Let me be clear, Anne Hathaway’s baby bump should be no one else’s business
When a woman has a baby, research has recently found, she loses grey matter from her brain to “prune” it for motherhood. Strangely though, academics haven’t discovered that pregnant women—especially famous ones—also cause a significant part of the population to lose their tiny minds. So we’ll have to go on the evidence before us for that one.
I speak of Anne Hathaway, who is pregnant with her third child. At the weekend, she walked the red carpet for the premiere of her new sci-fi film The End of Oak Street, wearing low-slung jeans and a blue cape-style top that left the underside of her stomach exposed. Or as one person in her Instagram comments put it: “The most scary and awkward belly I’ve ever seen.”
Oh good, here we go again. Naively, you might have thought that criticising a woman’s pregnancy wardrobe or accusing her of wearing a fake bump was the sort of thing that belonged in the Perez Hilton era. Think again. Since being photographed on Sunday, Hathaway has been the subject of abuse—let’s call it what it is—along the lines of, “This is shameful”; “Fake as f—, stop lying”; and, “It’s giving Handmaid’s vibes.”
If anyone had said something like that to me when I was heavily pregnant and feeling more vulnerable than usual, it could easily have sent me into a spiral. I’m not a Hollywood star on the publicity circuit, but on some level, perhaps that’s why, when I took part in a PR event that involved playing tennis with Andy Murray at seven months pregnant, I wore a baggy black outfit and held a racket across my stomach for the Instagram shot. The idea of anyone even thinking about my bump felt unsettling and wrong.
“When are we going to stop commenting on women’s bodies that don’t look like ours?” asked one sane woman underneath Hathaway’s Instagram post of her outfit. To which someone (could it be a man?) felt compelled to reply: “Maybe when women demonstrate a scintilla of self-respect and class. Could you imagine Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly appearing in public like that?” I knew there were dinosaurs in Hathaway’s new film, but turns out they’re all over her Instagram, too.
Are we so addled by filters and AI-generated images that we imagine a pregnant woman might be faking her baby bump, too? I’m not even sure what the issue is here: that Hathaway’s pregnancy seems too perfect, perhaps. She’s tiny, she’s in Hollywood, it’s very possible that she had make-up applied to disguise veins or stretch marks—I know I’d be asking for that on the red carpet, thanks very much. Maybe that’s just how her bump looks; after all, like fleshy snowflakes, each individual one is different.
