Pregnancy a ‘career move’ in Hollywood, TV personality says
Others argue it heralds shifting roles of women
The best job in the world, at least to some, is also rife with so many costs — including pay inequality, fewer promotions and hiring discrimination — that you almost want to offer its applicants a blindfold and a cigarette. But the surgeon general recommends that pregnant women don’t smoke.
The good news is that the “motherhood penalty” is being turned on its head by a growing number of flashbulb-tanned women. From Brooke Burke to Jessica Simpson, Jenny McCarthy to Jessica Alba, middling celebrities are finding new relevance — and incomes to match — by way of baby.
Elaine Lui, Canada’s top gossip-hound, goes so far as to say pregnancy “has become a career move” in Hollywood.
“It used to be that if you wanted to get ahead in the industry, you’d do an independent film or get ugly or gain weight; now, getting pregnant can elevate someone from a C to a B,” said Lui, founder of Lainey Gossip and a personality on CTV’s eTalk.
“Is that to say people are getting pregnant on purpose? Some. But more accurately, I would say they’re leveraging their pregnancy to further their careers.”
Evidence of this baby bump is writ large across popular culture.
Burke, a reality TV host, hit pay dirt as a professional mom whose empire includes postpartum apparel, a maternity website and a mother- hood advice book. Simpson, whose first, and last, Top 10 song charted nearly 15 years ago, landed a lucrative Weight Watchers deal on the steam of her first pregnancy, as well as the chance to design her own maternity line.
McCarthy, a D-list actor and former Playboy model, has become one of the first names in motherhood memoir. And Alba, whom Lui describes as “a mediocre, if not sh--ty, actress who has made a career out of getting knocked up,” is a hugely successful — and widely mimicked — “mompreneur” with her own baby goods company.
Michelle Meagher, an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta, thinks people should be cautious about rushing to judgment.
“I feel like this is an accusation we’re lodging at women. Like, ‘Oh look, now she’s using this as a commodity,’ ” she said. “I’m worried that it becomes a way of chastising them — calling them bad mothers before they’re even mothers.”
What interests Meagher most is the way pregnancy has come out of the closet since Demi Moore’s watershed Vanity Fair cover in 1991, and what it means that celebrity motherhood is its own industrial complex.
“I think this fascination with the young, attractive, successful, liberated woman becoming pregnant — and loving her pregnancy, and embracing motherhood — has a lot to do with the ways it soothes cultural anxieties around the shifting roles of women,” Meagher said.
Put differently, she said, society feels better about Beyoncé being a business magnate if it’s presumed that, deep down, she’s most gratified by being a wife and mother.
Patricia Leavy, a sociologist and feminist author, says the trend is double-edged.
“On the one hand, pregnancy and motherhood don’t necessarily prevent a Hollywood career — or any type of career — anymore,” she said. “On the other hand, the commodification of motherhood keeps us thinking about women primarily as mothers.”
Leavy, a parent herself, also argues pregnancy is being used as a kind of fig leaf by the media, who hide their public shaming of women’s bodies behind the guise of a “bump watch” or giddy coverage of postpartum weight-loss.