Conceptualizations of the Pregnant Body

The pregnant body has become a popular subject of contemporary feminist inquiry. Most of these writings center on how the pregnant body is represented within popular, medical, juridical, and political discourses and how cultural meanings of gender shape these representations. A brief survey of this literature reveals that the pregnant body in our society is degraded, divided, contained, and controlled while pregnant women are told to passively accept their impending maternal role. Rosemary Betterton explains, "In western culture, the pregnant woman is conceptualized primarily as a vessel, a receptacle and an envelope for a fetus, a conduit or a passage, and pregnancy as a condition which must be undergone in order to produce a baby" (1996: 96).

When the pregnant body is a focus, it is only partially seen. Emily Martin (1987) outlines how medical texts and popular images of pregnant women often cut off their heads and legs to depict only a free-floating mid-section. This fragmented body is also looked upon as a site of ugliness. Rosi Braidotti (1994) demonstrates that from Aristotle into the nineteenth century and today, popular and biomedical beliefs linked pregnant women and the monstrous while Julia Kristeva (1982) writes about how the pregnant body is seen as a site of horror and abjection.

These discourses on the pregnant body omit subjectivity, according to Iris Marion Young (1990). Pregnant women's voices are often absent from discussions concerning their issues and they are neglected the opportunity to define for themselves what their pregnancy will mean to them. Pregnant women are specifically denied the opportunity to define or express their sexuality during pregnancy. "Pregnancy must be purged of sexuality because we must contain pregnant women," asserts Della Pollack (1999: 33) in her writings on how women perform pregnancy and childbirth. Karen Carr further expounds, "pregnant women are supposed to glow with the excitement of motherhood, not with the glow of orgasm or sex in progress" (1995: 6). Pregnant bodies are under constant surveillance in order to maintain these boundaries, as demonstrated by Robin Longhurst (1999) in her interviews with pregnant women who carefully dressed in clothing that was not too revealing when going out in public. It is important to note that this construction is raced, as Lisa Bower (1995) reminds us in her discussion of how pregnant women of color are represented as hyper-sexed, promiscuous, and un-maternal in "fetal harm" debates concerning drug use during pregnancy.
My own work on the unassisted home birth movement deals with a group of women who believe that pregnancy and childbirth are inherently sexual events and should experienced as such. On an unassisted home birth activist's web site, birthjunkie.com, Charity Gregson asserts, Pregnant women are often looked upon as asexual. Maternity clothes are generally designed to hide a woman's figure, rather than accentuate it. Tops are more apt to have Peter Pan collars than swooping necklines. Society tends to view us as anything but sexual. It's as if we are suddenly expected to stop being a lover and start being a mother-and a virginal one at that.

Unassisted home birth web sites advocate for and teach pregnant women to "reclaim" and express their sexuality.As I was explaining this research to a colleague one day, my interest was peaked when she asked if I had ever considered pregnant pornography. In all my focus on how some pregnant women are "reclaiming" their sexuality, I neglected to consider how others are also sexualizing pregnant women and their bodies. If, as feminist research clearly articulates, the pregnant body is reviled, contained, and, above all, desexualized in our culture, how is it presented in an explicitly sexual medium like pornography? How are pregnant women themselves conceived in this medium? What are the implications of these sexualized images for further understanding how our culture constructs the pregnant body and pregnant women's subjectivity? As I delve into the world of on-line pregnant pornography, these questions will concern my analysis.

Defining Pregnant Pornography
This paper is concerned with pornographic, specifically hardcore pornographic, images of pregnant women. In setting standards for what constitutes hardcore pregnant pornography, it is tempting to fall back on the general "we know it when we see it" attitude toward porn, but this ignores several nuanced issues. For example, Terri Kapsalis (1997) notes the similarities between depictions of the female body in gynecological texts and pornography, arguing that they often serve the same purpose of male sexual gratification. As I will discuss later, the unassisted home birth movement, dedicated to eroticizing pregnancy and childbirth, has many sexualized images of the pregnant body on their web sites that are indistinguishable from images purporting to be pornographic. One person's erotica is another person's porn-it is a blurry line. For these reasons, in order to avoid confusion, I limited my research to media that labeled itself pornography. Whether everyone knows my material as pornographic "when they see it," is always debatable, but my decision to use material self-described as pornography will hopefully maintain clarity.

