Celebrity Images Do New Mums No Good

There is no question that the standards women are held to are absolutely ridiculous, and nowhere is that more apparent than the media’s fascination with celebrities’ post-baby bodies. Any magazine, celebrity website, even our own Famecrawler, trumpet photos of famous women mere weeks, sometimes even days, after they have given birth – and they are almost always toned, thin, and bright-eyed.

Some sites even have the gall to comment if someone looks less than sylphlike when they first are out in public after giving birth. As if our responsibility right after having brought another human into the world is to make sure we’re pleasing to the eye, not keeping the baby and ourselves alive and trying to forge a new identity after the whole world has been rocked by the arrival of this new little person.

I thought this column, from The Age, was really good. Apparently some shots of Naomi Watts got out, taken right after she’d had her second child. They showed everything, including Watts’ C-section scar.

You know where this is going, right? Any of us should look so “awful” at any time, especially right after having had a child, and of course the writer’s friends ended up more depressed by hoping to see a new mum who maybe looked a bit more like themselves and instead ended up being just another reflection of the ridiculous standards women are supposed to meet.

She, and I, have this to say: Stop this RIGHT NOW, new mums of the world. You probably look great, certainly you look far better than you think you do, and if you don’t, well, you have a little seven-pound excuse right there in front of you.

Celebrities’ post-baby looks are absolutely deceiving. If you had a nanny for each child (Angelina), someone else to cook your meals, and (most importantly) a tummy tuck all lined up for moments after you gave birth, you’d look better than before too. If you’re a normal mum, give yourself credit or every day you can make it out of tracksuit pants those first few weeks – or at least locate and put on clean ones.

This is supposed to be funny, but honestly I think it’s damaging. It hurts regular-person new mums who, along with all the other pressures of motherhood, have these unattainable images shoved in their faces and are made to feel they must meet them or be an object of ridicule, at an already emotionally vulnerable time in their lives.

It hurts the celebrities who are putting themselves and their babies at risk by putting all their focus on losing the weight fast so they can look good for the paparazzi instead of, I don’t know, bonding with their baby?

And it’s bad for us, as a society, because it totally skews our idea of what monumental change motherhood makes in a woman —and that’s a change that goes a lot further than skin deep.