Hailey Bieber has spoken out about a toxic, tiresome and dangerous norm that permeates how we speak about and perceive women’s bodies. Especially famous women’s bodies.
We’re talking about a conversation in which lots of gossip narratives – and patriarchal attitudes – are built. The pregnancy speculation paradigm, which is built from society’s obsession with discussing and involving itself with the concerns of other women’s bodies and the choices they make about them.
From abortion to weight loss and gain, we are told from outsiders, people and wider social structures what we should do with our bodies – and if you’re living your life in the spotlight like Hailey is, that includes constant painfully public questions and speculation about whether she’s pregnant.
She opened up about the ramifications of this in a recent interview, about how “disheartening” it is to be the constant subject of pregnancy speculations – recently, when it happened, she was just bloated.
“Everybody was like, ‘Oh, my God, she’s pregnant,’ and that’s happened to me multiple times before,” she told GQ.
“There is something that’s disheartening about, Damn, I can’t be bloated one time and not be pregnant? It would be a lie if I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I don’t give a s**t.’”
This perpetual fixation on a woman’s physical body – how it looks, whether she has a bump or bloat etc – as well as what she might be carrying within it robs anyone, not just Hailey, of both autonomy and privacy. She added in her interview that she would never want to share such an intimate part of her life with “the internet” (“When there comes a day that that is true, you— you, as in the internet, will be the last to know”). But let’s face it – the toxic nature of pregnancy rumours running rife may mean she sadly won’t get a choice. This is a problem, and undoubtedly a symptom of the patriarchy, an insidious way of preventing women from making their own choices about their own body in their own time.
It’s heartbreaking, really, that the way Hailey even perceived her experience of motherhood, when and if she chooses to have children, is now out of reach also. She called the spotlight that comes with her career and her husband Justin’s “probably totally unavoidable”. It feels like another way that women can’t win – if she’s not currently pregnant, she has her (completely natural and healthy) bloated stomach overanalysed, and if she does become pregnant one day, she won’t be able to experience it the way she’d like to due to the invasive and possessive side effects of fame.
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