Why Do We Keep Referring To Celebrities Having 'Secret Pregnancies' As Though They're Obligated to Share That With Us?
Scarlett Johansson was right when she recently spoke up about her experience being pregnant for a second time: We do put a lot of weird expectations on women during pregnancy - especially celebrities - and it's gotta stop.
As soon as the news breaks out, all of a sudden there is so much focus on the woman's body: How it's changing, how it's growing, whether she's showing yet, what she's eating, how much or how little she's exercising, et cetera et cetera. All of a sudden this almost-voyeurism, that would border on creepy under normal circumstances, just sort of becomes acceptable.
More than that, but as soon as she becomes pregnant, there's this tone that implies that the public is entitled to information about the pregnancy too - they ask invasive questions about her body that they normally wouldn't ask, sometimes there's awkward touching, and there's also a lot of expectation on the woman to take everything positively - and as Johansson pointed out, being pregnant can be frustrating, scary, painful, and not-at-all-fun, and pregnant women often aren't given the space to express those feelings freely.
There's no better proof of this weird entitlement than the phenomenon of the "secret baby." All of a sudden, during quarantine, we realized that when celebrities aren't out and about and in the news all the time, we really don't know that much about their lives - and some of them, like Mindy Kaling, for instance, simply got pregnant and had their babies in that span of time when nobody was really paying attention.
Why do we call those children "secret" babies? It's not like all these celebrities were working to actively hide their pregnancies; it's just that nobody was paying attention. To call it a secret implies that you should have had access to the information - but celebrities don't owe any of us that.
Case in point: The other day, Joe Jonas was trending on Twitter because of Sophie Turner's supposedly "secret pregnancy," but as these pictures show, it's not really like she's trying to keep it a secret...she just hasn't announced it to the world.
It's getting to the point where we even seem to be putting these expectations on celebrities wives; we don't even know Michael Cera's wife's last name, but everybody was freaking out on Twitter today after it was revealed that the actor has a six month old baby that he didn't happen to mention.
Sometimes a couple might want to keep a pregnancy to themselves for some reason. Maybe the woman doesn't want all the attention on her body. Maybe it's high-risk and they don't want the fallout when things go wrong. Maybe the person who's pregnant is just not enjoying the experience and doesn't want to talk about it. Kylie Jenner went to great lengths to hide her first pregnancy with her daughter Stormi, now 3, simply because she had literally grown up on a reality show and wanted to finally have a life experience for herself.
"I shared so much of my life. I was also really young when I got pregnant, and it was just a lot for me personally. I didn't know how I would bring that to the public too and have everyone's opinion. I think it was just something that I needed to go through by myself."
That also goes for celebrities who have chosen to go the surrogacy route recently, like Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Kim Kardashian - people call their new babies "secrets," but were they secrets before they were born, or do we just have weird expectations about access to that kind of knowledge? Expecting a baby can be a very personal time for a couple, and expectations like those can sometimes feel invasive.
That said, there are also celebrities like Rihanna who are going the opposite way, and embracing and showing off their pregnancies at any opportunity they get
Rihanna is taking an entirely different approach to normalizing pregnancy, clearly taking the stance with her clothing that pregnant bodies don't need to be covered up, necessarily, which, despite seeming counterintuitive, is a point that is equally valid and can coexist with the fact that nobody has the right to be invasive about a pregnancy.
A lot of people have opinions about this too, ranging from the dismissive "I don't want to see that" to "All women should be this proud of their pregnant bodies," but none of those people are correct: Having any opinion at all about what a pregnant woman should or should not do with regards to sharing her pregnancy or not is the problem.
She's growing a human. That human will then be HER child. How much or little she shares about that experience should be entirely up to her.
