‘SAD NEWS: I can’t see my vagina any more,” tweeted the record-breaking superstar rapper Cardi B in June. She had revealed her pregnancy to the public while performing on Saturday Night Live in April. Later, she tweeted that the last month of her pregnancy was “hell” and, when daughter Kulture was born, opened up about the baby’s sleeping patterns, her emotions (“I’m in love and I feel like I’m melting”), and, then, that she had “underestimated the whole mommy thing”, cancelling tour dates she had planned for six weeks postpartum. It was unusual to see a pop superstar documenting their experience of pregnancy and early motherhood so publicly. Until recently, pregnancy has been mostly anathema to the pop world.
However, a more positive, accepting attitude has been brewing for a while. In 2011, Beyoncé famously announced her pregnancy to the crowd at the MTV Video Music awards, and those watching at home, by flicking open her jacket, rubbing her bump and grinning. In 2017, a floral, veiled image of her kneeling while pregnant with twins received the highest number of Instagram likes of the year.
In the 2000s, the most visible pregnant pop star was MIA, who wore a polka-dotted dress by Henry Holland over her full-term baby bump to the 2009 Grammys. It led bloggers to call her a “skanky ho who couldn’t wait to get her baby about before getting back in the game!” Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera and a handful of others were photographed pregnant and Lily Allen sent up industry pressure to get her “body back” in the video for Hard Out Here (2014). Allen is on an operating table having liposuction. “How does anyone let themselves get like this?” says her revolted manager. “Um, I had two babies?” she replies. Her postpartum body is “terrifying” to him.
Pregnancy in pop in the 20th century is scant. In the 70s and 80s, well, most pop stars were male, but there were a couple of visible examples. In 1972, Diana Ross was photographed pregnant with her daughter Tracee Ellis Ross and in 1976 performed Baby Love while heavily pregnant, bump concealed with feathers. In 1988, Neneh Cherry performed Buffalo Stance on Top of the Pops while eight months’ pregnant.
Bumps started to appear more regularly in popular culture in the 90s. Demi Moore’s cover for Vanity Fair in 1991 – naked and heavily pregnant but for diamonds – was the starting gun. Many were incensed – some newstands refused to stock the magazine – which suggests that, at the time, the image of the female pregnant body was still taboo. Regardless of complaints, high-profile models and actors posed pregnant for magazine covers in the ensuing decades.
Apart from a few outliers, it took longer for pregnancy to appear in pop. In the late 90s, Melanie Blatt performed with a bump above her trademark baggy trousers. She was on the cover of British GQ in 1998, hands on belly, under the headline: “One Sexy Mother.”
In the mid-00s, tabloid interest in the pregnant body of Britney Spears was nothing if not comprehensive, dissecting her behaviour, whether an inch of flesh was bloat or baby, and photographs of her looking, well, normally pregnant, and normally postpartum, rather than the more acceptable, elegant, manicured poses of Moore or Cindy Crawford.
Even in the early 00s, there was a sense that pop still required a confinement period for its pregnant denizens. “When we did the Music video, it was a weird time. [Madonna] was pregnant and we didn’t want her to look pregnant – so we had to work around that,” reflected the video’s director, Jonas Åkerlund, years later.
Why did pop keep pregnancy hidden? In the 90s, one factor may have been the moral panic around pop music. The American Academy of Pediatrics decreed that the music video industry should produce videos with pregnancy prevention messages.
More so, in a sexually expressive industry, historically run by men, pregnancy didn’t quite work.
“Back then, women had to be fit, they had to be sexy,” says Emma-Lee Moss, a musician who performs under the name Emmy the Great. “There was this sense of: we’ve got to keep them young and fuckable.”
“Pregnancy is a body-horror,” she continues. “You’re hairy and smelly and things are happening and fluids are coming out.”
“Perhaps fans don’t want to think of the artists they admire shopping for diapers or having sore nipples,” says Rebekka Karijord, whose 2017 album Mother Tongue chronicled her first pregnancy and the traumatic premature arrival of her daughter. “Artists, and especially young female ones in pop music, are often supposed to be a blank canvas for their fans’ projections, for their longings and dreams. Available and untaken.”
To understand the attitude that pregnancy is in some way grotesque – which isn’t confined to pop; the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin defined the grotesque body as a “body in the act of becoming” – we have to look at deeply embedded anxieties around the female body. In 1962, Sylvia Plath wrote these lines: “I am a mountain now, among mountainy women / The doctors move among us as if our bigness / Frightened the mind.”
Why is pregnancy frightening? One theory, suggested by the philosopher Christine Battersby, is that it challenges the idea that man was simply “thrown into the world”, as Heidegger described it. Dismissing pregnancy and birth vanishes the idea that something happened before man “is”, as she put it – and it happened in a woman’s body.
The political theorist Iris Marion Young wrote that the pregnant body undermines Cartesian dualism, which constructed the male body as rational, ordered and active, and the female body as irrational, unruly and passive. The pregnant body, for a start, has two bodies in one. And it might well have a man inside it, which is disruptive, threatening and best ignored.
Today, pregnancy is often fetishised but the language used by aspects of the popular press is telling. According to certain British newspapers, the kind that translate wearing a pair of shorts to “putting on a VERY leggy display”, you can’t be a pregnant woman in the public eye without “flaunting” your “HUGE” bump.
Another reasons for pop stars keeping pregnancies hidden in the 90s and 00s was the worry that a baby could ruin a career. “Attitudes were really bad back then,” says Emmy the Great, mentioning a lyric in To Zion (1998) by Lauryn Hill, in which she writes about the advice given to her on finding out she was pregnant. “Look at your career they said / Lauryn, baby, use your head.”
She tells a story about a tour manager she knows who was working with a band of three men in their 20s. When she told them she was pregnant, they fired her and told her it was for her own good.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Cardi B talked about a similar-sounding reaction from her friends and team to what Hill recounted in To Zion. “It was like, ‘You can’t do this. This might fuck up your career.’” It helps that artists like Cardi B are able to use social media to build an audience before securing a record deal, which allows for greater autonomy.
The shift in the past few years is part of a wider change in interpersonal attitudes. Experiences that were once deemed “personal” are out in the open. People want to talk about their health, their emotions, their ups and downs, and others want to hear about them. Pop stars use social media to talk directly and openly to fans about their lives, encouraged and emboldened by fourth-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement.
Motherhood and female reproductive health, in particular, are expressed by artists in new ways. Ali Wong’s standup specials Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife – both filmed when she was seven months’ pregnant – brilliantly detail the ups and downs of pregnancy and motherhood. Jenny Hval’s 2016 album, Blood Bitch, for example, celebrates periods.
Karijord believes that, while women have permission to be more multifaceted in popular culture these days, “we still have a long way to go”, and raises the absence of stories about male parenting in pop.
“I believe this gap has its roots in patriarchy, and it’s a shame because pregnancy and parenthood is a huge, existential part of life for many of us,” she says. “And genuine, interesting art has to be allowed to reflect our life – for both men and women. Just like falling in love. Which there are a million songs about.”
