost everyday for six months . I looked forward to being able to eat as much as I wanted. Pregnant women get to satisfy their cravings! But this was not the case for me. Even smelling other people’s food turned my stomach. Plain rice and water were all that I could stomach, and these only in very small quantities at a time.

I often hated the changes in my body. Although I wanted to have children “someday”, my pregnancies were unplanned. I felt my body and my life being taken over by this ‘thing’ inside me: I couldn’t eat, couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep . . . I was a long way from the content mama portrayed in the media.

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This one’s not retouched, just desaturated so you can’t see the stretchmarks so much. Mmmm. stretchmarks. moles. freckles. hair. how sexy.

Warning: contains sensitive material.

When I was sixteen my boyfriend raped me. It was my first sexual experience. Before this I was completely ignorant: I did not know about penises, or erections, or sexual pleasure. I was taught as a young girl to always wear clean underwear and never take them off. As a girl I was not prepared for menstruation and even after I was not taught how to manage my blood. I quit ballet shortly after menarche because I could not figure out how to keep a rolled up wad of toilet paper in the right place at the right time of month. It was a tragic thing for me to quit dancing. It was many years before I was able to return to serious study and I am sure it was the beginning of associating my body with misery.

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My mother was an on-again off-again member of Weight Watchers. Throughout my childhood she was a constant dieter: she did aerobics every morning (from the t.v.) and several nights each week (t.v. or at a centre), took diet pills, laxatives, measured her food, recorded every bite – or skipped meals completely. I don’t remember her ever sitting down with the kids at mealtime (my dad worked afternoon shift). I do not remember her being overweight (how could she be with all of this obsessive behaviour?) but she must have been unhappy with her body or else why would she have tortured herself this way?

I picked up her habits early and by the time I was twelve I also hated my body. I would choose an arbitrary number on the scale and decide that this would be my ideal weight of the week. I would skip meals until I had reached my ‘goal’. I remember making the concious realization that there was so little in my ife that I could control that reaching this “goal”, this arbitrary number on the display, would mean I was good at something. It never occurred to me and no one pointed out that I was a growing child or that what I was doing and what my mother was teaching me was unhealthy.

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All of these women are beautiful. But it’s not because of how they look, it’s because they have substance. Beauty has come to mean different things to different people. What once referred to aesthetics or physical appearance can now refer to content.

The Beauty Log

I don’t spend much time on my appearance. Take a look. Here’s what I did over the past week. I didn’t count things like applying sunscreen or bug repellant because I’d say those things are more for health than beauty. There’s a fuzzy line between those two things. Here’s the list:

• Monday

15 mins: Evening shower and shave

• Tuesday

1 min: Hair brushing
45 In-class nail picking (gross, I know)
15 mins: Evening shower and shave

• Wednesday

5 Hair brush
15 mins: Evening shower and shave

• Thursday

15 mins: Morning shower and shave
2mins: Blow dry

• Friday

15 mins: Morning shower and shave
5mins: Blowdry

• Saturday

10mins: Shower

• Sunday

15mins: Shower and shave

Total time spent: 158 minutes (2 hours 38 minutes).

It’s actually more time than I thought. I cannot imagine if I had some elaborate routine of plucking, preening, and painting. How do people find the time for it?

For me, at this time and place in my life, spending time on my appearance means basic hygiene ( showering). I quit shaving my legs when I was fifteen years old because I refused to conform to society’s beauty standards. I was already a misfit and this just added to my character. Eventually I learned to ignore the heckling. For fifteen years I let my body grow whatever hair it wanted, wherever it wanted.

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These women and many others were posing for photos with geeks galore at this year’s E3 in Los Angeles. The “booth babes” (as they are called) are as much of a draw for the Electronic Entertainment Expo as the new releases.

August 2005’s Cosmopolitan features an ad for Tampax Fresh: “the only cardboard tampon that doesn’t smell like a cardboard tampon.” The image used in this advertisement perpetuates dualistic paradigms and characteristics about women’s bodies.

Beguile your senses.
Succumb to the freshness.

The colour white is associated with purity. This advertisement uses the colour white to symbolize that this menstruating woman is clean. Even though blood is leaving her body this woman has no odour — in fact her menses is fresh-scented. Women’s bodies are associated with nature/the wild and in need of taming/conquering. This leads to viewing their natural body functions as needing to be managed.

The use of water in this image furthers the idea of purity because water is used (symbolically and literally) to cleanse and purify. With water this woman cleanses herself of blood so that she can maintain her purity.

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Isn’t she the cutest thing?