Why do we desexualize women when they become mothers? The third episode of Thread the Needle explores the messages society sends us about how mothers should look and behave. Discover the strange history behind why many women still feel they must leave their sexual identity behind once they have a baby in their arms.
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Episode Guests:
Stephanie Coontz, Professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College, Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families, and author of several books, including Marriage, A History
Lina-Maria Murillo, Professor of history and gender studies at University of Iowa
Jennifer Haylett, Sociologist who studies surrogacy and the sociology of reproduction at University of Iowa
Satheara Teeuwen, Burlesque dancer living in Portland, Oregon
“It's just not common for people to think that pregnant women are sexy, but I'm over here like ‘Hey, I'm still a super babe, I just have a big old belly.’”
-Satheara Teeuwen
“All of a sudden you become a mom, and the sexy part of your life is supposed to just disappear and you’re just supposed to take care of this other person, which I think is terrible.”
-Satheara Teeuwen with her son Deklan
Thanks for listening to the third episode of Thread the Needle, a podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. If you have a story you’d like to see featured in a future episode, please email me at podcast@theneedle.co.
Thanks to Molly Bloom of American Public Radio for mentoring this project!
Hosted and produced by: Donna Cleveland
Theme song by: Meara Oberdieck
Original music by: Taylor Ross
Episode artwork by: Chosie Titus
Recording and audio mastering by: Cody Olivas, Nicholas Naioti
Additional music from: Free Internet Archive
Episode 4 transcript:
DONNA CLEVELAND (HOST): Imagine a woman with an enormous pregnant stomach doing a body roll onstage in a transparent shimmering robe, her belly a glowing gold disco ball.
The woman slowly shimmies out of her dress, uncovering her breasts, then her baby bump, gazing coyly at the audience as she reveals a flirty set of lingerie. The next moment, she jumps into the splits. To close the number she removes her bra with her back turned to the audience, then spins around dramatically to reveal a set of tassels over her breasts, which she begins whirling in a circular motion before ending her number by blowing a drawn-out kiss to the audience.
Meet Satheara Teeuwen, a 32-year-old burlesque performer and teacher who lives with her now two-year-old son Deklan and husband Erik in Portland, Oregon. Satheara’s story challenges an idea that many of us consciously or onconsciously believe—that in order to be a good mom, you have to give up an important part of yourself: your sexuality.
You’re listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realities of women’s lives. I’m your hot Donna Cleveland. I’m currently child-free, I’m in my 30s, and I’m trying to sort out my feelings about motherhood.
Whenever I take a broad view of my life and think about whether I want to experience being a mother and having a family, the answer that comes up for me is yes. The love I have for my own parents is really special to me, and I’d like to experience the other side of that love with my own child.
But when I think about taking that leap now, like in this very moment, I get a feeling of panic and my first feeling is no, or not yet. Obviously, this isn’t a can I can kick down the road forever, so I’ve decided to start examining my feelings on the subject. The decision to become a parent is deeply personal. There are so many factors that can play into your decision, from your career and relationship status to the experiences you had as a child.
Looking around, I can see a lot of reasons NOT to have kids. I see moms taking on most of the load at home, and falling behind both in rank and in pay at work.
While these are all factors for me, on top of that, I’ve become aware of some beliefs I’ve picked up along the way. On some level, I think you have to become a different person in order to be a good mother—a selfless figure who is no longer allowed to have your own needs.
I thought it would be helpful to put some words to this image of motherhood I had in my mind.
Here’s what I came up with: Nurturing, modest, sweet, domestic, self sacrificing. Oh, and definitely not sexy.
In this episode, we’ll trace the origin of this fictional woman I believe I must become in order to be a good mom. In particular, we’ll focus on this notion that it’s no longer appropriate for women to express their sexuality once they become a mother.
