From ‘Madonna’ to ‘Whore’: Sexuality,pregnancy,and popular culture

Abstract

Pregnant bodies are often perceived to be sites of reproductive beauty in American popular culture; however, the intersection of pregnancy and sexuality elicits reactions ranging from cultural disgust to fetishization. Using Foucauldian discourse theory, I look at how cultural ambivalence about pregnant women who have sex manifests in varied popular culture texts. Ambivalence, I argue, appears through the medicalization of pregnant sexuality (asexualizing), compulsory heterosexuality and pregnancy pornography (hypersexualizing). I also include feminist responses that disrupt the asexual/hypersexual binary.

Keywords

Body studies discourse analysis popular culture pregnancy representation

In February 2010, I taught a class on the “yummy mummy” phenomenon and spatiality of pregnancy. A few students were dismayed that anyone could view the naked pregnant body as grotesque, a response Robyn Longhurst analyzes in “‘Corporeographies’ of pregnancy: ‘Bikini babes’”. Positive commentary on naked pregnant bodies (i.e. “they are beautiful”) switched when we discussed sexuality; I detected a few “ewwws” and off-handedly remarked that “yes, even yummy mummies have sex”. Student response illustrates that pregnant women are beautiful in their expectant, asexual state, but troublesome when they seek sexual pleasure. This anecdote exemplifies continuing uneasiness around pregnant women’s sexuality,¹ and the essay that follows examines the vacillation between asexuality (the “Madonna”) and hypersexuality (the “Whore”) that frames how pregnant women are represented within American popular culture.

I use Foucauldian discourse theory to trace the asexual and hypersexual modalities of pregnancy by comparing medical, popular and pornographic texts, and pointing to more progressive, feminist texts wherein women reclaim their sexualities. In the case of an asexual body, sexual practices are discussed in a medicalized and heteronormative context; sex functions to pleasure one’s partner or aid childbirth. Hypersexualization occurs when the body is marked by (assumedly heterosexual) intercourse. In the most extreme case, pregnancy pornography, an abject and lactating body is fetishized. Throughout this essay, writings by sex-positive feminists like Susie Bright “speak back” to popular representations and present new possibilities for pregnant women.

Pregnant women’s sexual intimacy is well documented in medical literature. Various studies note the frequency of sex, kinds of preferred sexual positions, expressions of desire, attitudes towards intercourse, and fears and misconceptions about sex during pregnancy (Barclay et al., 1994; Bartellas et al., 2000; Fox et al., 2008; Hyde, 1996; Kenny, 1973; Lumley, 2008; Mills, 1981; Pauleta et al., 2010; Robson et al., 1982; von Sydow, 1999). This research articulates how a woman’s beliefs about her body manifest in her intimate life. In her literature review spanning 1950–1996, “Sexuality during pregnancy and after birth”, Kirsten von Sydow found that advice about sex played a key role in pregnant women’s lives. Women who sought advice from a source other than a medical professional (i.e. books, birth preparation courses, female friends) reported a higher degree of sexual interest and enjoyment (von Sydow, 1999: 40). This finding indicates that cultural messages are a significant influence on a pregnant woman’s sexual life.

The extensive medical literature on pregnant women and sex has not been matched by humanistic, qualitative inquiry; very few authors analyze pregnant women’s sexuality from a feminist-cultural studies perspective that considers the role of discourse in shaping women’s experiences. Discourse can further be used to restore, legitimate, reproduce, challenge, transform or dismantle the status quo (Wodak et al., 1999: 8). Discourse is communicated through those positioned as “experts”, whose ideas are to be trusted because they occupy culturally esteemed roles. Pregnant women are expected take “experts” seriously, especially within a bio-medical model that privileges obstetricians and gynecologists (Rothman, 2000). Since “advice” texts, such as pregnancy preparation books or pregnancy magazines, written by “expert” authors play a considerable role in shaping a woman’s perception about her sexuality, it is worth interrogating discourses presented therein.

Medical literature notwithstanding, pregnant women’s sexuality, particularly cultural representations of and discourses about pregnant women’s sexuality, is undertheorized within feminist literature. This is why Rebecca Huntley’s “Sexing the belly: An exploration of sex and the pregnant body”(2000) is a vital contribution and offers a model for my analysis of the subject. Huntley uses Lisa Rinna’s Playboy pictorial, a Dutch pornographic film named Pregnant Schoolgirls, and Dr Miriam Stoppard’s advice book Healthy Pregnancy to “explore the societal reverence for pregnancy and motherhood, a reverence that exists alongside evidence of deep fears and desires in relation to the pregnant body” (Huntley, 2000: 348). Huntley is primarily concerned with connections between pornographic and non-pornographic representations; she finds that each text is defined by a social veneration for maternal bodies and a pronatalist discourse that suggests women are driven by a desire to mother (2000: 358).