As for the idiom "hardcore," according to Linda Williams (1989), hardcore pornography is defined as pornography that shows explicit sexual acts with visual penetration. Most of the pornographic material I will discuss fits this description even if it does always label itself as hardcore.

Finally, pregnant pornography relies on a visibly pregnant body. A pregnant woman may be the subject of pornography, but if she does not have a noticeable pregnancy, it is not pregnant pornography. A pregnancy is noticeable in this context if the woman's uterus is expanded enough to be seen as a round, protruding "belly" or "stomach." The dependence on a visible pregnant body and how it is represented will be discussed later.

Methodology
Hardcore pregnant pornography, I will demonstrate, exists as a distinct genre of porn. My goal is to explicate, describe, and theorize this genre in its contemporary form. Pregnant porn clearly has its own history. The pregnanthoneys.com web site, displays several "vintage" pornographic pictures of pregnant women that resembled the porn of the 1950s and 60s while the Erotica Museum in Barcelona, Spain has pornographic images of pregnant women from the late 19th Century. Despite this history, and the inevitably ever-changing cultural meanings that exist within this history, this paper will focus on contemporary images, accessed on the Internet within the past few months.

In locating hardcore pornographic images of the pregnant body, I turned to a growing source of pornography today-the Internet. Though Internet constitutes "barely a fifth of American porn consumption" (Rich 2001: 51), it was the most accessible medium for this research. Simply typing "pregnant pornography" into a search engine yielded 58 sites devoted solely to pregnant porn. Yet, this is hardly the extent of pregnant pornography's presence on the Internet, since once you enter one of these site, you are sucked into a string of web rings, links, and pop-up ads for more sites-some also specializing in pregnant porn, but many that simply offer some pregnant porn material in addition to a wide variety of other porn genres. These web rings and pop-up ads make it difficult to generate an accurate count of web sites, but the wealth of material available on these sites and their information on numerous print publications and videos leads me to conclude that a substantial subset of the porn industry today is dedicated to pregnant women.

Pregnant porn sites are not ghettoized and stigmatized as "fetish" sites, but are listed along with "lesbian" porn, "barely legal" porn, "Asian" porn--all widely popular genres of pornography. I did notice that some sites are linked to "fat porn" web sites and there was also a pregnant bald women fetish site. While these aberrations are important to mention, I choose to focus on the predominant strand of pregnant porn sites, which have apparently commonalities and themes throughout, creating a distinct and coherent genre.
Pregnant pornography appears to incorporate professional, professional amateur, and amateur photographs and performers, using the definitions outlined by Sharon Abbott (2000). There are no distinct "porn stars" in this genre since a career as a pregnant porn star would be very difficult due to the temporal nature of pregnancy. It was unclear to me whether any of the models in pregnant pornography were previously involved in the porn industry and continued to do so throughout their pregnancy or if they chose distinctly to participate in the profession only during their pregnancy. Professional porn stars may host a pregnant porn site, such as Astrid Plarr, who serves as host of pregnanthoneys.com, but is not pregnant.

Besides photographs, there are many videos dedicated to pregnant pornography. Amateur and pro-amateur videos are available to download on the Internet and though I did view several of these on-line videos, my analysis will be primarily restricted to still-photos so as to focus my scope. There is a string of professional videos through Totally Tasteless Production Company, called Ready to Drop. As of now there are over fifty Ready to Drop videos, each with a different pregnant woman. They are heavily advertised on the pregnant porn web sites I chose for my analysis and would be an interesting source of material for anyone doing further research on this topic.

I limited my analysis to seven pay-to-view sites specializing in pregnant pornography: pregnant-women.com, pregnantbabes.com, pregnantsluts.com, pregosonline.com, pregnantnudewomen.com, expectingsex.com, and pregnanthoneys.com. All of these sites asked the visitor to be over the age of eighteen before entering. For the first five, I was limited to the free sample material, which was still quite explicit in content. I paid a small fee for three-day trials of the entire sites at expectingsex.com and pregnanthoneys.com. I choose expectingsex.com because it purported to be "The #1 rated hardcore fucking and sucking pregnant site on the Internet," whereas pregnanthoneys.com claimed to be "The largest and classiest pregnant site." These sites appealed to me because I was interested in how the idioms of "hardcore" and "classy" played out on these sites. At first, they were different, with expectingsex.com featuring more sexually explicit content, profanity, and nudity, whereas pregnanthoneys.com presented images of women in lacey lingerie with well-groomed hair and make-up and used more sensual language supposedly written by a female porn star. But once I entered both sites, they had very much the same material and rhetoric, even using a few of the same photos.