Instead of focusing on the many practical barriers to motherhood that we have less control over, we’ll look at our cultures beliefs around motherhood. That way we can choose for ourselves how our identity should be affected. While there’s a lot that’s out of our control, examining self limiting beliefs isn’t one of them.
Before we jump in, I want to clarify that this episode is not meant to make women feel they need to worry about their appearance or get back to their “pre-baby body” on top of all their new responsibilities as a mother. I also am aware that motherhood may change many women’s priorities, and that feeling sexy might not feel so important anymore.
Instead, this episode intends to explore the notion that being a sexual being and a good mom at the same time are somehow opposed.
To some, Satheara’s dance may seem like lighthearted fun, to others it may seem inappropriate. To me, it felt defiant, which i admired.
SATHEARA TEEUWEN: It's just not common for people to think that pregnant women are sexy, but I'm over here like hey I'm still a super babe I'm just as sexy as ever, I just have a big old belly. Pregnancy is beautiful and sexy like I'm still as fabulous as ever. So the audience sees that and they probably do think about pregnant women a little bit differently.”
CLEVELAND: Satheara said she also planned to help people think a little bit differently about women after they’ve had their baby.
TEEUWEN: Unfortunately, the idea is that moms are not sexy in modern day culture. like moms, all of a sudden you become a mom and you're just like be a mom, and like the sexy part of your life suddenly is supposed to just disappear and will just support take care of the person, which I think is terrible.
CLEVELAND: Before Satheara became pregnant, she’d had practice at pushing back against negative messages she received about her body and sexuality. Growing up, she said her mom put a lot of pressure on her to be thin. When Satheara joined burlesque, it brought the issue to a head:
TEEUWEN: When I did first start performing and she found out. One of the things that she said is "well you need to lose weight if you're going to do that.
CLEVELAND: Wow! How did that make you?
TEEUWEN: Well. I guess it's just the norm in my family to like. It didn't make me feel good but it wasn't an uncommon thing to hear. I felt a lot of shame about like my belly fat and partly I'm sure but like my upbringing, you know, I'm Asian and Asian people tend to be smaller.
My family, I love them, they didn't like do this on purpose, it's just kind of like the way, the Cambodian culture was like but that certainly shaped my lack of confidence while I was growing up which of course was still there when I became adult. So my family kind of, they made me feel like I should have always been like thinner and I'm so like doing burlesque and not being like a super slim person. I did have to like, get through that like when I first started performing, like I always covered my belly, well I would wear something like a waist censure . . . and I guess I didn't stay too long because when I was like Woo, I like being free this is great. But yeah but at first like I didn't even wear a thong for like the first two years of performing like I always wore sole bottoms. Now I'm like how can I get away with?
CLEVELAND: After years of performing, she became a headmistress at a burlesque school in Portland, where she helped guide other people through the same process of gaining confidence that she went through.
TEEUWEN: It is super empowering. I feel like being a burlesque performer has made me a much more accepting person of myself. Seeing people of all shapes and sizes. Feeling sexy and removing their clothes and, you know, being proud of themselves. I think that is just a wonderful thing, (Laughter) so I love doing it and I love sharing it and teaching other people even more.
CLEVELAND: Talking to Satheara gave me a glimpse of a refreshing new model of motherhood, different from the one I’d been holding onto in my head. But I wondered, where did I get my ideas in the first place? If you look to the media, it’s easy to find examples.
Take Saturday Night Live’s mom Jeans skit. If you’ve seen it, it’s pretty hard to forget: Tina Fey and Rachel Drach frolic around in unflattering pants “cut generously to fit a mom’s body.”
This line sums it up: “I’m not a woman anymore, I’m a mom.”
When talking to Satheara, she had a hard time pinning down a reason why we look at moms in this light.
TEEUWEN: Some people might be like 'oh that body made a person and now has all these flaws'. Or it could be like the way moms are portrayed in the media and stuff is like okay, they're not sexy, they're usually like doing stuff like taking care of a baby.
