I have my finger on the pulse so you don't have to:
Katherine Heigl has a new baby girl she adopted from Korea
Nicole Richie has been spotted kicking around Bev Hills minus her new little bird, looking remarkably svelte just one week post-birth
Jenna Elfman is pregnant with her second in real life and on her show.
Halle Berry is allegedly covering up her second bump...
Showing posts with label Halle Berry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halle Berry. Show all posts
18 September 2009
20 July 2008
Halle Berry: post-baby body
Halle Berry sporting a very flat stomach 5 months since giving birth. According to the Daily Mail, this is 'several months longer than other new Hollywood mothers'. Give me a bloody break.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1036490/New-mum-Halle-Berry-flashes-flat-tummy-losing-baby-weight-healthy-way.html
29 April 2008
Holy Halle!
Halle Berry: 5 weeks post-baby....that's all I have to say about that.Source: http://www.usmagazine.com/halle-berry-debuts-post-baby-bod
15 January 2008
A little bump in the road.
I never thought I would say this.
I feel saturated. Fully and utterly saturated. As of this week, it feels like pregnancy and birth are the only things left for the media to talk about. Whereas I used to get a little rush reading about the latest pregnant celeb, seeing the snaps of her belly in a tight maternity top or delighting in stories about weight gain, for some reason this week, pregnancy in the news is no longer exciting. From someone who lives and breathes pregnancy (without actually being pregnant), this is a very bizarre turn of events.
I've been trying to work out why celeb pregnancy hasn't been doing it for me lately. Is it just the latest crop of preggos that I find to be utterly boring? Is it possible that I have read too many tabloids for one lifetime? Then it occurred to me. Pregnancy is now a career booster for celebrities and the birth of a child is treated like an 'event' rather than a private family affair. More than 400 articles are devoted to the 'birth' of Christina Aguilera's son whom she had by elective caesarean (which is not mentioned anywhere). For someone who claimed she did not want to have the media involved in her pregnancy by sheepishly failing to 'announce' that she was knocked up, that she and her husband sent decided to send out a press release just undermines the 'privacy' she was supposedly trying to achieve. Why would she do that? Because pregnancy and motherhood are clearly boons to the careers of celebrity women and it would be a mistake not to cash in on the tabloid baby showers.
Now that all of these celebs are pregnant (I hesitate to even give a complete list it has grown so spectacularly in the last few months), pregnancy is an PR exercise. No one is willing to say how they really feel and every pregnant celebrity, it seems, feels the need to pay lip service to 'good' motherhood. I swear if I read if one more celeb using the words 'wonderful' or 'amazing' to describe her pregnancy, I think I will hurl. When Halle Berry recently said she wished she could be pregnant 'forever', it was like nails grinding on a chalkboard. Nicole Kidman is 'thrilled' to be pregnant along with the rest of the world as the 600th rumour about her non-existent baby bump has finally come true and no doubt, motherhood at 40 will eclipse all of her independent achievements to date.
I'm just over it. What happened to the frank pregnant confessions of both elation and utter disgruntlement? I'm so sick of celebrity women going on about how great and easy pregnancy is and lapping up the adulation for daring to be naked and pregnant on a magazine cover when only last week it was decided that British mother Louise Manning is set to win up to £200,000
because she was harassed so profoundly at work. Forced to resign when she revealed she was pregnant, Manning's boss sent a memo stating:
"Louise’s pregnancy has quite naturally had an adverse effect on her ability, motivation and dedication."
Mothering is not easy and for many companies, pregnancy is the WORST career move a woman could ever make.
This is the world we live in. It's not all designer prams and expensive birthing suites. Average women, it seems, have to quite literally fight for their 'right' to have a career during pregnancy. Surely the birth of a child is a major life achievement for any woman but quite often it comes at the expense of her ability to achieve a work/life balance. The celebrities who rave about how easy pregnancy is completely undermine the everyday realities that most women face trying to juggle a family with a career or even in staying at home without the luxury of a nanny or a chef.
Source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3176474.ece
I feel saturated. Fully and utterly saturated. As of this week, it feels like pregnancy and birth are the only things left for the media to talk about. Whereas I used to get a little rush reading about the latest pregnant celeb, seeing the snaps of her belly in a tight maternity top or delighting in stories about weight gain, for some reason this week, pregnancy in the news is no longer exciting. From someone who lives and breathes pregnancy (without actually being pregnant), this is a very bizarre turn of events.
I've been trying to work out why celeb pregnancy hasn't been doing it for me lately. Is it just the latest crop of preggos that I find to be utterly boring? Is it possible that I have read too many tabloids for one lifetime? Then it occurred to me. Pregnancy is now a career booster for celebrities and the birth of a child is treated like an 'event' rather than a private family affair. More than 400 articles are devoted to the 'birth' of Christina Aguilera's son whom she had by elective caesarean (which is not mentioned anywhere). For someone who claimed she did not want to have the media involved in her pregnancy by sheepishly failing to 'announce' that she was knocked up, that she and her husband sent decided to send out a press release just undermines the 'privacy' she was supposedly trying to achieve. Why would she do that? Because pregnancy and motherhood are clearly boons to the careers of celebrity women and it would be a mistake not to cash in on the tabloid baby showers.