Building on Huntley’s work, I am interested in how ambivalence manifests itself in cultural texts as asexuality or hypersexuality. Though Huntley and I have a mutual curiosity about sexuality and maternity, I approach the topic informed by Foucault’s theorizing of power-knowledge discursive regimes as well as the role of the “expert” in creating Truth-claims to contend that anxieties about the transgressive nature of pregnant sexuality are assuaged through popular culture texts (Foucault, 1994). Pregnant sexuality is managed through “expert” knowledge, sanitization, compulsory heterosexuality and fetishization, which shows there is little room for empowering narratives of sexual intimacy. I recognize that pregnant women have agency and may find a great deal of playfulness in their sex lives. As I explain next, a Foucauldian perspective recognizes that power is never absolute. While the texts may offer little diversity in how pregnant women are depicted, this does not mean that women themselves aren’t engaging in diverse sexual behaviors while pregnant.

Drawing on feminist-Foucauldian methodology allows for an examination of representations of pregnant sexuality with an eye to the “political implications of constructing pregnancy in these ways” (Marshall and Woollett, 2000: 354). Foucault argues power is circulatory (1995) and so it is also imperative to consider how pregnant women cooperate with, recirculate and/or reject meaning ascribed to their sexual bodies. I include feminist voices to demonstrate cultural intervention is possible. However, this essay does not focus on what women “do” with these texts; some may read them literally and abide by the advice given while others may read them flippantly or arbitrarily. Foucault insists that knowledge-power regimes are not absolute. As ethnographer Khiara M Bridges shows, class-marginalized women who cannot afford comprehensive health care oftentimes express excitement for the “medically managed pregnancy” dictated by Medicaid insurance coverage (Bridges, 2011: 93–94). For these women, the care of “experts” represents access previously unavailable to them. Their agency is demonstrated by submitting to a medical authority. Women in Bridges’ ethnography might feel empowered by voraciously reading all “advice” texts they can get their hands on. Bridges argues that racialized and/or immigrant women who do not follow medical instruction are deemed to be “wily patients” (2011) that cheat the health care system. Therefore, observing medical advice is one way for race, class, and status marginalized women to escape the “welfare queen” construction.

For middle-class women, listening closely to a medical “expert” is a form of “intensive mothering” (Hays, 1996). Intensive mothering refers to the hypersensitivity that mothers are expected to have towards their children in order to be “good” mothers. By exercising bodily vigilance, deferring to a medical authority, putting a fetus’s needs above herself, and preparing for birth and motherhood, a pregnant woman participates in intensive mothering. In this case, consuming (purchasing and reading) pregnancy “advice” guides and adhering to a doctor’s instruction is the hallmark of “good” motherhood-to-be.

Given my methodological choice to analyze texts rather than interview pregnant readers, I am more concerned with how and why discourses are constructed within these narratives, and I question how representations of pregnant women’s sexuality are “encoded” (Hall, 1993: 98) with ambivalence about the procreative body. At the same time, I recognize pregnant women accept, negotiate and/or reject these discourses depending on their identities, social positions, experiences, and value systems. There will be “variable literacies” (Radway, 1984) within any diverse group.

I chose differing forms of textuality (e.g. online columns, print books, visual culture pornography) and intended readerships for this inquiry. I was inspired by Huntley’s distinct text choices, which she describes as “an exercise of bumping different texts together, in order to see the connections and gaps, to read across genres, to compare fantasies of the maternal and the sexual” (Huntley, 2000: 348). An “eclectic and unruly” (Cacho, 2012: 27) choice of texts, of “varied and often disjunctive primary sources” (Puar, 2007: xv), was intentional to show how discourse travels across various platforms. Discourse is not housed within one text alone, but produced in the traveling between texts that compound, corroborate with, support, and sometimes disagree with each other. Hence, it is not unusual for women to receive contradictory information about their pregnant selves (i.e. asexual in medical texts and hypersexual in pornographic texts) because power is never universal. The asexuality/hypersexuality paradox illustrates cultural ambivalence towards pregnant sexualities: they exist at an intersection between an embodied state (i.e. pregnancy) and an embodied desire (i.e. sexuality). To see how discourse is deployed, and how power operates, it is essential to look at disparate texts through what theorist Jasbir Puar calls a “queer methodological” process, which negates positivist ways of knowing that quantifies discourse. Rather than “a position to be marked off” or fixed moment to analyze, this essay examines “a series of debates and interacting ideas [as well as] contradictory ideas and practices which ‘cross each other and give rise to something else, some other site’” regarding pregnant sexualities in the poststructuralist tradition (Lather, 1991: 54). Thus, texts chosen for this essay create an “alternative historical record, archive, and documentation of our contemporary moments” (Puar, 2007: xv).

