Time for a pregnant pause, Serena
SERENA Williams is pregnant. In case anyone hadn’t heard the news, or missed the breathless tale of how Williams won the Australian Open during the early weeks of her pregnancy, the fact is made plain on the August cover of Vanity Fair, which features her in the buff.
One hand cups her breasts and the other is positioned in the small of her back. The body posture suggests confidence, but it also captures a hint of nonchalant impatience. Come on, take the picture! Williams is wearing a waist chain, a flesh-coloured thong and a single twinkling stud in her ear. That’s it.
The photograph by Annie Leibovitz is loving lit, elegantly framed and deeply admiring of its subject. Congratulations, Serena! And to your fiancé, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, too.
But really, it would have been fine to skip this strange celebrity ritual, this complicated stew of personal indulgence, brand tending and socio-political me-too-ism.
A woman who does not live her life on the public stage might hire a photographer to memorialise these special nine months and then tuck those images into a family photo album, frame them for display at her home. However, to place those photos on the cover of a major magazine or insert them into an Instagram feed that reaches 100 million fans suggests not only that one’s pregnancy is of interest to the public but that it is also meaningful in some uniquely grand and sweeping way. Most likely, however, it is not. Celebrities have transfor med pregnancy into another Instagrammable moment. It’s become another business opportunity.
No one, of course, has been pregnant better than Beyoncé. From her Madonna-with-flowers Instagram announcement to the Madonnawith-chair perfor mance at the Grammy Awards, Beyoncé elevated pregnancy into an art house film starring… Beyoncé.
Conventional wisdom traces the beginning of the nude pregnant celebrity photo genre to 1991, when Demi Moore appeared on the cover of the Tina Brown-helmed Vanity Fair. At the time of its publication, that photo was startling. Moore was an A-list celebrity, having just starred in Ghost. She was photographed nude at a time when pregnancy did not add to a celebrity’s glamorous frisson.
Pregnancy was a condition that temporarily put glamour on hold. The 1990s were also a time when the template for maternity style still meant garments that were meant to hide, rather than emphasise, a growing baby bump.
The photo was sensual. And arguably, it was this nude photograph that helped transform the way in which the fashion industry aimed to dress pregnant women.
This is not the first time that Williams has displayed her extraordinary physique. She did so memorably in 2009 for one of ESPN’s body issues. This Vanity Fair cover is about voyeurism. It reminds us that life’s milestones are not real until they are publicly validated. It’s yet another way in which celebrities pony up a piece of themselves to the public, making it that much more difficult to create boundaries in the future. Does anyone still actually want boundaries? Perhaps not.
There are often important messages celebrities can highlight when they invite the public into their personal lives. They can help destigmatise illnesses or normalise what at first seems disconcertingly unfamiliar.
But what is the broader value of the bared baby bump?
Pregnancy is a beautiful and life-changing experience and every woman’s pregnancy is unique and captivating to her. However, even if a woman is a celebrity, that doesn’t make her pregnancy newsworthy.