"It's Like They Want You To Get Fat" - Williams & Potter, 1999

- by DannyR

Throughout her life a woman in modern, westernised society is externally pressured to conform to a pervasive societal ideal of thinness that emphasises her sexual availability to men. Yet when she becomes pregnant she is expected to easily adjust to a complete reversal those expectations and alter her behaviour.

Pregnant women are frequently no longer perceived as sexual persons, and often feel undesirable and unattractive due to the disparity between the societal ideal of attractive and their changed bodies. A pregnant woman’s sexuality and approval of her own body are deemed less important than her role as ‘baby factory’ and thus she is expected to become heavier, to conform to a maternal ideal with accompanying bodily changes. She herself participates in this reconstruction of her body, to the extent that she feels and responds to these pressures. For example some women, and especially younger women on whom there is more pressure to conform to societal expectations of attractiveness, may feel guilt about their weight gain and worry about the difficulty of losing it post-partum, while others see the changes as significant of their changed role, and consign their sexual desirability to the past.

The role of the expectant mother entails a changed relationship with food to ensure the foetus is well nourished. Eating is no longer for the mother’s pleasure or sustenance but instead considered ‘part of your job’. They are criticised for making personal choices to eat unhealthy food – the implication being that ‘your body isn’t just yours now!’ The medicalisation of pregnancy extends the expectation of the doctor’s control over childbirth back into the duration of the pregnancy, removing from women even a sense of control over their own pregnancy.

A woman’s expectations of her own body and the expectations of those around her toward that body are socially constructed, as evidenced by the vastly different standards for feminine attractiveness across cultures and across time. That pregnancy has become medicalised is evidenced by the results of qualitative research, women report feeling measured through pregnancy against prescribed weight gains as though weight gain were the most important predictor of pregnancy outcome. Many worry that they are ‘bad mothers’ if they are ‘not doing it right’.

This topic illuminates the sociological themes of Differences and Divisions; women are subjected to more pressure to conform to ideals of weight than are men, and are thus defined in terms of roles or functions. To some extent this also demonstrates the interaction of the Social and the Personal, as many women internalise this categorisation and come to define themselves in relation to their food and weight.

References

Williams, L. & Potter, J. (1999). ‘“It’s like they want you to get fat”: Social reconstruction of women’s bodies during pregnancy.’ In J Germov & L Williams (Eds.), A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite, Melbourne: Oxford University Press.