Now that all of these celebs are pregnant (I hesitate to even give a complete list it has grown so spectacularly in the last few months), pregnancy is an PR exercise. No one is willing to say how they really feel and every pregnant celebrity, it seems, feels the need to pay lip service to 'good' motherhood. I swear if I read if one more celeb using the words 'wonderful' or 'amazing' to describe her pregnancy, I think I will hurl. When Halle Berry recently said she wished she could be pregnant 'forever', it was like nails grinding on a chalkboard. Nicole Kidman is 'thrilled' to be pregnant along with the rest of the world as the 600th rumour about her non-existent baby bump has finally come true and no doubt, motherhood at 40 will eclipse all of her independent achievements to date.
I'm just over it. What happened to the frank pregnant confessions of both elation and utter disgruntlement? I'm so sick of celebrity women going on about how great and easy pregnancy is and lapping up the adulation for daring to be naked and pregnant on a magazine cover when only last week it was decided that British mother Louise Manning is set to win up to £200,000
because she was harassed so profoundly at work. Forced to resign when she revealed she was pregnant, Manning's boss sent a memo stating:
"Louise’s pregnancy has quite naturally had an adverse effect on her ability, motivation and dedication."
Mothering is not easy and for many companies, pregnancy is the WORST career move a woman could ever make.
This is the world we live in. It's not all designer prams and expensive birthing suites. Average women, it seems, have to quite literally fight for their 'right' to have a career during pregnancy. Surely the birth of a child is a major life achievement for any woman but quite often it comes at the expense of her ability to achieve a work/life balance. The celebrities who rave about how easy pregnancy is completely undermine the everyday realities that most women face trying to juggle a family with a career or even in staying at home without the luxury of a nanny or a chef.
Source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3176474.ece
09 January 2008
Halle Berry: thrilled to be eating
I've said more than once that pregnancy is often the only culturally sanctioned time of life when women can be 'fat' and are expected to have big bellies (notwithstanding the fact that there are size zero maternity jeans). I wrote about Milla Jovovich and how her somewhat extreme weight gain (reportedly 70lbs) was most probably symptomatic of her inability to have a healthy relationship with food given her career as a model, and in fact, she confirmed this late in her pregnancy http://babybumpproject.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-more-more-milla-j-are-cravings.html
I was sad to read yesterday Halle Berry said this about her 7 months pregnant body:
"This is the first red carpet that I've really walked down where I didn't have to think about holding in my stomach – because I can't."It's the first time I've been to an awards show where they served a meal and I actually ate it – the whole thing," she said. "I was eating off everybody else's plate and that felt very liberating and good."
I think it's great that Halle feels 'liberated' as she says but I'm not surprised that she feels this way. Women are taught to suck in and push up and shove all the extra floppy bits away so no one can see them. When you're pregnant, clearly sucking in just isn't going to happen. But to think that these smart, funny, talented women have never been able to eat a proper meal in public because their dresses are too tight or because an armada of cameras are staring them down, at the ready to splash just how much they ate across the headlines of the tabloids, is just sad. I think most women who read this blog are guilty of indulging in the same self-defeating behaviours at some point in their life but why do we allow that? We should feel liberated to eat whenever we want, not just when we are growing another human life. Halle might feel free to indulge herself now but no doubt when that baby is born, like every other celebrity, she will be back in her jeans faster than she grew out of them.
Source: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20169669,00.html
I was sad to read yesterday Halle Berry said this about her 7 months pregnant body:
"This is the first red carpet that I've really walked down where I didn't have to think about holding in my stomach – because I can't."It's the first time I've been to an awards show where they served a meal and I actually ate it – the whole thing," she said. "I was eating off everybody else's plate and that felt very liberating and good."
I think it's great that Halle feels 'liberated' as she says but I'm not surprised that she feels this way. Women are taught to suck in and push up and shove all the extra floppy bits away so no one can see them. When you're pregnant, clearly sucking in just isn't going to happen. But to think that these smart, funny, talented women have never been able to eat a proper meal in public because their dresses are too tight or because an armada of cameras are staring them down, at the ready to splash just how much they ate across the headlines of the tabloids, is just sad. I think most women who read this blog are guilty of indulging in the same self-defeating behaviours at some point in their life but why do we allow that? We should feel liberated to eat whenever we want, not just when we are growing another human life. Halle might feel free to indulge herself now but no doubt when that baby is born, like every other celebrity, she will be back in her jeans faster than she grew out of them.
