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Ask a stupid question…

Dr. Confused

The New York Times asks: Is the “Mom Job” really necessary?

“Necessary?” They’re asking if elective plastic surgery (a tummy tuck, breast lift, and liposuction) is a requirement? Are women’s bodies, especially mothers’ bodies, so flawed in our current culture that we are now required to pay thousands of dollars to be allowed to be seen in public?

Also, I wish that the NYT chose to focus more often on issues affecting more than the top 1% of the income distribution.

30 thoughts on Ask a stupid question…

  1. And note how postpartum bodies are potrayed as “deformed”–here we go again with the notion that healthy feminine perfection is an underweight teenager with a boob job.

    A woman may not like how her body looks after childbirth, but a soft stomach or drooping breasts are not deformities.

  3. The hair-raising quotes in the article about post-pregnancy changes in women’s bodies are especially irritating. One woman describes her breasts as “deflated sacks” and the plastic surgeon selling his services calls post-partum changes “profoundly negative.” Even the executive director of Our Bodies, Ourselves (quoted, I suppose, in an effort to find something positive to say about ugly post-pregnancy bodies) says, lukewarmly, that some women’s stomachs might go back to being “pretty flat.” Wish the reporter had found a woman who thought getting post-partum surgery was a stupid idea, but I guess “I didn’t get stretch marks and my stomach is still flat and my breasts not too worse for the wear after two rounds of breastfeeding” or “Pffftt…so I have a little fat overhang. Big deal!” doesn’t do the trick of convincing women that there is, or there will be, something deeply wrong with their bodies after they give birth.

  4. I don’t think this affects only the women who can afford these procedures. It also affects the women whose bodies will be compared unfavorably to theirs.

  6. 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.

    We give life, and we are then stigmatized for it.

    What a really fucked up system.

  7. Oh, I see: we’re supposed to want and need to be mothers, but we’re not supposed to look like we are.

    That surgeon’s statement – “Now women don’t have to worry about looking like they’ve given birth” (paraphrased) – if only, doctor, if only that were really, really, actually true.

    Argh.

  8. Good point, the15th. We’re all being held to these standards, it just that only a small fraction can afford to undergo the painful and expensive procedures required to meet them.

  9. Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman’s breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.

    R A Heinlein

  10. I’m with preying mantis on the text being relatively sane:

    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.

    “The message is that, after having children, women’s bodies change for the worse,” said Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, a nonprofit group in Washington. 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.

    At least they’re recognizing what’s going on.

  11. This issue really made some stuff click into place in terms of my feminist thinking. I always considered myself a feminist and always though there was too much social pressure on women to care about their appearance. After I had my son, I felt hideous, absolutely hideous. But the more I turned it over in my mind, the more I realized how messed up the situation is. Here I’ve gone and done the thing that is supposed to be the highest purpose of a woman, and I feel like I have lost all of my worth as a human being because I have a big stomach. I began to see just how screwed we are in this whole grand patriarchy.

    And yes, I wish they had interviewed some more people who have come to terms with their postpartum bodies. And yes, shape of a mother is wonderful.

  12. woah, man. good thing I wasn’t a “raving beauty” before I got pregnant, because apparently after mid-february I might as well just shrivel up and die.

    fuck that.

    I have enough to be ashamed of (you know, character flaws, failures to act humanely and rationally, things I actually do and am responsible for) without taking this crap seriously.

    good thing we have no money, otherwise I might be tempted. (/sarcasm)

  13. On another blog, someone pointed out that this “mommy-job” surgery is the provenance of the very well-to-do (the NYT is famous for covering the latest idiot trends of the super rich), but I also read a friend-who-is-a-mommy-blogger’s blog, and just yesterday, several women , who I can safely assume are fairly middle-class midwesterners from large towns/small cities, on there where discussing what procedure they would want after they’re done birthing and nursing. The assumption (among this admittedly small group) was that “well of course you could/should get a little work done.” Eep.

  14. Pingback: Post-partum plastic surgeries « Radical Doula

  15. Oh well DONE, Francis; I’m also a huge Heinlein fan. Haven’t read our collection in a long time; think I’ll re-introduce myself to Lazarus Long et al this winter.

    I LIKE my “mommy body”. Am far more comfortable with it and what it can do at 42 than I was the body of my 20’s…

  16. You know what that little tummy pouch you get is for? Snuggling babies. It’s like a built-in pillow, and my son loves cuddling me partly because of it. Childbirth softens your body up, no question. But why is a woman’s body supposed to be *hard* anyway…so it can be more…manly? Woman=soft=bad? Pah. Screw those people. I’m not a 14 year old boy, I’m a woman, who has carried a child in her womb and fed him with her breasts. Anybody tries to give me grief for that isn’t worth talking to.

  17. You know what that little tummy pouch you get is for? Snuggling babies. It’s like a built-in pillow, and my son loves cuddling me partly because of it.

    Yup. I am not a mother, but I have many distinct memories of laying on my mom’s tummy; some of my earliest memories are of laying on her and listening to her belly gurgle. I can distinctly recall thinking it was the most awesome thing ever. (More embarrassingly, according to Mom, I used to gurgle back…)

  18. I can’t say that I am in love with my stretch marks or the shape of my breasts after nursing 3 babies, but I would never change it either. Not if it was free and painless. I worked hard to bring those babies into the world, I am proud of that work, and I have the scars to prove it. I hate MILF culture.

