The Tyranny of the ‘Sexy’ Mom 

Have Americans become too obsessed with how women's bodies do — or don't — spring back into shape after having a baby? By SUSANNA SCHROBSDORFF | July 30, 2012. Time Magazine inShare17 Jennifer Garner made news recently for wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Yup, in America it’s a big deal when a 40-year-old actress and mother of three does not appear in a bikini with ridiculously toned abs four months after giving birth. “Jennifer Garner Unveils Sexy Post-Baby Body in a Retro Swimsuit!” gushed US magazine. How incredibly evolved of them.TodayShow.com chimed in with “Thank you, Jennifer Garner! There are so many ways you make looking like a normal mom seem completely acceptable and even cool.” Agreed. But before we start celebrating this as some kind of breakthrough, remember that US magazine didn’t call Garner cool or normal; it called her “sexy.” And therein lies the problem. Twenty years ago, it seemed like a huge step forward for women to be considered sexually attractive and a good mother at the same time. Prior to that, studies showed that being desirable and being maternal were considered mutually exclusive. But then in 1991, Demi Moore went and broke about thousand taboos by posing nude and pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair, saying she hoped it would give pregnant women “permission” to be sexy.

It was the dawn of the age of the sexy mom, and there was no going back. “Reversal of the traditional separation between maternity and sex has exploded onto the scene in recent years as the media is full of hot mammas … yummy mummies, knocked-up knock outs,” writes Kelly Oliver in the journal Hypatia. She points out that what started as a kind of feminist liberation for women is now slipping into old-fashioned objectification. (Take, for example, a certain popular yet vulgar acronym for desirable mothers that we cannot print here.) Suddenly that permission to be sexy and motherly turned into a mandate. And we’re complicit. We cannot stop staring at the zillions of body-after-baby photos online. We can (and do) buy baby bibs that say “My Mom Is Hotter than Your Mom.” School-drop-off sweatpants have to be Juicy Couture–sexy. How exhausting it all is — especially given the equal and almost opposite pressure to be hyper-attentive supermoms too.

While indulging in the mental junk food of celebrity magazines isn’t the end of the world, it does feed into an addictive contrast-and-compare game we play with our bodies, which numerous studies have shown erode our self-image and predispose us to have depression. It’s not surprising that in a nation where three-quarters of us are overweight or obese, we can feel like losers when we’re not sexier than ever after having a baby like Jessica Alba. This attitude has a trickle-down effect. A new report published this month in the journal Sex Roles revealed that many 6-to-9-year-old girls already think of themselves as sexual objects. Psychologists showed the girls two paper dolls, one dressed in tight, cleavage-revealing “sexy” clothes and the other wearing a trendy but covered-up outfit. Most girls identified the sexy doll as the one most likely to be popular and the one they wanted to look like. Interestingly, media consumption did not seem to play a role in the doll they picked. But a mother’s self-image did. Those girls with moms who reported self-objectifying tendencies, like worrying about their clothes and appearance many times a day, were more likely to pick the sexy doll. (MORE: The War on Women Begins with Girls) Of course, we don’t want to get on the blame-Mom bandwagon. And we really don’t want a return to mom jeans. But maybe we can give ourselves and others some time off in the relentless pursuit of post-pregnancy hotness. If not for ourselves, then for our daughters. Those after-baby shots of actresses in bikinis have an air of awkwardness and self-consciousness that is pure high school. Who wants that? Meanwhile, look at the Garner photo without the sexy label and what you see is a woman not trying to look hot. In fact, she doesn’t seem to be trying to look like anything.

Schrobsdorff is the assistant managing editor of TIME.com. The views expressed are solely her own.

The War on Women Begins With Girls 

It is time for fathers to speak out and combat sexism. Here's how

By LAWRENCE J. COHEN AND ANTHONY T. DEBENEDET, M.D. |
March 19, 2012, Time Magazine |

Daughters and fathers have been in the news recently. In his response to Rush Limbaugh calling Sandra Fluke a “slut,” President Obama said that he wanted his own daughters to grow up “to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way…And I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.” A week later, John Ramsey expressed regret that he had entered his daughter, JonBenet, in beauty pageants and related events, including a parade just days before she was murdered. The need for fathers to help empower daughters is clear, since we still live in a world where some powerful men throw sexual slurs at adult women and girls are being sexualized and objectified at a younger and younger age. As dads of a combined 4 daughters (ranging in age from 1 to 21,) these recent events have made us pause and reflect on how to best encourage our daughters to combat these tendencies in our society.

But how do we do this as fathers? One of the most important ways is to break down the old stereotypes that men are rational and logical while women are emotional. We can free our daughters from the burden of that myth by expressing our own feelings and by respecting the intelligence, decisions, and leadership abilities of women. When they see us opening up and talking, they learn to do the same and to not remain silent when something doesn’t feel right. A father’s influence can help a girl find her own strong voice. We also need to listen to our daughters more instead of trying to always impart a lesson. Listening paves the way for girls to discover what they want to say and the inner strength to say it.

The other big thing dads can do is treat women the way we would want a partner to treat our daughters. We wish that it went without saying that daughters need their fathers to reject treating women as objects through sexist jokes, stares and comments on the street, and pornography. The sexualization of girls is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of sexism in our society, and it is time for fathers to speak out about it. Haven’t we evolved beyond the beauty pageant and similar spectacles such as prom queens, debutante balls, and a swath of reality TV that undermine girls’ power? The emphasis on appearance not only robs girls of the sense of being valued for who they are, but also leads to body image distortions and self-criticism. Less obvious is the way that external praise and judgment interferes with a girl’s development of inner confidence.

Finally, as fathers, we can use our relationship with our daughters to instill in them a strong feeling of being loved and cherished for who they are. Who they really are, beyond prettiness, niceness, and cuteness. When someone says, “Your daughter is so pretty,” we can respond by saying, “Yes, and powerful too!” The world is very ready to sexualize our daughters, but as fathers we can teach them that there is a world of physical touch that isn’t sexual or aggressive. We can do this by cuddling and nurturing them as babies, roughhousing with them as children, encouraging their physical strength and athleticism as they grow older, and hugging and putting our arm around their shoulder throughout their lives.

At the same time, as hard as it is for fathers to face, we have to acknowledge that our daughters can’t stay our precious little girls forever. We have to let go of our over protectiveness. Joe Kelly, in his book, Dads and Daughters, describes the dangers of the stereotype of the “dad on the porch with a shotgun,” protecting his daughter’s virtue. As an alternative, Kelly proposes engaging with the culture that demeans our daughters. For example, his organization has a project based on fathers speaking out—as fathers, to fathers—against the sexualization of girls. His Dads and Daughters group writes to CEO’s (who are mostly men, and mostly fathers) asking them to imagine their own daughters or granddaughters as the models in their company’s sexualized ads. Try it yourself—it’s pretty disturbing. It’s no wonder that they have had success in getting some particularly offensive ads pulled.

So it’s pretty simple: Respect women, reject objectification, speak out against over-sexualization, and above all, listen. Because girls are powerful. As fathers, we have a unique opportunity to celebrate and support that power. 

Cohen, PhD, is a licensed psychologist in Brookline, Mass. DeBenedet is a board-certified internist and gastroenterology fellow at the University of Michigan Health System. The views expressed are solely their own.

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