Rebecca Kukla: evaluation

Transcript context

…In a way, but not quite. That’s fine. I was waiting for more misogyny. This is a kind of misogyny, I guess, yeah. This is what my first book, Mass Hysteria, was about. I think that we have a centuries-old way of conceiving of the pregnant body and the task of pregnancy that has led to some really profound distortions in how we understand pregnancy, and particularly how we understand what pregnant women should do, what their responsibilities are, and how we give advice to pregnant women. One part of it is arguably just true, and not the part that I really pick on, which is that pregnant women are responsible with their bodies for creating the next generation of people, right? In some sense, the pregnant body has a kind of a civic responsibility, which is really distinctive. Out of that pregnant body is going to come a person who is going to belong to the next generation. And there’s been this long-standing idea that goes back several hundred years that the pregnant body creates the body politic, so we all have a collective investment in how that process goes. So far, so good. At the same time, though, pregnant women’s bodies have been seen as profoundly untrustworthy because women and women’s bodies have been seen as profoundly untrustworthy, right? Women have been seen as easily swayed by hormones and emotions, as fragile, as easy to tempt into various kinds of bad behaviors, as not really understanding science very well, so as not knowing how to regulate their bodies, as being undisciplined, and so on. So we’ve developed this kind of double idea that women’s bodies are super risky but also have this incredibly important task. As a result, we’ve developed all kinds of science and norms and advice based around this idea that women have to be hyperdisciplined and hypercontrolled at all times, particularly when they’re pregnant, or things will go terribly, terribly awry. This is my favorite example of this: If you go back a couple hundred years, there was this supposedly scientific concept of the maternal imagination. And the idea was that, if pregnant women saw things or felt things or encountered things during their pregnancy that got them all riled up, it would directly mark the body of the fetus. If they really craved strawberries, their fetus would have a strawberry birthmark. Or the most hilarious one is, if they found themselves accidentally lusting after a black man, their baby would turn out black. There was this idea that we had to completely control women’s environments and keep them in a nice, calm, low-stimulation environment throughout their pregnancy so that they didn’t destroy their fetus because they were so weak and prone to these things. I think — even though very few people would claim that directly anymore — that mentality continues now. There’s this idea that pregnant women can’t get too emotional or the stress will destroy their fetus. Or they can’t eat too much or they’re going to turn their fetus into a future obese person. s now. There’s this idea that pregnant women can’t get too emotional or the stress will destroy their fetus. Or they can’t eat too much or they’re going to turn their fetus into a future obese person. There’s a whole other conversation. They’re supposed to regulate how much sex they have, when they have sex, what they eat, what they breathe, what they wear. There’s this wonderful quote in a famous pregnancy book that says, “With every single bite that you put in your mouth, you should be asking yourself: Does this bite help my baby? Or am I just doing it for my own selfish end?” There’s this idea that literally each time you put a piece of food in you, you’re supposed to be self-regulating. This has led to advice that’s not only unfollowable for women, but to get more directly back to your question, I think it leads people to see pregnant women as constantly involved in this high-risk project that requires intensive risk management. And this has led to all kinds of unfollowable advice and bad science.…

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