To illustrate the medicalization of pregnant sexuality, I selected Dr Miriam Stoppard’s Contraception, Pregnancy, and Birth (1993) advertised to be the childbirth bible”, “authoritative”, “comprehensive” and a “classic work” written by “Britain’s most popular and trusted childbirth expert” (Stoppard, 1993: 1).² Stoppard is highly influential in North America too if rankings on Amazon.com are to be believed. Stoppard has published widely on the subject of family, childbirth, parenting, and women’s health. Next, I chose popular (explicitly non-medical) texts marketed as easy-to-use guides. These include Ericka Lutz’s Sex and pregnancy: The naked truth revealed (2002), Robin Elise Weiss’s Sex during pregnancy (2002) and Paul Joannides’s The Guide to Getting it On! (2000). Lutz (2002) and Weiss (2002) were found on encyclopedic websites offering advice and information on hundreds of topics (Babyzone.com and pregnancy.about.com respectively), while Joannides represents a pulp sex-text. These are accessibly written with a “mainstream” audience in mind. I used a random database search to find pregnancy pornography, and I selected four websites Lactalia (n.d.), Expecting Sex (2002), Pregnant and Horny (n.d.) and Knocked Up Sluts (n.d.). These websites present women in traditionally pornographic poses though there is a focus on the pregnant belly and lactation play. I opted for still images rather than video or audio because they depicted a two-dimensional snapshot of sexuality akin to the other texts. Finally, feminist texts were chosen to contravene in the dominant narrative thereby offering an alternative understanding of pregnant sexuality. Anne Semans’s piece, ‘Turning on to pregnancy’ (2000), was first published on the Hip Mama website.³ This website is a feminist, motherhood activist and education resource that provides information and support for mothers. Anne Semans is a sex educator who has worked for “women-run sex toy businesses” and finds “the World Wide Web is an ideal medium for sex education, research and networking” (Semans, 1998: para. 4). She has also published books with Cathy Winks such as Sexy Mamas (Winks and Semans, 2004) and The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (Winks and Semans, 2002). Susie Bright’s ‘Egg Sex’ (1995) is another feminist text that approaches pregnancy from an activist point of view. Bright, renowned pro-sex author and performer, writes the most political piece as she challenges hegemonic notions of (hetero)sexuality. Bright’s pregnancy and labor narrative disrupts asexuality and hypersexuality messages. Her text demonstrates the ineffectiveness of disciplining the pregnant body, which often slips between the cracks of top-down discourses. Bright’s story not only indicates pregnant woman-agency, but resistance to hierarchal power.

“We’re Mary now”:⁴ Asexuality, medicalization and heteronormativity

In general, women are believed to have had sexual intercourse to become pregnant; the sperm (penis) + ova (vagina) = baby narrative remains dominant. However, my opening anecdote implies that thoughts of pregnant women having sex make many people uncomfortable. In The Mask of Motherhood, Susan Maushart recalls a moment when teenage boys were mortified to learn the woman they were ogling (Maushart) was eight months pregnant. She writes, “My fan club stopped in its tracks. I thought one boy was going to cry. Then they began to laugh, in the nervous way you must when you realize the joke’s on you” (1991: 39). Maushart’s anecdote suggests that even considering a pregnant woman sexy makes some squeamish. Pregnancy and sexuality, as well as sexiness, are seemingly incommensurate.

Susie Bright observes, “It’s an awesome feat of American Puritanism to convince us that sex and pregnancy do not mix. It’s the ultimate virgin/whore distinction. For those nine months, please don’t mention how we got this way – we’re Mary now” (Bright, 1995: 81). Bright’s identification of cultural discomfort rooted in Christian conservativism is important; Mary is now shorthand for chastity. The overrepresentation of asexual white women is not coincidental. Women of color are positioned as always-already sexual by logics of racism rooted in histories of slavery and colonial genocide. Similarly, working-class and poor women are historically constructed as sexually unruly against the reserved middle-class or affluent woman who is more respectable according to bourgeois notions of femininity. Given US histories of racialization and class, discourses of asexuality are primarily directed towards white, middle-class female readers, viewers, and consumers who can access asexuality easier than women of color and/or class marginalized women.

During times of stress and anxiety, people turn to doctors to dispense professional information and advice. Pregnancy is one such female experience in which women are encouraged to rely on the medical community for advice, as it is a period of great bodily change and uncertainty. Paul Joannides, in Guide to Getting it On! (2000), demonstrates deference to medical authority. He writes:

Please! No matter what you read in this chapter or anywhere else, you absolutely must discuss the matter of having sex while pregnant with a healthcare provider who is familiar with you and your pregnancy … While this is necessary for relatively few pregnant couples, your personal health care professional is the only one who can help you in making this determination (Joannides, 2000: 511, emphasis mine).

Here, medical experts are the arbiters of sexual behaviour. Yet, as Kirsten von Sydow’s review reveals, only one-third of expectant women received any advice from their doctors (von Sydow, 1999: 38); it was largely restrictive in tone. And of this group, 10% of the women remembered any mention of alternative sexual practices beyond penetrative intercourse; no one was told that sexual intimacy may improve the conditions of pregnancy (von Sydow, 1999: 38). Von Sydow found that women who did not consult their gynecologist at all during their pregnancies experienced “an intensiﬁcation of their sexual feelings” (von Sydow, 1999, 40). This is a curious and problematic conundrum: most pregnant women are not talking to their doctors about sex, and those who are, as prompted by advice texts such as Guide to Getting it On!, receive restrictive guidance that prevents sexual satisfaction during pregnancy while women who do not engage with their doctors report heightened levels of sexual enjoyment. So, medicalized instruction, as advocated by popular advice texts, promotes asexuality through cautioning against a woman’s sexual intimacy.