CLEVELAND: I could see Satheara’s point. It’s true, women’s bodies go through changes when they have kids. But there’s a problem with this conclusion. If Satheara’s logic held, that would mean we’d be perfectly comfortable with moms looking sexy as long as they still conformed to our society’s beauty standards. But that’s not what we see today.
In the world of celebrity mom shaming, the Kardashians have been at the top of the list.
Remember when Kim Kardashian “broke the internet” a few years ago when she posed nude for the cover of Paper magazine? Twitter exploded with negative comments, asking why she would do a nude photo shoot now that she’d become a mom?
Last year, Kourtney Kardashian became a target when she posed nude for GQ, with commenters calling her everything from disgusting to whorish for posing naked as a mom of three.
Whether you’re a fan of the Kardashians or not, when you think about it, these women are coming under fire for presenting the same image that made them famous to begin with.
The media was giving me some clues—clearly I’d picked up the idea that moms not only were not, but weren’t allowed to be sexy. Even women who were famous sex symbols were expected to change in a fundamental way once she had a baby in her arms.
But I still didn’t know WHY we had these beliefs. To find answers, I turned next to Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Washington State and best-selling author of a book on the history of marriage.
With the help of Coontz, I hoped I could trace the beliefs battling out in the public sphere as well as in my own head back to their historical origins.
I half expected Coontz to tell me that religion was the source of the problem, end of story. After all, I know the time I spent at a Catholic Sunday school growing up didn’t exactly help me develop a well-adjusted attitude toward sex. But Coontz said religion wasn’t the source of this idea, so much as a tool used to impose the societal norms of any given time period.
STEPHANIE COONTZ: There’s a very strong tradition of religious control over women. Sexuality is a very good powerful way to control people's personal behavior and if you invest it with high morality that's something that has a strong influence on people.”
CLEVELAND: So apparently I couldn’t blame religion for my hangups about motherhood. Going into this episode, my guess was that the media or religion were the source of my problems. But as I was soon to discover, the real source strangely was tied up instead in the advent of private property. Coontz walked me through a historical timeline to show the relationship between land ownership and the society’s ideas surrounding motherhood and sexuality. I’ll share her findings with you here.
The story begins in Ancient Greece, a breeding ground for patriarchal beliefs.
COONTZ: You have to ensure that no man plants a seed in the row that you have hoed. And in many societies that really emphasize private property and inheritance, there is an extreme concern with protecting the quote "virtue" unquote of women so that you may be sure that you don't introduce quote a foreigner into the soil of the patrimonial family.
CLEVELAND: The link between land ownership and sexual practices only became more clear when Coontz began studying our foraging ancestors and discovering much less patriarchal models of motherhood.
COONTZ: These hunter gatherers likely had much more egalitarian configurations. Hunting together and then sharing the kill while it was fresh just made common sense. And in these hunter gatherer societies, the women often provided a higher percentage of the overall food, making them highly valued members of the tribe. She said many of these tribes were likely non-monogamous as well, because in a setting where everything was shared including parenting duties, there wasn’t a strong need to emphasize paternity.
CLEVELAND: While most hunter-gatherer societies existed more than 10,000 years ago before we developed agriculture and settled in different areas, there are more recent and even current-day examples to draw from.
COONTZ: There's a wonderful account of living with 'Mounted Nine Nanoscopy Indians', by a Jesuit and he noted that although most women stayed home with their children while when the men went out on long hunting forest some women went out with them and he thought that this was just absolutely terrible because they were out on their own with the man and also he pointed out that even the ones that stayed home had a lot more freedom than women back in the in old Europe [19:16] and so at one point he has he says a discussion with this nanoscopy and what we will call today his informant you know, that's a physiological term and he says now you got to keep your women at home because they're not as strong and then nanoscopy says well actually they you know help us move the tents, they're very strong and so then he picks another reason. Well they're not very wise and then nanoscopy says you know we rely on the words of old women, old women do not fling their words about without meaning. And so finally he pulls out his big argument from the European perspective, well if you allow women such freedom how do you know that the children she bears will belong to you and then nanoscopy Indian replies, 'thou has no sense, we love all the children of the tribe you Frenchmen love only the children of your body but we love all the children of the tribe'.