  19. There’s a bit in the article about how in the old days you had to go for discreet clothing instead of plastic. Is there a new trend of bare midriffs on a day to day basis for the top 1% of earners?

  21. At least they’re recognizing what’s going on.

    I’m a mother and a grandmother. I “recognize” what goes on, too. The question is: why is that supposed to be BAD when it’s what has kept the human race going?

  22. The term “mom job” is really not on. What about a “dad job” for the guy who gains sympathetic pregnancy weight (except he doesn’t lose it) and suddenly needs a bra?

    I think body maintenance/enhancement is a feminist issue up to the point at which it’s relevant for men too (which “mom jobs” obviously aren’t). I mean, in my case, I require various things of my (male) partner. If I feel motivated to do various things to maintain weight (none of them surgical yet, but never say never), how much of that is a feminist issue? I think only the portion that exceeds what my expectations of men are, and what my particular one is willing to do for himself and me.

    Not that all this vanity and superficiality are anything to boast about, but I think it’s worthwhile to parse out how much relates to feminism.

  23. octogalore, I agree with what you’re saying about how the focus is only on women, but it doesn’t make sense to say that sexism is OK if both sides get heaps of it.

    It relates to feminism rather a lot when women are expected to maintain a single, immature and unrealistic body shape throughout their entire lives, regardless of age, physical ability or childbirth.

  24. Man, just when I thought that the whole half-naked fashion trend was dying down and life was returning to normal…. 😛

    Seriously, this is such a rarefied demographic. What’s wrong with rich people, anyway, that makes them so fucking shallow?

  25. Pingback: Mom Job? » Green SAHM

  26. “I don’t think it was an issue for my mother; your husband loved you no matter what,” said Ms. Birkland, who recently remarried.

    This quote is so sadly wrong. The idea that there has ever been a period in human history where your spouse always loved you no matter what (on either side of the gender divide), or the idea that there aren’t husbands now who do love their post-partum wives, sagginess and all.

    It relates to feminism rather a lot when women are expected to maintain a single, immature and unrealistic body shape throughout their entire lives, regardless of age, physical ability or childbirth.

    I wonder. I mean, yes it relates to feminism. But American society in general has a huge fear of aging which, I suspect, is a cover for an even bigger fear of death. Sometimes (when I’m in the mood for overbroad generalizations, heh) I think this refusal to stare death in the face explains a lot about our culture, from things like “mom jobs” to the high fundamentalist population. There’s a certain denial going on, like if we can shut death out, pretend it isn’t there, it won’t catch us. Reminders of the aging process, which is after all a march towards death, are considered ugly because we are supposed to value youth–as though the inexperience and follies and vanities of youth (said the young’un) are to be more highly valued than the wisdom of the old! Though I suppose if you spend all your time trying not to age, you don’t have much time left to learn.

  27. mythago: “It relates to feminism rather a lot when women are expected to maintain a single, immature and unrealistic body shape throughout their entire lives, regardless of age, physical ability or childbirth.”

    That doesn’t contradict what I said though, which is: “I think only the portion that exceeds what my expectations of men are [is antifeminist], and what my particular one is willing to do for himself and me.”

    Women do not expect men to maintain a ‘single, immature and unrealistic body shape.” So, any “mom job” that reflects an expectation to maintain this IS antifeminist per what I said.

    What I mean, though, is that expectations of fitness/maintenance for a particular couple aren’t sexist if they are equal. Of course, I allowed that they could be frivolous. If doing five days of cardio to balance a completely sedentary desk job, three days of weights and ab work in the gym, and eating four balanced meals a day leads to an “immature and unrealistic” body shape, then mea culpa. But I think, as Isabel suggests re her discussion of fear of aging, that where a woman and man have equivalent expectations of one another, it’s not per se antifeminist.

  28. Even as a gal with plastic I find this annoying. The female body i grew up seeing was my mothers. At age 64 and a grandmother, having had 2 of her own along the way, I still think she’s beautiful. I thank the gods daily that I seemed to have inherited her genetics, and I suspect if someone suggested she needed a tummy tuck, lipo, or a lift, she’d laugh in their faces.

    Mothers are what women often really look like. And even I will say it’s a shame that such things are becoming, apparently, unseemly.

  29. Plastic surgery is becoming more and more “normal” and expected. As plastic surgery becomes quicker and cheaper (although not necessarily safer) it will become part of the average woman’s beauty routine. Those who abstain will find themsleves at a terrible disadvantage in a world full of firm, perky beauties with flat stomachs and perfect breasts. Do you think Jessica Simpson had it hard getting dates because of her bobblehead personality? First-rate T&A is what most men really want.

  30. But American society in general has a huge fear of aging which, I suspect, is a cover for an even bigger fear of death.

    I think the societal fear involved in this situation is the fear that women who have become mothers may decide not to remove themselves from society solely to care for their husbands and children. Refusing to buy in to plastic surgery trends is part of this. If a woman rejects beauty ideals, continues to work and have a public life, while also being a wife and mother, then she is a very scary thing to the patriarchal notion that women who have become wives and mothers are done in the public sphere.

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