When sex is discussed in popular medical literature, pleasure is absent from discussion of sex acts. Advice to pregnant women often involves a discussion of positions best suited for the last trimester. In Contraception, Pregnancy and Birth (1993), Stoppard writes, “There are several lovemaking positions that you can use to enhance your enjoyment – without in any way diminishing that of your partner – once the missionary position becomes too awkward and uncomfortable” (Stoppard, 1993: 211). Positions ranging from “side-by-side” to “rear-entry” are best for the last months of pregnancy while a “sitting” position in the middle trimester “enable[s] you to adjust your position but still see your partner’s face and feel close to him” (Stoppard, 1993: 211; emphasis mine). Stoppard’s heterocentric discourse is couched in the idea of “making love” and intimacy with a male partner. Sexual positions are described methodically and clinically, referencing comfort as opposed to female pleasure. Susie Bright jokes, “It’s typical of mainstream sex books to focus on ‘positions’ in the masculine way one might prepare a sports manual” (Bright, 1995: 82). The female orgasm is rarely mentioned except in saying that orgasms may or may not disrupt the fetus and one should check with a health care provider to determine what forms of sexual intercourse and pleasures are acceptable, which I have already described as being problematic instruction.

As evident in the Stoppard text, discourses about pregnancy are steeped in a heterosexual romantic narrative. The mom + dad = baby story constructs a myth that is pronatalist, nuclear family-centric and normatively heterosexual. This construction removes sexual agency from pregnant women because her expression of sexuality is repackaged as functioning in service to her male partner or her fetus, and rarely for her own pleasure. Pregnant sex advice follows two trajectories: how to maintain satisfaction for a male partner and how to have sex in preparation for labor. Theorist Lucy Bailey concurs, “The desexualization of their bodies in discourses around pregnancy and motherhood led to a redefining of their bodies as existing for another” (Bailey, 2001: 124). Again, neither of these is attentive to a pregnant woman’s pleasure.

Heteromale sexual privilege is evident in “The first time father”, a section within Stoppard’s chapter on “A sensual pregnancy”. This section includes a man’s account of frustrations and joys of his wife’s pregnancy. This is also taken up by Joannides who notes, “Some pregnant women cherish the feeling of having both the baby and the father inside of them at the same time” (Joannides, 2000: 519). Elsewhere, Joannides talks about male virility with one’s wife, which is another assumed familial relationship. He writes: “As pregnancy progresses, some men feel as if they are nourishing or symbolically feeding their wives during intercourse, especially when they come inside of them. On some level, the dad-to-be might view his semen as a kind of milk that will help nurture both mother and infant” (Joannides, 2000: 525). Further, Joannides refers back to the medical model of preparing for childbirth. He advises:

Some healthcare professionals think it’s good for a pregnant woman to tone and exercise the muscles in her pelvic floor (aka doing Kegel exercises). What better way to accomplish this than by having a man insert his penis into your vagina, keeping it stationary while you squeeze it with your pelvic muscles? Most guys would be happy to lend a helping penis. (Joannides, 2000: 521)

These Kegel exercises are described as a way for heterosexual, married couples to prepare for labor despite the fact that this exercise does not technically require a male partner. Sex is not for the woman’s pleasure; it is an assertion of masculinity.

Bright critiques this focus on heterosexual relationships. She writes: “Great emphasis is placed on how to cope with the ambivalent husband’s feelings towards his wife’s body and the burden pregnancy puts on their normal sexual routine” (Bright, 1995: 80). By contrast, Bright makes little reference to a sexual partner. When a partner is alluded to, there is no mention of gender. She also discusses sex via self-pleasure, an angle absent from most texts as mentioned earlier. Similarly, Hip Mama presents a more comprehensive view of pregnant sexuality. In her post “Turning on to pregnancy”, Anne Semans writes: “If you are pregnant and single, you may be able to enjoy some of these activities alone, or perhaps you can enlist the aid of a good friend to help you relax with some of the non-sexual ones” (Semans, 2002: para. 2). Here, a single woman’s experience of pregnancy is discussed and validated. This is noteworthy because single women are increasingly choosing to become and/or remain pregnant, and yet even the 2009 version of Stoppard’s text is silent about how a single pregnant woman might enjoy intimacy. These feminist texts counter the medicalized, heteronormative, married view of sexuality.