So there are many examples where we do not have the extreme jealousy and guarding of women's reproductive rights that you see in in in so many agricultural societies and in some hunting societies as well.
CLEVELAND: Another example is in a handful of tribal societies in current-day South America.
COONTZ: There is a belief that any man who sleeps with a woman during the course of her pregnancy contributes something of himself to her child and so when the woman has the baby the midwife says, 'name every lover you have had during your pregnancy', and if she names more than the one man who is her actual husband the midwife goes to each of those men and says, 'you have become a father'.
Now here's what's so interesting today in our society this would be the stuff of a Jerry Springer you know knock down drag down fight. [LAUGHTER]
CLEVELAND": But in those days it was one of the best assurances that a child would survive until adulthood because men took that responsibility seriously and contributed a portion of their fishing and hunting to the child of the woman that they had slept with during her pregnancy
But for the most part, when foraging tribes gave way to agrarian societies, Coontz said the prevailing attitude became similar to the ancient greeks “no man plants a seed in the row that you have hoed.” Having this attitude has made it easier for men to control their blood line and to pass along land ownership for the past 10,000 years.
Now that you’ve gotten some background on our foraging past, we’ll fast forward to the medieval days. During this time period and actually all the way up to the 1700s,
COONTZ: Women were considered the lusty sex, more prone to sexual error and adventure than men. They were not considered naturally virtuous or naturally asexual.
CLEVELAND: Coontz explained that at that time, men and women worked on the farm together. So it made sense that men had this view of women, because they were able to keep them under control. Coontz said this attitude continued through the colonization of the United States and into the late 1700s. If this is starting to feel like a boring history lesson, hang in there! We’ve just arrived at the critical moment where women were suddenly zapped of their sexuality.
What Coontz found is that the industrial revolution and the advent of the love marriage are to thank for this drastic shift in ideals. The industrial revolution was in full swing by the early 1800s, and with it, men began to work outside the home. It follows that if men considered their women to be lusty and not to be trusted, they’d have a hard time leaving them home alone and to their own devices. By insisting that women be asexual guardians of the home, men could head out to work without any worries.
COONTZ: There is a particular variant that masquerades as Democratic that they combine the sense that women should be chaste with the idea that it's not because we control them, it's because we respect them so much.
CLEVELAND: At the same time, the love marriage began gaining popularity.
COONTZ: People were terrified by it they said if you marry for love how will you get men to keep controlling their wives: if they love them they might give in to them.
CLEVELAND": This only reinforced this idea that women must be pure and asexual, as a sort of coping mechanism for men.
COONTZ: This is when you get the idea of the male breadwinner, the female nurturing and women became redefined as basically sex, asexual or pure.
CLEVELAND: Coontz said motherhood only added to this idea of men and women being opposites.
COONTZ: It's really not until this new love match idea of the late eighteenth century that you get this idea that it's motherhood that makes a woman totally pure and of course the contradiction that we tend to forget how she got to be a mother in the first place.”
CLEVELAND: Since mostly white middle-class women were actually able to stay home and fulfill this vision of domesticity, perhaps the most devastating consequence of this new view is what it did to poor women.
COONTZ: If she's a woman who has to work in the fields, if she's a black woman, a minority, a woman a working class woman, then she has actually forfeited her claim to true womanhood and so men could go to her as a prostitute and one of the interesting things that happened to men sexuality is that many of them could not have a sexual relationship with their wife in the same way that they could with a prostitute.
CLEVELAND: This attitude also wreaked havoc on married couples’ sex lives.