Source: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20169669,00.html
09 October 2007
Halle Berry: blah blah blah
Excuse my cynicism but I find Halle Berry's constant glowing exhortations about how magnificent it is to be pregnant a bit unsettling (almost as unsettling as the relentless surveillance of J.Lo's womb). Surely, she is excited to be having a baby. That's great. However, I find this recent comment from People absolutely ridiculous:
"There's no bad," the Oscar winner, 41, said Sunday at a press gathering for her new movie, Things We Lost in the Fire, which opens Oct. 19. "There is nothing bad about it. The morning sickness and the vomiting and the hot sweats. Nothing's been bad about it. I've loved every second of it," she said.
Find me a woman that loves to puke without warning and I'll start to believe that there's nothing 'bad' (or at least marginally inconvenient) about being pregnant. It is one thing to be completely 'over the moon' (cringe!) with the idea of becoming a mother. It is another thng entirely to suggest that the physical signs of pregnancy are not at all inconvenient as if Berry is so worried about being perceived as a selfless, 'good' mother she could never even admit that some physical aspects of pregnancy can be wonderful and even (shock! horror!) terrible. I am yet to find a woman (in my research or otherwise) who has 'loved' every physical experience associated with pregnancy (particularly the more unpleasant ones). Seriously, it's like saying that a Brazillian wax doesn't hurt or slamming your hand in a car door is fun and you would do it again.
Even though I'm sure Berry never intended someone like me to read so deeply into her verbal diarrhea, I think this sort of statement reinforces the idea that women must be pregnant (physically, psychologically and emotionally) selflessly; that they must embody 'goodness' at all costs and never 'complain' like obedient little women. It does not do justice to the enormous physical burden (that's right, i said 'burden'..I think housing another human for 9 months and then pushing it out is physically taxing...and I doubt many women would argue) women endure. Pregnancy is like having a full-time job in addition to the full-time paid work most women do daily except being pregnant (or being a mother) is not recognised or valued as 'work'.
Berry actually contradicts her image of 'goodness' or 'selflessness' later in this particular article by saying:
"I crave things daily. It changes every day, and I try to listen to my body and not overdo it so I don't become too big."
Clearly, 'bigness' or 'fatness' are negative aspects of pregnancy for Berry. Women are not supposed to take up too much space. Whereas vomitting and nausea associated with pregnancy are constructed as being out of a woman's control in early pregnancy, eating and body size are perceived as being within her control. Becoming 'too big' for Berry would suggest that she is not a mother that is in control of her body or her life. Berry does not identify her fear of fat as something particularly negative because women are supposed to be consumed with thinness and body size. Of course, Berry doesn't want to get too 'fat'. That's just part of being a 'woman'.
Source: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20151100,00.html
"There's no bad," the Oscar winner, 41, said Sunday at a press gathering for her new movie, Things We Lost in the Fire, which opens Oct. 19. "There is nothing bad about it. The morning sickness and the vomiting and the hot sweats. Nothing's been bad about it. I've loved every second of it," she said.
Find me a woman that loves to puke without warning and I'll start to believe that there's nothing 'bad' (or at least marginally inconvenient) about being pregnant. It is one thing to be completely 'over the moon' (cringe!) with the idea of becoming a mother. It is another thng entirely to suggest that the physical signs of pregnancy are not at all inconvenient as if Berry is so worried about being perceived as a selfless, 'good' mother she could never even admit that some physical aspects of pregnancy can be wonderful and even (shock! horror!) terrible. I am yet to find a woman (in my research or otherwise) who has 'loved' every physical experience associated with pregnancy (particularly the more unpleasant ones). Seriously, it's like saying that a Brazillian wax doesn't hurt or slamming your hand in a car door is fun and you would do it again.
Even though I'm sure Berry never intended someone like me to read so deeply into her verbal diarrhea, I think this sort of statement reinforces the idea that women must be pregnant (physically, psychologically and emotionally) selflessly; that they must embody 'goodness' at all costs and never 'complain' like obedient little women. It does not do justice to the enormous physical burden (that's right, i said 'burden'..I think housing another human for 9 months and then pushing it out is physically taxing...and I doubt many women would argue) women endure. Pregnancy is like having a full-time job in addition to the full-time paid work most women do daily except being pregnant (or being a mother) is not recognised or valued as 'work'.
Berry actually contradicts her image of 'goodness' or 'selflessness' later in this particular article by saying:
"I crave things daily. It changes every day, and I try to listen to my body and not overdo it so I don't become too big."
Clearly, 'bigness' or 'fatness' are negative aspects of pregnancy for Berry. Women are not supposed to take up too much space. Whereas vomitting and nausea associated with pregnancy are constructed as being out of a woman's control in early pregnancy, eating and body size are perceived as being within her control. Becoming 'too big' for Berry would suggest that she is not a mother that is in control of her body or her life. Berry does not identify her fear of fat as something particularly negative because women are supposed to be consumed with thinness and body size. Of course, Berry doesn't want to get too 'fat'. That's just part of being a 'woman'.
Source: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20151100,00.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