In addition to pleasuring one’s partner, popular texts encourage sex to facilitate childbirth: sex has utility. In her online column “Sex and pregnancy: The naked truth revealed”, Ericka Lutz tells women that “sex can even be medically useful … Semen deposited near the cervix can help soften and loosen things up, and nipple stimulation and orgasm can sometimes induce labour” (2002: para. 3). Similarly, Dr Bennett Spetalnick, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Vanderbilt University, advises, “Sex at term and the accompanying contractions might be just the fuse that that last step needs. I would certainly rank it higher than any of the other home methods to induce labor” (Bohn, 2006: 13).

Susie Bright also recommends sexual activity to aid childbirth though using a sex-positive tone and intention. In “Egg Sex”, Bright recalls advice given to her by a pre-natal instructor. In advising how to properly give a perineal massage, the instructor says:

Daddy should massage and finger the vaginal opening until he could put more and more of his fingers inside, relaxing the vaginal muscles through such caresses until he might be able to press a small orange or even his whole hand into Mommy’s opening … Perineal massage is not discussed in every hospital or prenatal setting. Most couples and their care providers are steeped in the dominance of penis-vagina intercourse. It requires a different sort of orientation to devote attention to the possibilities of fingers and hands. (Bright, 1995: 82, 83)

After a friend assures her it is a helpful exercise, Bright comments “I could see why immediately. A hand going inside my pussy is a little like a baby’s head trying to move outside into the world. How exciting!” (Bright, 1995: 82) Bright is correct in observing that perineal massages are not prescribed as “homework”. Fisting is often considered to be a queer sexual practice. The only mainstream text that discusses it is Joannides’ Guide to Getting it On!, which presents itself as a non-judgmental populist resource, where he advises perineal massages “help to make [the vagina] more pliable and reduce the need for an episiotomy” (Joannides, 2000: 523). But Bright takes her advice to engage in sexual activity one step further; it is worth quoting at length. She admits

I pestered my teacher for three weeks about whether she thought using a vibrator during labor would be helpful for pain relief … Well, I decided on my own that my Hitachi magic wand was going to be my focus object. I believed that stimulating my clit would be a nice counterpoint to the contractions going on inside my belly … I have a great photograph of me in the delivery room, dilated to six centimeters, with a blissful look on my face and my vibrator nestled against my pubic bone … I had a great labor. (Bright, 1995: 83)

Bright’s anecdote directly contests the dominant tropes discussed in this essay – sex as medicalized, heterosexual and for birth. Instead, Bright presents a sex-positive and queer approach to pregnancy that involves self-pleasure and pain relief. One can only imagine the doctor’s response to a laboring woman using a sex toy!

Hypersexual, hormonal and leaky bodies

In her essay on pregnant embodiment, Iris Marion Young suggests that asexualizing discourses are liberating because one is released “from the sexually objectifying gaze that alienates and instrumentalizes [a pregnant woman] when in her nonpregnant state … The look focusing on her belly is not one of desire, but of recognition” (Young, 2005: 54). This is not entirely true. There are numerous examples of the hormonal, insatiable pregnant woman who becomes an object of desire. For instance, “She Gotta Bump”, a viral video, a New York magazine article on “Hot Mamas”, and pregnancy pornography illustrate variable sexual agency that ranges from sexual objectification to playful desire and embodied pleasure, which shows that hypersexualization can be reductionist and/or a site of reclamation.

In March 2010, a friend emailed “She Gotta Bump”, which is a viral video written by three men (Rob Pearlstein, Dave Cohen, and Joe Hursley) explaining why pregnant women are sexy and an untapped sexual market. At one point, Hursley says “I wish that I could make you pregnant twice. I like stretch marks, pickle farts, cankles, swollen wrists, did I forget to mention your triple D tits?” and later he exclaims that a “MILF [mother I’d like to fuck] is fine” but “a PILF [pregnant woman I’d like to fuck] is sublime” (“She Gotta Bump”, 2010). There are a few interesting moments in the video that are unlike those seen elsewhere in popular culture; for instance, I enjoyed watching a group of pregnant women dance around in their yoga class. The organic movement of their bodies through space is a pleasant alternative to the lethargic pregnant character often presented in other cultural mediums. These few moments of playfulness aside, “She Gotta Bump” demonstrates that pregnant women are still sexual objects rather than sexual subjects. After all, Hursley, a white heterosexually positioned man, is the central narrative figure who promotes sex with pregnant women. If the video featured a pregnant woman who narrated and joked about her horniness, this would trouble notions of pregnant sexuality because then she would be the agent of her desire rather than the subject of someone else’s. As it stands, “She Gotta Bump” is more clearly about his desire for these women rather than their desire for anything.