COONTZ: I read a letter that a man wrote to Marie Stopes who was one of the first women who wrote a sexual advice book at the early twentieth century and he said I am so thankful that you wrote this book because before you wrote it, I would not have dared to express any of these kinds of sexual actions or behaviors to my wife for fear that she would think I was a prostitute that I was thinking she was a prostitute. So men got this tremendous, tremendous diversification between good women and bad women just as women did.”
CLEVELAND: Meanwhile, women were beginning to suffer from extreme sexual frustration. Jenn Haylett, a professor of sociology at the University of Iowa who I also interviewed for this episode, said women began flocking to the doctor’s office for relief.
JENN HAYLETT: And this is an interesting time period because we have basically a lot of sexual repression around women especially women who are mothers but at the same time that this is when we have the advent of the first mechanical vibrator you know that's being used in doctors' offices because these women are going to doctors with essentially all of the sexual repression that builds up and frustration and [13:15] doctors are finding ways to alleviate that pressure essentially by bringing them to orgasm you know so acknowledging their sexuality but doing it in a way that sort of clinical and not really about pleasure you know and then you know putting them back into their sphere of home where they then assume this identity that seems almost asexual again.
CLEVELAND: The feminist movement began upending many of these ideas in the late 19th and 20th centuries, but some of these notions haven’t fully disappeared. In fact, Haylett had a theory that while women are in many ways liberated today, we still haven’t relinquished control over mothers.
HAYLETT: I think also it's just it's not surprising because it sort of fits into a long steady standing pattern of people thinking that they have the right to comment on you know [39:17] what women do with their bodies and how they present themselves and what even sort of options they have and I think that there is a longstanding history of that in the U.S. of people trying to control even or what the female body stands for and limiting women's autonomy in portraying themselves in the ways that they want to and I think that [39:45] maybe we've come to I don't know this is speculation on my part but maybe we've come to a point where women without children are seen as independent beings and we very much believe in freedom and independence for individuals, so we let those women kind of do what they want but then once they have kids, once there's a reason to or a justification for looking at those women has no longer independent or solely as you know individuals anymore we like quickly latch on to that because we have this desire to still kind of control [40:20] women's sexuality and I think when they have kids it's almost like a door opens where, where people also sudden feel okay, now we can justify, you know, judging them because they're no longer sort of I guess like complete individuals anymore but it's interesting we don't do that with men, right, I don't really see men being called out in the same way for any of their behaviors pre or post having a child and even if a man right is doing something maybe better that isn't that's unsavory we still just brushed it off as being well [41:03] that's just kind of how men are and what not, you know.
CLEVELAND: While I’m all in favor of mothers being liberated from this cycle of judgment, I found myself struggling with the question: Is it harmful to your kids if you look sexy around them?
The most insightful opinion I got on the matter came from Lina Maria Murillo, a professor of gender studies at the University of Iowa, who apart from studying the matter, is also having an ongoing conversation about it in her household with her husband and two daughters.
LINA MARIA MURILLO: Society is incredible at manipulating children's minds from a very early age into thinking not only what is, what is gender appropriate but what is age appropriate.
CLEVELAND: At age 9 and 7, Murillo’s daughters already have strong feelings that sexy is something there mom SHOULD NOT be.
MURILLO: They're just like, 'mom can you button you know you need to button your shirt all the way up because you know you don't want to show', and then they're are, they're very, they pick up on that.
CLEVELAND: Murillo said she’s also had to defend the way she presents herself to her husband.
MURILLO: We both grew up Catholic and his family is very conservative and it was the same thing you know it's just like you're a mother now and I was like I am but I'm not dead and I like I love, I enjoy, I do expressing myself through clothing, through jewelry, through I think it's a wonderful way to express your, your, your identity, your imagination and your body [23:37]. It may not look great right by the ideas of like, ideas that we have today about you know the super fit body, the super like the yoga body whatever but like I like what I look like and so yes, you know, I tell my children like no I'm keeping the button where it is [23:58]. My kids staring there, it's fine. They, they'll love to have that conversation in public with like other people. They'll just call me out like, 'Mom that's button is really low', and there's like seven other people there and I'm like, 'it's fine, you got to need to let me be'.