To analyze these web sites, I utilize the methodology defined by sociologist Shulamit Reinharz (1992) as content analysis: I deconstruct and interpret the themes contained in a set of cultural artifacts. The images of pregnant women depicted in the photographs on pregnant porn web sites are understood in this paper as cultural artifacts worthy of analysis. How are pregnant bodies positioned, (un)dressed, and displayed? What images are considered most desirable? I am also interested in how pregnant bodies are described on pregnant porn sites. What is the language used to explain these images? How does it influence our perception of the images? Theorizing these questions, I believe, will elucidate what these representations say about pregnant women in our culture.

In theorizing these questions, I draw on several studies done on pornography within feminist cultural studies, as well as the feminist studies on the pregnant body mentioned in the Introduction. Though pornography has been a contentious topic in feminist thought, it is not my goal to engage with or rehash those debates. I do not aim to condemn or dismiss pregnant pornography or hail it as an empowering medium for women. It is significant in this paper as a site of where social relations and cultural meanings are reflected and produced. The relations and meanings presented in pregnant porn may not always be positive towards women, but they are, I argue, of value to feminist thought on the pregnant body and pregnant women's subjective selves.

I will begin with a description of the overall image of pregnant pornography and some of the main themes, presenting the aspects that I find to go against the popular constructions of the pregnant body and those that support or reinforce these constructions. This includes hypothesizing why the pregnant body is an object of pornography and, indeed, why it may be the ideal object. I will also discuss how pregnant women's sexuality, maternal roles, and subjectivity are presented in pregnant porn and conclude by offering suggestions for future research needed to explore the hypotheses and theories set forth in this paper and to better understand all aspects of pregnant pornography.

Pregnant Pornography
What is first striking about pregnant pornography is how normal it looks. "Normal" in the sense that it clearly resembles and replicates contemporary mainstream pornographic images of non-pregnant women. Pregnant women are made to look sexy and desirable in the very same manner as non-pregnant women. They are dressed in seductive, revealing clothing and lingerie and are often not dressed at all. They are also often dressed to play out fantasies of a young, innocent schoolgirl or a demanding dominatrix. On pregnant-nudewomen.com a pregnant adult woman poses in a cheerleading uniform and pigtails and on expectingsex.com a pregnant woman is seen in a leather corset, black boots, and carrying a whip. None of these outfits would be out of place in a non-pregnant porn site.

The pregnant women are also posed in sexually provocative positions, often exposing their breasts and genitals. They are often pictured engaging in different sex acts. Expectingsex.com and pregnanthoneys.com offered multiple series of thumbnail pictorial scenes in which pregnant women are seen masturbating, giving or receiving oral sex, having vaginal or anal intercourse, urinating, engaging in S/M, etc. These activities are usually with men, but sometimes multiple men or another woman.

Because of the stereotype of the hyper-sexual black woman discussed earlier, I wondered if there would be a predominance of African-American women in pregnant pornography. The opposite proved true since despite the representation of women of all races, pictures of white women far outnumbered all others. This is consistent with Linda Williams' findings in her study of hardcore pornography that white women were the most popular subjects of heterosexual pornography. For Williams, contemporary standards of beauty are raced to favor white women and this is explicitly expressed in pornography (1989: 225).
The body types of the women in pregnant pornography also fit contemporary dominant standards of beauty. The women are thin (aside from the pregnancy) and large breasted (often because of the pregnancy) with attractive facial features. They often have blonde hair and always wear make-up. Of course, there are several distinct bodily differences among the women who compromise pregnant pornography.

Visible Bodies
As stated before, pregnant porn relies on a visibly pregnant body. At its very foundation, pornography relies what is seen. Beverly Brown defines pornography as "the erotic organization of visibility" (1981: 10) and in this genre, the evident pregnant body is the figure around which this organization takes place. The pregnant body is a spectacle-a profoundly sighted body that does not exist outside of being seen.

