Beyonce, her babies, and how to cope with it all...
Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement broke records, because having a baby is now big news, writes Sarah Caden
BAILEY Baldwin is an American model, 20 years of age, the daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and niece of actor Alec Baldwin. She is, obviously, of the generation that cannot let an occurrence pass without comment whether it directly impacts her or not. But still.
Last Wednesday, Baldwin tweeted: “I feel like I’m more excited for Beyonce to be pregnant than I will be for my own child.”
Now, you could put this down to youth and being part of a generation that is “excited for” pretty much everything; but Baldwin was not alone.
Apparently, sensible actress Brie Larsson professed to be crying at the news. Black Mirror actress Bryce Dallas Howard tweeted: “I think we all really needed this. #twins.” I’ll be honest, I wondered if she was being sarcastic. Sadly, not. No one was being sarcastic. The celebrity world was seriously “excited for” Beyonce’s twins.
Correction, the world in general went a bit mad over the Beyonce babies news last week. But then, that was the desired effect of a pregnancy announcement that was planned and styled and produced to within an inch of its life. It would have been positively rude for the reaction to have been anything other than overblown.
Last Wednesday, Beyonce announced on Instagram that she and her husband Jay-Z were expecting twins. “We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two, and we thank you for your well wishes — The Carters,” she wrote, using her husband’s surname. The picture to accompany the statement was of a kneeling Beyonce in side profile against a backdrop of a huge floral display, dressed only in underwear and with a huge green veil draped over her head and body (right).
If it had been anyone but Beyonce, who can do no wrong, it was worthy of inclusion in one of those “most awkward family photos ever” listicles. It was Beyonce, however, and so the posting broke the record for the most liked Instagram posting ever.
Honestly, woman announc- es she’s having a baby — the world goes wild. The world has gone truly mad.
When it comes to the business of babies we have gone slightly mad, though. No one harks back to a time when we were hush-hush about anything that went on “down there”, from conception, to pregnancy, to birth. And not at all forgetting the damaging cloak of silence thrown over miscarriage, abortion and deaths of newborns.
It’s not about a journey from a culture of silence to culture of proclaiming with pride the arrival of a new life. It’s more about what has turned into a crowing competitiveness and a fetishising of fertility and reproduction.
For example, there is this issue around celebrities being asked in interviews if they are planning to have children. Understandably, a lot of people — and it’s mostly women who are asked — don’t like it, from a “why is my womb your business?” point of view.
A celeb gets married, and the questions start, but for the fact that so many have now publicly objected that the questions have stopped. Though the roundabout way of getting into it is to ask if a celeb objects to being asked.
Never mind “why is my womb your business?” though. Why on earth is the future product of someone else’s womb really of any interest? Isn’t there an international consensus that your own kids are fascinating but that you’re mostly faking interest in the children of others?
That seems to be ignored, however, in a culture so “excited for” the babies, the “baby bumps”, the snapping-back-after-babies of others.
The dull truth is that most people have babies. Women bear them, men make and are then made fathers. It happens to most people. It’s miraculous and near-magical, but it’s not special. As in, it’s special when it’s happening to you; but other people, not so much.
Still, we have come to the point where a interview with GAA star Philly McMahon, a broad-ranging interview about life and his late brother and love and grief, has a headline stating that he’d like to be a dad. That’s great and all and one hopes it works out. But, really, is that startling? It is far more rare to not want to become a parent than to want to. And yet we’re all rolling along with turning reproduction into an award-winning activity.
Beyonce scored two ba- bies, so she broke the blasted internet. How the hell is Kim Kardashian going to top that? Weirdly, you could feel fairly confident that she’s worrying about the same thing herself.
Last week, after Beyonce’s initial announcement that she’s pregnant with twins, she put further photographs and even a video on her website. The video saw Beyonce plunge into a pool, where an underwater camera filmed her clutching her belly and then swimming gracefully through the water.
There was also a standing shot of her, mimicking Botticelli’s Venus de Milo, another of her reclining on a sofa with her young daughter, Blue Ivy, standing above her. Again, this seemed to be a nod to a reclining Venus Renaissance painting. No lack of notions of grandeur, then.
It’s a perfect example of how, if you put yourself on a pedestal, people will willingly believe you deserve to be revered. Beyonce made a massive deal of being pregnant, and the world reacted in kind. It’s the biggest deal ever. Even if nearly everyone is doing it.
Worse though, it’s more of this notional female empowerment conducted through celebrities stripping off. They get naked more and more often, with net dresses the costume du jour as they leave pretty much nothing to the imagination.
And, somehow, they convince us it’s all for the sake of womankind and celebrating our bodies, when really it’s just showing off. And another way of making ordinary women feel inadequate because they’re not like that.
So Beyonce bares all to say she is having some babies; whom we already embrace as the babies to end all babies.
‘It’s a perfect example of how, if you put yourself on a pedestal, people will willingly believe you deserve to be revered...’