CLEVELAND: In essence, Murillo says that kids must go through the realization that their parents are real human beings with lives of their own, and that respecting their sexual autonomy should simply be a part of that. While that process is never going to be comfortable for parents or for kids, that doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy.
As funny as Murillo’s stories are about her run-ins with her daughters, she’s making the best of a somewhat frustrating situation where she has to defend her behavior to her family and to the outside world.
This fits in with a phenomena Coontz pointed out. Unlike in past time periods where there was a very clear model of motherhood, in today’s world, women no longer have one ideal of motherhood to follow. Instead, they face conflicting models, and whichever one they choose, they end up having to defend to the world around them.
COONTZ: Most modern women feel guilty whatever they do. If they stay home, they say. 'oh my gosh am I setting a bad role model for my daughter', you know, what am I going to do in the future if they go out to work they think Oh I'm I'm being a bad mother and people don't like feeling ambivalence, it's hard to admit ambivalence, it's hard to admit that I don't like half of what I'm doing and so one very common psychological response to it is to blame the other to is to project the part of the you that you don't like on to somebody else so that you can say well the people who stay home are blah blah blah if you're a worker or if you're a stay at home mom the people who are working on neglecting their kids and I think that it becomes more intense among women precisely because we are the victims so to speak of this incredible cross-cutting set of pressures.”
CLEVELAND: Coontz said we have to develop our own models of what we want motherhood to look like. And this brings me back to Satheara.
Satheara kept performing all the way up until she was 37 weeks pregnant. When I talked to her just days before she gave birth to her son, here’s what she had to say about what she expected life to be like post-baby.
TEEUWEN: You don't have to let this part of your life take over and take away something that you once had. like I know that I haven't had the baby yet, and I know I'm going to be exhausted and I'm probably going, you know, 27:21 (INAUDIBLE) and not washed my hair for two weeks (Laughter) if I can just remember that I am still sexy on the inside and I'm sure that other people will see it too whenever I do take a shower.
CLEVELAND: Satheara was just days from giving birth when I first interviewed her for this episode. So I decided to check in with her to see how her expectations of motherhood measured up to reality. She let me know that she returned to burlesque 9 weeks after giving birth to baby Deklan. She spent the first few months facing challenges such as having to pump breast milk backstage and getting used to changes to her body, which she said has made her a believer in high-waisted thongs. She said Deklan comes backstage sometimes and loves when she gets all fancy with glitter on her lips. He also enjoys pulling off her fake lashes! Satheara is booking shows less frequently than before having Deklan, but says she feels as sexy as ever, while admittedly a little tired.
So where does this leave my relationship to motherhood?
Talking to Coontz and the other experts I interviewed for this episode, I was fascinated to tie beliefs that felt so stifling and personal to me back to such impersonal and practical purposes: essentially keeping control over land and resources. Knowing where these beliefs come from and seeing how little they make sense in today’s world does make them lose some of their power.Now when I think of myself with a child, I see myself less as this one-dimensional Madonna figure and more as a multi-faceted human being, just like I am today, but with motherhood as a new facet to add to that collection.
I’m Donna Cleveland, and you’re listening to Thread the Needle, a monthly podcast that explores the meeting place between feminist ideals and the realiteis of womens’ lives.
This show was edited by me, with production help from Cody Olivas, theme song by Meara Oberdieck, and sound by Taylor Ross. The episode artwork is by Chosie Titus. Thank you to Molly Bloom for being my mentor.
If you have feedback or a story you’d like to see featured in a future episode, please email me at podcast@theneedle.co. Look out for a new episode of Thread the Needle on Wednesday, January 1.