It’s six months into my first pregnancy; I’ve weathered the nausea and the mind-numbing fatigue and have come to terms with my literally girlish figure morphing into a cross between a walking football and a duck with breasts.
But, as the months progress and with them the growing evidence of my fertility, my 30-something, hard-won female adult independence has become irrelevant.
My body is no longer my private space, my temple to blaspheme as I please. Instead it has become public property, where all and sundry are free to question and pass judgement on my eating habits, sleeping positions, alcohol consumption and, most patronising and invasive of all, touch me, without invitation or permission.
I feel like a cow; poked, prodded, examined and, in the unasked opinion of the one doing the prodding and poking, pronounced fit, cute or, as clearly evidenced, without the need to conduct a physical examination, pregnant. The added insult and infantilisation of cute, of course, makes me a marked woman, excused from desire and desiring. My body, apparently freed from the sinful bonds of sexuality, is simply a desexualised host.
It is as if my pregnancy has rendered me exempt from the usual fought-for courtesies and rights offered to other members of the human race, especially women.
After all, a casual pat on the arse or breast is likely to be met with a well-deserved ”fuck off”, if not a lawsuit, but I, with my gently swelling midsection, have been afforded the status of a child and the pats on my belly are beginning to feel like patronising pats on the head: ”Well done for getting yourself knocked up m’dear; now run along and don’t eat prawns, sleep on your back or have a glass of wine. And is that pill you’re taking safe?”
No, actually I’ve cut the Panados I take for the hormone-induced headaches with crack cocaine and some heroin for good measure, because I’m just pregnant and my poor little hormonal brain can’t possibly decide or discern what’s good for me and my baby. But thank you so much for your condescending concern. I don’t know how I’d cope without it.
The rub, though, is that this often comes from other women who know exactly what it’s like to be objectified and demeaned, but, despite it all, are still caught up in the human race’s fetishisation of pregnant women.
They seem to buy happily into the unspoken agreement that for the duration of their pregnancies they belong to everyone. For 40 weeks, we know what it’s like to be property; to belong to others and to be ”advised” by them, regardless of their relationship to us.
Much as women used to (and in so many cases still do) belong to their fathers and then their husbands, and when the simple biological accident of being male conferred the right and duty to keep all women in line. We couldn’t be trusted to do it ourselves, what with our hysterical uteri and all.
Is it because people equate being ”with child” with being ”a child”, or is it okay because pregnant women all suffer (for a short period) from that alarming loss of memory known as ”pregnancy brain”, so have signed away their right to be treated as adults?
The maternity for dummies handbook, What To Expect When You’re Expecting, asks gleefully what I should expect, after all pregnant tummies and what’s in them are, again, cute.
Oh I don’t know; a little bit of common courtesy, the acknowledgment that I’ve pretty much looked after my own health and nutrition since the age of 18 and will continue to do so pending senile dementia, and the understanding that my body, pregnant or not, is still my body, and touching it without my permission is simply not acceptable?
Yes it’s out there, but then so are my breasts and my arse in a bikini, or skinny jeans and a tight top but I don’t belong to anyone, and if you respect my right to dress as I please, you wouldn’t dare touch me.
So hands off my bump please.