Molly Baz is among the millennial generation’s most influential cooks, and after she became pregnant, she expanded her reach to the care and feeding of parents and babies. In May, she starred in an ad campaign for the breastfeeding startup Swehl, serving up a new recipe for lactation cookies. In one shot, she wore underwear and a rhinestone bikini, presenting an exposed belly and a pair of oatmeal cookies centered with drops of cherry jam, which she held atop her chest as a goofy visual joke. The ad copy said: “Just Add Milk.”
A 45-foot digital billboard of the image appeared in Times Square shortly before Mother’s Day — and then vanished. The ad network Clear Channel Outdoor said that it had removed the ad from its rotation, deeming it in violation of the company’s guidelines on acceptable content.
When I heard that the Swehl billboard had been censored, I was a little shocked that anyone had been shocked. Baz posted on Instagram about the removal, pointedly including shots of several lingerie ads that still loomed over Times Square, featuring nonpregnant models looking dainty in bikinis and bras. “I think you’ll see the irony,” Baz wrote. “Bring on the lingerie so long as it satiates the male gaze.”
When Demi Moore appeared naked and seven months pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, it caused a media sensation that bordered on scandal. Her photograph was primed to sell her A-list Hollywood persona, tickets to her movies, and copies of the magazine. But that was three decades ago, and pregnancy has now been thoroughly eroticized, glamorized and commodified. Especially on social media, it has become a stage for promoting a growing range of consumer items.
As millennials become parents, brands like Swehl have emerged to stamp maternity paraphernalia with our generational tastes, like curvy typefaces and spicy puns; Swehl offers a colostrum syringe called “Secret Sauce” and an ointment called “Balm de Nips.”
I wonder if the most provocative thing about Baz’s billboard was not her pregnancy, or her outfit, but her hands. Though we have now seen many famous women pregnant and nude — Cindy Crawford, Kim Kardashian, Serena Williams, untold numbers of Instagram influencers — we’re accustomed to seeing the pregnant body posed in a certain way, often with the woman’s hands covering her breasts and cradling her own bump. She is positioned to ensure her modesty and also telegraph her maternal attention. One of her limbs is always making a closed circuit back to her womb.
Not this time. Baz isn’t holding her breasts or her baby; she’s holding her cookies. She is selling her pregnancy, sure, but she’s also selling a recipe. She has her hands full with her career.
The sensual representation of the pregnant body is as old as representation itself. The Venus of Hohle Fels, a 35,000-year-old fertility idol carved from mammoth tusk, is the earliest known depiction of a human being. Her breasts are distended, her belly round. She has abundant labia and a pinhead. “You couldn’t get more female than this,” Nicholas Conard, the archaeologist who recovered her in a German cave in 2008, told Smithsonian magazine. “Head and legs don’t matter. This is about sex, reproduction.”
But tens of thousands of years after the birth of that Venus, American media seemed stuck in the stone age: When Lucille Ball became pregnant while filming “I Love Lucy,” she couldn’t actually say the word “pregnant” on television.
Then came Moore. “It seemed ludicrous to me that, at that time, pregnant women were invariably portrayed as sexless,” Moore wrote in her 2019 memoir “Inside Out.” “Women hid their pregnancies under tentlike clothes instead of flaunting their new curves the way you often see today.”
When the issue hit newsstands, under a protective sleeve, “people went insane about it,” Moore wrote. Readers called it pornographic, exploitative, liberating.
Even as the photograph smashed a taboo, it created a new standard — of a pregnant body that is disciplined, public, and yes, sexy. Moore worked with a personal trainer so obsessively throughout her pregnancy that she moved his family into the guesthouse on her Idaho estate. On the cover, Moore’s round stomach competes with her sculpted glutes. The image was a celebration of pregnant sexuality, but it was also a tribute to supreme corporeal control and the wealth that made it possible.
Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a sociologist who writes about family life for The Cut, credits Moore with popularizing the now-ubiquitous pregnancy move she calls “bump hands.” When a pregnant celebrity or influencer poses while petting her own stomach, she is “creating a meaningful enclosure around appropriate fatness,” Jezer-Morton writes, emphasizing the bump “to reassure the viewer that underneath this one protrusion is a thin person.”
A version of bump hands has marked depictions of pregnancy for millenniums: The Degas sculpture “Pregnant Woman,” cast in bronze in 1920, shows a figure staring down at her stomach, which she cradles in both hands; a Cypriot pregnant terra-cotta figurine in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to 600-480 B.C.E., appears with her hand on her belly, “signifying her connection with fertility,” as the museum puts it.
Before bump hands were associated with thinness, they were a gesture of fecundity and maternal dedication. Now these connotations fuse together, indicating a pregnant woman who takes care of her child and her body at once. Then there is Baz, who stands with her belly unattended, using her hands not to radiate care but to make a cheeky joke in the service of her business. One more pregnancy taboo, shattered over Times Square.
The shot reminded me of another depiction of pregnancy from the Met archives, an Italian Renaissance engraving of a pregnant woman styled to represent the field of geometry. Geometria, as she is called, holds her own stomach in one hand and a pencil in the other, which she uses to sketch shapes in the sky. She gives the impression of a woman working with one arm tied behind her back, her attention scattered between her fetus and an entire branch of mathematics.
The removal of Baz’s billboard, and the swift backlash against Clear Channel Outdoor, turned out to be good for her business. Another company stepped in to donate its billboard space to Swehl. Special K featured Baz’s now-famous belly on its cereal box. And in October, Baz again appeared on a billboard over Times Square, this time promoting an organic formula company called Bobbie.
In the Bobbie ad, Baz lay outstretched on the countertop of her butter-yellow kitchen. Her four month-old baby’s mouth was latched on one of her breasts. Dinner cooled in a casserole dish near her elbow; a can of powdered formula sat by her knees. Baz held her baby in one hand and his bottle in the other. “I nurse as much as humanly poss, and lean on formula for the rest — it’s a combo feeding life for meeeee,” she wrote in an Instagram post announcing the partnership. She added, “neva did i eva think I would get pregnant and become the poster child for normalizing mothers’ bodies in media.”
As with Demi Moore, there’s a thin line between a taboo and an ideal. Breastfeeding above Times Square is another gutsy provocation, though this image looks more familiar than the last. Bobbie has posed Baz in a having-it-all tableau, balancing work and child rearing as she feeds by both breast and bottle, looking polished and unbothered. The company, which markets itself as “European-style” and “modeled after breast milk,” sells itself as a luxury product by positioning its formula as close to breastfeeding as it can.
It was savvy for Bobbie to pass its bottle to Baz, the woman who made the maternal body edgy again by reminding everyone that breasts on billboards don’t just make money — they make milk.
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