While “She Gotta Bump” sexually objectifies pregnant women, there are other cultural texts that present pregnant women as hormonally out of control and sexually voracious, primarily for the benefit of a male partner. An op-ed piece for New York magazine, entitled “Hot Mamas”, imagines the over-sexed pregnant women. Author Amy Sohn, explaining the seasonal effect of the summer on pregnant libido, jokes “All those rosy-cheeked buncookers are waking up sweaty from intense erotic dreams, reveling in their voluptuous new figures, and chasing hubbies around the apartment demanding to be serviced” (Sohn, 2003: 169). Like “She Gotta Bump”, Sohn approaches pregnant sexuality with humor that paints pregnant women as ideal sexual partners. The hypersexual nature of pregnant women appears in more “serious” literature too. During hormonal fluctuations, pregnant women may experience genital swelling that presents an amorous opportunity for pregnant women and their (implied male) partners. In Guide to Getting it On!, Joannides informs readers, “Around the fourth month of pregnancy, most women’s genitals begin to swell. And swell. And swell. This swelling can lead to full-time lubrication and can make some pregnant women feel very horny” (2000: 515). This matter-of-fact tone presents lubrication as a positive facilitator of heterosex. But while lubrication is an acceptable body fluid, other emissions signal danger, according to these experts. In her text, Dr Stoppard counsels, “It is inadvisable to have sex if the mucus plug that seals the cervix has become dislodged, and you should also abstain after your water has broken. So if you have a show (the blood-stained vaginal discharge) or the water breaks, do not have intercourse” (Stoppard, 1993: 219). While sexual interaction may be contraindicated for some women, a point I am not contesting, a corporeal discourse analysis of abjection reminds that disgust and fear are psychical reactions to body fluids moreso than medical ones.

French theorist Julia Kristeva (1982) says encountering body processes brings one face to face with a fear of death. Body fluids are a prime example of the abject: one must urinate, defecate, and sometimes menstruate, in order to live. Keeping these fluids inside the body causes toxicity and, eventually, death. However, when released from the body, they are immediately rejected as disgusting. This sets up a process of disavowing elements that are fundamentally part of the self: it is “me” and “not me” at the same time. Encountering the abject, then, is a moment of crisis. If one wants to live as a psycho-socially stable person, one must negate the abject, or deny it is/was part of the self. Conversely, to take pleasure in the abject marks one as pathological, odd, or repulsive. When it comes to body fluids, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994) believes not all flows are equal. The more transparent the fluid, the more psycho-socially acceptable it is (i.e. tears are not as offensive as feces). It follows, then, that vaginal lubrication is far more tolerable than a bloody mucous plug, as blood represents injury (and ultimately death) in the Euro-western medical-cultural imaginary. While a lubricated pregnant woman signals a readiness for (hetero)sexual intercourse, a bleeding pregnant woman indicates danger. To further explain the differences between the “clean and proper” pregnant body and the abject one, I juxtapose two cultural representations: the yummy mummy and the pregnant pornographic performer. The yummy mummy is a pregnant person who contains the abject. The pornographic performer, alternatively, revels in it. While the yummy mummy upholds normative ideas about gender, sexuality, and class, the pornographic performer destabilizes power through her corporeal playfulness and discursive code-mixing.

Pregnant and horny: Hypersexuality, fetishism and pornography⁵

The yummy mummy (late 1990s and early 2000s) is linked to a (pop) feminist, or arguably post-feminist, celebration of young, affluent, largely white, able-bodied,⁶ heterosexual maternity aesthetics and lifestyle. The Guerilla Girls define the yummy mummy as

sexy even while she’s pregnant. And after the baby is born, she instantly fits into her prepregnancy clothes – miniskirts and bikinis included. She wouldn’t be caught dead in muumuus or baggy sweats. She’s the opposite of the tired, trapped, unkempt housewife who spends long hours serving her husband and kids and never has time for herself. How does the Yummy Mummy do it? She has a full-time nanny, a personal trainer, and LOTS of money, honey. How else? (Guerilla Girls, 2003: 27)

The yummy mummy values youth, beauty and consumption; she shows that one does not have to give up a sense of “style” because there is a “pregnancy chic” attire and attitude (Musial, 2003). Since fashion and aesthetics are connected to this figure, she is also linked to a fascination with pregnant and maternal celebrity bodies who are idealized yummy mummies (Musial, 2003). Kim Allen and Jayne Osgood argue that the yummy mummy maintains “female choice, autonomy, consumerism and aesthetic perfection” as “a desirable identity”, which also “frames the maternal through a distinctly neo-liberal lexicon of choice, self-actualisation, and reinvention through the consumer marketplace. It also celebrates self-sufficiency, by promoting planned and professional mothering. In short, the Yummy Mummy symbolises the ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ mother of neo-liberalism” (Allen and Osgood, 2009: 6, 7).

The yummy mummy is a consuming and consumable neo-liberal subject. On one hand, she is the ultimate consumer of goods, services, and clothing that mark her socio-economic status. And on the other hand, she is a consumable sexual object. The yummy mummy is an appropriate site of desire because she is safe. She performs (hetero)sexuality (Levy, 2006) in a bounded way that maintains gendered, racialized, and class-specific norms. As a bourgeois white heterofeminine subject, the yummy mummy upholds respectability politics. She is a self-disciplined body; her toned physique and curbed appetite are exemplars of the classical and contained body (Bordo, 1993).

