11/5/2023 0 Comments Thick sexy moms![]() ![]() The recent “Are You Mom Enough?” cover of Time magazine was either the apex or nadir of all our current mama drama. But if you don’t look like a supermodel after having children, maybe you just aren’t trying hard enough. Did you look like Heidi Klum before having children? No? That’s O.K. We play into the conflicts of Madonnas versus Whores, Working Moms versus Stay-at-Homes, Bettys versus Veronicas.Īnd now we have Fab Moms versus Flab Moms. Still, our tendency toward these extremes makes us a self-loathing bunch. If our livelihood depended on wearing a swimsuit in front of millions, we’d probably put down the doughnut too. We all can learn a little from people whose profession is to be attractive. They’ve learned how to pull it together, so much so that I wrote a new book filled with simple advice from their stylists, makeup artists and trainers. And let’s face it: celebrities aren’t always terrible examples many eat well, exercise and dress far cuter than we do. There is no virtue in letting oneself go after giving birth. So what are we Pudge Island inhabitants to do? Of course, I am all for looking great, feeling good and getting skinny. I just had a baby three weeks ago!,” she said. “I read comments on my Twitter page about how I’m waddling into Pilates and I go: ‘Wow, that’s a really mean thing to say. The Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai, six months after giving birth, was featured in a much-viewed YouTube video entitled “Shocking! Fat Aishwarya Rai!” that juxtaposed before-and-after photos against the sounds of an elephant (some news media blamed “Western values” for the uncivilized pile-on).Įven the actress Hilary Duff discovered that her Twitter account was brimming with nasty remarks after she gave birth in the spring. Shortly after People magazine put Beyoncé on its cover this year, TMZ ran photos of the actress Bryce Dallas Howard with her 4-month-old daughter, Beatrice, for no reason - except, perhaps, to let commenters verbally stone her. Lately, though, signs are showing that this 1 percent of lucky mothers with the time, money and good genes to be skinny in their skinny jeans have informed our judgment of the other 99 in a sort of trickle-down mean-girls effect. (Yes, I like to look nice, too, but there are only so many tricks I can pull off before 7:30 while packing lunchboxes.) On TV, June Cleaver and Roseanne have been replaced by Sofia Vergara’s Gloria on “Modern Family,” Courteney Cox on “Cougar Town” and cocktail-swilling, Botox-frozen “Real Housewives.” At school drop-off, sweat pants have been banished, as Balenciaga bags and blowouts make every day seem like mommy dress-up. Now, we have terms like “yummy mummy” and “cougar.” Tropical cultures have no native words for “snow” ours used to be devoid of words to describe a sexual or sexy mother. Weight loss was female entertainment.īut in the same way that gray hair went from natural to unacceptable in part because of Clairol’s relentless marketing in the 1960s, ubiquitous imaging of “sexy” moms has rewired society’s expectations. When the infant-industrial complex took hold during the economic boom of the aughts (around the time every mom in SoHo suddenly had a status symbol Bugaboo), the Olympian efforts that star moms from Gwyneth Paltrow to Gisele Bündchen employed to get thin again seemed just Hollywood spectacle their sideshow, not ours. So much so that Tom Wolfe once remarked, “The one thing that Us Weekly has done that’s a great boost to the nation is, they’ve probably increased the birthrate.” ![]() As the editor of Us Weekly, covering the Suris and Shilohs of Hollywood for six years, I delivered what the young female audience wanted: cute moms and babies. I am partly to blame for my own physical netherworld. Me? I’m currently stranded on an island like the one on “Lost,” only this one is inhabited exclusively by still-pudgy moms struggling to find their way back. You see, in today’s celebrity narrative, just two kinds of desirable maternal female physiques exist: the adorable gestating one (with bellies called “bumps”) and its follow-up, the body that boomerangs back from birth possibly even better than before. Shortly before Mother’s Day this year, People magazine anointed Beyoncé as “World’s Most Beautiful Woman” with a cover line “Back After Baby!” ![]() There, in the stacks of periodicals at the nail salon, these genetic aberrations smile at us from celebrity magazines, or from our computer screens, wearing bikinis on the beach in Cabo weeks after Caesarean sections, or going straight from recovery room to Victoria’s Secret runway. And she makes no allowances for my maternal paunch. ![]() So from this land of all-things-ersatz, from breasts to reality TV, has arisen another irresistible illusion: the Momshell (mother-as-bombshell). ![]()
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