Baby Bumps

I require clarification about this blossoming penchant for celebrities to appear on cover pages of widely-circulated magazines to show off their pregnant bumps. Traditionally, viewing the bump has been restricted to family and close-friend members, but not any more. Why? What is driving the need of celebrities to show their bumps to the entire world? My guesses go along these lines (1) the celebrity wishes to display to the world that the bump has done nothing to diminish her exhibitionism; or (2) the displaying of the bump has become a kind of requirement to display that the pregnancy is being carried with pride and fortitude. The third possibility is for the celebrity to display an I-don't-give-a-shit attitude about what you viewers think; I'm pregnant and take it or leave it.

Perhaps the grouping can be subdivided into one of the three possibilities above. The second requirement for clarification is this: (1) Do we care about the bumps? (2) If we care about the bumps, why? I have no scientific data or analysis to form an opinion, but instinctively, I would answer that we do not care about the bumps -- that they are being forced upon us, and if the bumps were to be removed, few of us among the general population would feel dissatisfied/cheated.

I seem to remember the trend getting under way with a cover shot of Demi Moore. Upon seeing the cover, I had to ask myself, "are we to regard this as beautiful?" If that was the desired result, it didn't work on me. Having lived with a pregnant woman, I cannot see many advantages -- stretched skin marks, broken veins, a generally bloated look, and a wife-organism that was either scarfing down hamburgers, fries, and malts, or one that was spewing the same materials into a toilet.

Feeling a foreign body moving within the mound led my thinking more toward the profound than feelings of amorousness. Right or wrong, I felt no excitement about the idea of ejecting my sperm somewhere in the direction of my developing son/daughter. To me it seemed sacrilegious, but I was raised Catholic.

My wife took it as rejection (which it was) and assumed it was about the mound (which it was). Someone out there tell me that I wasn't alone in thinking my pregnant wife to be sort of sacrosanct. Today, the weekly bump seems to be part of the normal grocery check-out line.

Whether you wish to see it or not -- it is standing out there for you to witness. In conclusion, I would confess the following: There is nothing WRONG with a woman being photographed in a stage of pregnancy. If the idea behind the photography is to excite a male response, the effort is a failure.

With nothing to back up my claim, I sense that most men prefer NOT to see pregnant women on photographic display -- that it does nothing to get their endorphins flowing. The purpose of the photography is driven by magazine subscriptions and a less than prurient interest in celebrity figures.

Let's face it, the bulge is patently unattractive, though few would be bold enough to concur. Look at it this way: Are more men trying to jump pregnant women or non-pregnant women? I think the answer is pretty clear and the answer obvious.

This is not to say all women who are pregnant should be taken behind the barn and shot. No, if a man loves his woman, the bump is just a bump, and he'll figure out some way of still having sex with a lady who is already primed for the charge. But, let's be honest with ourselves. The bulging women on our newsstand magazines are NOT erotic. They are obviously knocked-up, and the male of any mammalian species is likely to go sniffing elsewhere to deal with his lust. Women who think otherwise -- that pregnant women look extra sexy are welcome to crawl on top of them because there are a lot of husbands/mates who have no desire to do so whatsoever.