As a proper neo-liberal, bourgeois, white feminine figure, the yummy mummy contrasts with the pregnant pornographic performer who contests modesty. Whereas the yummy mummy looks sexy, the pregnant pornographic performer has sex. The yummy mummy works on her body through exercise, diet, and beauty practices, the pregnant pornographic performer works through her body. The yummy mummy is contained and sanitized, the pregnant pornographic performer has an unfettered sexual appetite. The yummy mummy manages the abject, and the pregnant pornographic performer encounters and plays with it, as I will demonstrate shortly. Like the Madonna and the Whore, the yummy mummy and the pregnant pornographic performer are mutually constitutive. The yummy mummy is respectable because she has a non-respectable counterpart in the pregnant pornographic performer. She can set herself apart because she is not like those women who are paid to undress and/or have sex on film or the web. The pregnant pornographic performer, like the “welfare mother” of the USA, the “chav mum” in Britain (Tyler, 2008), and the “slummy mummy” in Australia (Goodwin and Huppatz, 2010), is the figure of racialized, classed, gendered and sexualized disgust that denigrates the working-class/poor, non-white, and overtly sexual maternal woman.

By turning the body into a joke, and reveling in the abject, pornography challenges the bourgeois body. If the bourgeois body is refined, the pornified body is grotesque; the former is sophisticated and stylized, the latter is gross and tasteless (Huntley, 1998: 74). Pornography, unlike erotica, a cultural marker of high culture, “lacks … subtlety [because it is] literally about sex and power” (Huntley, 1998: 75). In pregnancy pornography, pregnant women are hypersexualized, often fetishized, and sometimes portrayed as experiencing pleasure and desire. Unlike the texts I discuss earlier (medical and popular “advice” books and websites), pregnancy pornography literalizes pregnant sex thereby offering a unique site of study to understand how power circulates through gendered, sexualized, and classed bodies.

Squirting breast milk, as opposed to dripping breast milk, appears quite frequently in pregnant pornography. Lactation during pregnancy is possible for some women who have been pregnant multiple times or have had two pregnancies in close proximity. Other women lactate when sexually aroused during a first pregnancy. It is quite likely that some of these lactating women are post-partum; however, the websites advertise lactating pregnant women. Since lactation and gestation are discursively fused, it is pivotal to analyze them together.

On these sites, lactation is illustrated to be a playful, humorous sex act as well as an arousing one on par with male ejaculation. For instance, Lactalia is advertised as “forget skim and 2%, get 100% Lactalia” (Lactalia, n.d.); an open milk container appears on the home page alongside pictures of baby bottles. It is strangely infantilizing and fetishizingly sexual simultaneously, again pointing to the cultural ambivalence directed towards adult pregnant women’s sexuality. One image I discovered features a smiling, bustier-wearing woman, squirting breast milk onto a dart board. Distance and precision are valued here. Fiona Giles, in “Fountains of love and loveliness: In praise of the dripping wet breast”, reads lactation pornography as a way to recontextualize the lactating breast as playful; she sees lactating “distance” contests as a way to enjoy the female body (Giles, 2002: 11). Playing with body fluids contests a gendered and class-specific respectability narrative that says the abject should be contained and sanitized. In a previous piece on maternity clothing catalogues, I argue that nursing bra advertisements accomplish this by discreetly concealing the wet breast to avoid the shame of a lactation-stained shirt (Musial, 2003). In contrast, lactation pornography values women’s ability to make “the biggest wet spot of them all” (Bright, 1995: 85). Lactation pornography represents the pregnant body in “its infinite and mobile complexity” that enjoys “eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain miniscule-immense area” (Cixous, 1976: 885). Corporeal playfulness, in this instance, is also an anti-bourgeois aesthetic. The bawdy/body humor attached to lactation pornography is reminiscent of Laura Kipnis’s analysis of Hustler (1992) and Constance Penley’s discussion of porn’s “white trash sensibility” (1997) in which the vulgar challenges, defies, and deflates bourgeois pretension. Therefore, lactation in pregnancy pornography accomplishes two things: it disrupts gendered narratives of respectability that ask women to conceal and contain their lactating breasts and it disrupts class narratives of respectability that dictates the body is no laughing matter.

The site (and sight) of women playing with their lactating breasts unsettles gender and class norms, and it also empowers other women to enjoy their bodies. Cultural producers like Talia and Susie Bright reclaim sexual pleasure through lactation. In her “About Me” page, Talia tells site visitors, “Lactation has opened up a whole new world of sexual exploration for my partners and me. I hope we can open it up for you too” (Talia, 2010). Susie Bright corroborates, “Sexual arousal will make your breasts leak when you’re lactating, another important fact missing in most parent handbooks. As much as I have lectured on G-spot orgasms, I had never had anything come out of me when I was making love before, and this made my head swim with embarrassment at first then arousal” (Bright, 1995: 85). Talia and Bright confirm Giles’s theory of lactation: it can be a woman-positive, sexual exploration because lactation is achieved through individual masturbation in pregnancy pornography. Lactation pornography makes women’s pleasure visible.

