I logged on to People.com this morning (yes, yes, I know; I'm colluding in the celebrity nature of our culture.) and saw this headline: "Jessica Alba on Pregnancy: 'I Never Felt Less Sexy." This comes after Vanity Fair's recent interview with Angelina Jolie in which she declares "[Pregnancy] makes me feel like a woman. It makes me feel that all the things about my body are suddenly there for a reason. It makes you feel round and supple, and to have a little life inside you is amazing. . . I’m fortunate. I think some women have a different experience depending on their partner. I think that affects it. I happen to be with somebody who finds pregnancy very sexy. So that makes me feel very sexy.” This got me thinking; does the average woman (and no, I don't think either Jessica Alba or Angelina Jolie are the average woman) feel sexy during pregnancy?
I enjoyed my pregnancy with Wild Man (for the most part), and I suppose I felt sexier for a period. But by the end, which I think is really the part that most women remember the most vividly, I felt far from sexy. Is it now fashionable to spin pregnancy as sexy, or is it, indeed, sexy for some women?
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I definitely didn't feel sexy while I was pregnant. I loved it most of the time--mainly for the sheer awesomeness of growing a baby in one's body. But I felt fat--not sexy. When Angelina goes on and on about how womanly and sexy pregnancy makes her feel, I can't help but roll my eyes. Her career is built on being sexy. Her public persona revolves around being sexy (a sexy humanitarian). So, of course pregnancy for Angelina Jolie is pregnant. And of course Brad Pitt thinks it's sexy, thereby making Angelina feel even sexier.
So, congrats, Angelina, for being so damned sexy. I hope you appreciate it. As for Jessica Alba, I appreciate her acknowledgment of pregnancies discomforts. But she is also often quoted as working against her family's fat genes--constantly watching what she eats. Like Angelina, Jessica Alba is primarily celebrated for her beauty and her body. I have no doubt that she'll be posing in a bikini on the cover of Details or some such magazine in order to prove that she's still sexy and therefore worthy of being a movie star.
I've clearly lost my point (my brain is a bit fried this afternoon). But, perhaps some sense can be made anyway...
spin spin spin. gwyneth paltrow is the virginal motherhood is like a drug I can't get enough and angelina is playing the other side sexy sex sex pregnancy is so hott. both of them irritate the crap out of me.
So leave it to me to take it to the gutter a bit. But, I think there's a distinction to be made between feeling *sexy* when you're pregnant and feeling the influence of hormones that increase your sex drive. Clearly, every pregnancy is different; my own two are perfect examples. With my first, my sex drive incresed dramatically. I was easily aroused, especially during the last three months, and had I not just left my husband, there would have been lots of...well, you get the picture.
With my second pregnancy, however, I wasn't interested in sex at any point in the pregnancy. I wanted intimacy, cuddling, and touching. And I actually felt sexy in my pregnant skin. But the drive to have intercourse simply wasn't there because I was so exhausted.
Finally, I think there's a slippage in the term sexy. It doesn't have to mean that a woman feels like a beautiful sexpot (which is the feeling I'm getting from the way the term is being used here, but I could be wrong). Rather, it connotes to me a woman's ability to be a desiring (and desired) subject. The latter meaning seems like one that I think is easier to work with in describing my own experience with both pregnancies.
For me, I don't think there is much slippage. To feel sexy, I have to both feel like a "sexpot" and want to have sex. But I do understand what you're saying.
Of course everything people say in an interview is done with total awareness that they are being interviewed for publication. But also, it's probable that Jessica Alba sometimes feels sexy and that Angelina Jolie sometimes feels like a slug. There's no more an average pregnancy than there is an average woman and probably pregnant women--for they are, after all, real women--feel the range. Sometimes the whole range in the same day. I think there are simultaneous social perceptions of pregnant women as sexy and asexual that are more about how people looking at pregnant women feel than about how women feel when they are pregnant. When I was pregnant with my first, someone said to me, "Can you believe that some people actually think pregnant women are sexy?!" After my negative reaction, she followed it with the caveat, "well, it's okay for their husbands to think they're sexy." I'd say that's a fairly common stance, but also it doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole idea of sexy is a problem because when most people talk about it, they DON'T mean woman as desiring. They mean woman as desired.
Personally, when I got dressed up in a snug maternity dress to go out to dinner at 8 months, I felt sexy, and the big curvy firm belly was part of that. I liked it when people stared at it. When I had my head in the toilet vomiting up my internal organs, it was not sexy.
Anyone seen the sex scene in _Munich_? Now that's hot.
So there's a disjointed string of thoughts on the topic.
Oooh, yes, I forgot about that scene in _Munich_! That was, hands down, one of the best sex scenes ever -- pregnant sex or otherwise.
I had totally forgotten that scene too!
Anyway... This is a very interesting question. All I can say is this: I had no sex drive whatsoever in my first pregnancy (and it was funny how it came back in full force after the baby was out and those hormones left my system -- to bad I was all torn and sore, etc). In the second pregnancy I felt sexier and had much more drive.
The thing with pregnancy (and the first year of breastfeeding) for me is that it's the only time in my life when I've had larger, curvier breasts, so that in itself is a boost to the "sexiness." Otherwise, I agree with most everyone that the libido may vary, and that pregnancy is a time of lots of physical discomfort...
You know, people seemed upset at Jessica Alba saying pregnancy was not sexy, but I have to agree with her. I never felt less sexy. I appreciated her honesty about it. Angelina Jolie, on the other hand, lives this ridiculous life with Brad Pitt and four beautiful children (before the twins' arrival) and has been staying in a French villa before giving birth in a hospital that overlooks the water. Gag me. (In all fairness, I should say I can't identify with Alba's life either.)
She feels sexy? Bully for her. But we already have no means by which to identify with her and now she wants to brag that she and Brad frickin' Pitt think pregnant sex is hot?
I think Jolie's statements were received better and I think it was because it was akin to stating that she loved the baby-making. Great. Here's a woman who likes sex and likes to make babies. Alba, on the other hand, doesn't like making the babies.
Anyway, it is amazing, as Jolie says, that my body can make a life but it does not make me feel like a sexpot.
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