“Who Doesn’t Want to Be This Hot Mom?”: Celebrity Mom Profiles and Mothers’ Accounts of Their Postpartum Bodies

Abstract

In this article, we explore mothers’ responses to celebrity mom body (CMB) profiles in popular magazines. Drawing from objectification theory, we frame CMB images as one component of the ubiquitous sexualization of girls’ and women’s bodies, and ask how these images influence mothers’ views of their postpartum bodies. While a good deal of previous research examines the media portrayal of pregnant and postpartum bodies, very few studies go on to ask how these images affect mothers’ self-image and their relationships with men. During in-depth interviews, we showed our sample CMB images and found that most mothers evaluated themselves negatively; however, we add that they evaluated themselves in different ways depending on their social class and educational backgrounds. All mothers identified negative effects of CMB images on men, which diminished mothers’ feelings of sexual attractiveness to male partners.