Lactation is consistently tied to masculine discourse on ejaculation and some women take pleasure in the ability to perform “masculine” bodily functions. Of her ability to lactate while aroused, Bright writes: “I felt some feminine equivalent of virility” (Bright, 1995: 85). Likewise, Anne Semans connects lactating on a partner to swallowing ejaculate during oral sex. She declares, “Admire my breasts … Oh yeah, if you’re sucking on my nipples and you get milk, drink it and enjoy it like it’s the nectar of the gods. (I don’t ever want to hear that this is a turn-off especially if you’re a guy and having your wife swallow your come is part of your turn-on)” (Semans, 2000: para. 7). The connection between lactation and orality is made clear on Pregnant and Horny (n.d.) and Knocked Up Sluts (n.d.), which feature pregnant women drinking their breast milk. These narratives are necessary to counteract stories like “Milky”, found on Pregnant and Horny, in which a male writer enjoys placing his penis between his wife’s lactating breasts. Reminiscent of heterosexual, androcentric discourses analyzed earlier, lactation stimulates male orgasm, not female pleasure.

Overall, there is subversive potential in pregnancy pornography. Whether it is simply by showing pregnant women having sex or playfully enjoying lactation, the mixing of the sacred (asexual Madonna) and the profane (hypersexual Whore) destabilizes power. The cognitive dissonance associated with these websites is similarly productive in this respect. The “knocked up slut” surely contests respectability: is she “knocked up” (connoting an unintended pregnancy) because she is a “slut” or is her horny nature unchecked by pregnancy? Likewise, the “pregnant schoolgirl” motif queers sexuality by fetishizing youth (pigtails, private and perhaps Catholic uniform) through clearly adult performers. Pregnancy pornography is fascinating because it features women who are clearly adult and maternal⁷ and as such offers an alternative to the pornographic norm, which involves plastic, thin, shaved, pubescent-looking bodies. This is a mature fantasy rather than invitation to sexualize teen girls. And finally, the “horny housewife” disrupts ideas of domesticity and maternity often tied to asexuality. Diverse class codes are evident in pregnancy pornography: a “knocked up slut” is marked as working class, not unlike the chav mum and slummy mummy described earlier whereas a “pregnant schoolgirl” represents upper-class private school privilege, and a “horny housewife” has middle-class connotations. Pregnancy pornography provides an avenue for disrupting these power relations while representing pleasure and desire.

Conclusion: A note on the erotic, simultaneity, and jouissance

In this essay, I interrogate the mixed messages pregnant women receive through popular culture – they are presented with texts that serve to asexualize and hypersexualize their bodies. Initially, I was troubled by these ambivalent representations. However, there is transgressive potential in seeing these as simultaneous discourses rather than mutually exclusive ones. Since pregnancy is an embodiment always in flux, it represents simultaneity in many respects – the body is both not-mother and (assumedly) mother, feminine and maternal, sacred and profane, asexual and hypersexual and so forth. Robyn Longhurst says discursive and popular culture renderings of pregnant bodies have the potential to “enable new and different ways of doing pregnancy” (Longhurst, 2000: 470). By embracing ambivalence, simultaneity and playfulness, women refuse disciplining processes and “cause ‘pregnancy trouble’”, a play on Judith Butler’s idea of gender trouble (2000: 463). Theorizing simultaneity enables one to see the mutual constitution of pregnancy and sexuality. Susie Bright as well as Dr Michel Odent, obstetrician and author insist that pregnancy and sexuality cannot be divorced from one another; in fact, separating sexuality from the whole process only serves to increase women’s fear which is counterproductive to the birth experience (Bright, 1995: 83; Odent, 2001: para. 11, 12).⁸ Given this correlation, it seems to be in a woman’s best interest to be as pleasured as possible to manage pregnancy.

Finally, feminist poet Audre Lorde points to the erotic as the essence of being: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde, 1997: 279). The erotic is not necessarily sexual, but involves finding pleasure in the body. In many ways, Lorde is articulating what others have called “jouissance”, which “has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation … women so empowered are dangerous” (Lorde, 1997: 278, 279). For pregnant women to reclaim their sensuality, sexual power and eroticism is a dangerous political project indeed because it requires causing “pregnancy trouble” (Longhurst, 2000: 456) through resisting or negotiating medicalization, limiting heteronormative discourses, and sometimes fetishization that are associated with pregnancy and instead finding pleasure and sexual agency in areas where this was previously denied, erased or silenced.

Footnotes

Notes

Jennifer Musial is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Dickinson College. She recently completed essays on Britney Spears using a critical whiteness/feminist studies perspective, and HB 2443, an anti-abortion Arizona bill operating under the guise of “prenatal nondiscrimination”. She is working on a book-length manuscript entitled, Pregnant Pause: Reproduction, Death, and Media Culture. Pregnant Pause examines how the US news media cover cases of fatal violence against pregnant women.

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