The more sighted as pregnant the body, the better. Women that are further along in their pregnancies or have particularly large pregnancies are often considered more desirable in pregnant porn. The web site expecting sex.com advertises women with "stomachs the size of beach umbrellas," whereas other sites co-opt medical language to promote "third trimester sluts" or "girls ready to drop" (alluding to the time period immediately before birth). The same image of a naked woman with an uncharacteristically large pregnancy, posed to the side to reveal the magnitude of her shape and facing the viewer with a seductive smile on her face, appears on several sites.

Physical characteristics associated with the pregnant belly that are considered unattractive in broader society are desirable in pregnant porn. Stretch marks, for which many women try countless remedies to prevent or erase, draw attention on these sites for being sexy. In a photo-montage of "Chantel" on expectingsex.com, the viewer is told to "look at the stretch marks on that babe" and pregosonline.com advertises close-ups of "those stretch marks." In many of the photos, stretch marks are in plain sight as the women make sexual poses. Stretch marks help stress the obviousness of the pregnant body.

This focus on the mid-section of pregnant women is in concordance with the feminist critiques of public and medical fascination with only the pregnant bellies of pregnant women. Yet, there are no pictures of just the belly area in the pregnant pornography I analyzed. Women are not fragmented in the way they are in medical textbooks or other cultural images of the pregnant body. They are often photographed in full-body shots. The focus is not just on the image of the enlarged uterus but other areas of the female body, as well. Not all of these areas of focus are explicitly connected with reproductive capabilities, but they do rely on parts particular to the female body.

During pregnancy, a woman's breasts and labia swell, her areola's darken in color, and her nipples may begin to lactate. These features are also the focus of pregnant pornography. The site pregnant-women.com markets "swollen pussy and swollen nipples," while pregnantsluts.com offers "big pregnant boobs with dark sexy nipples" and expectingsex.com showcases "engorged cunts." "If milk-squirting swollen nipples get you hot," pregnant-women.com has pictures of pregnant women lactating, as do many of the sites. In pregnant porn, the women are often holding up their breasts or pinching their nipples and their pubic hair is always shaved, allowing for maximum visibility of these markedly pregnant area.

Whereas the bellies of pregnant women are not fragmented in photographs, the breasts and genitals are. There are cropped, close-up photos of large, often lactating, breasts or shots between a pregnant woman's spread legs. These pictures seem to be no different than the "crotch shots" and images of breasts in other genres of porn, but the swollen body parts or lactating breasts visually remind the viewer they belong to a pregnant body. The concentration on the areas that are particular to the pregnant female body may explain why the pregnant body is a desirable subject of pornography.

Othered Bodies
In attempting to figure out why the pregnant body would be considered desirable in pornography, I looked at some feminist writings on pornography. According to Annette Kuhn, "pornography in general produces meanings pivoting on gender differences" (1985: 24) and Linda Williams argues that hardcore porn is a genre and ideology that is "most transparently about sexual difference as viewed from a male perspective" (1989: 5). This foundation of gender and sexual difference is, I argue, highly important in the attractiveness of pregnant women in pregnant porn.

In pregnant porn, as in pornography in general, there is often a concentration on the body parts that are markedly female, breasts, vagina, etc. In many ways, the pregnant body is a hyper-feminine body because these areas become bigger during pregnancy. The pregnancy itself is a clear, if not the clearest, marker of sexual differences between men and women. The pregnant body supports these differences by being hyper-different, extremely othered from the male body perhaps making it not such an odd choice for pornography. It may be the ideal body for pornography's obsession with sexual difference.

Sexed Bodies
Pregnant porn sites play on the cultural construction of the pregnant body being denied sexuality. On pregnant-women.com, they advertise pregnant women who "haven't had a cock in so long" and expectingsex.com's "Chantal" is "sick of being told not to have sex when pregnant." At the same time, they rely on the adage that women have a heightened desire of sex during pregnancy (an axiom that exists simultaneously with the desexualized images of pregnant women). At pregosonline.com, they argue that "pregnant babes are so horny" and "That thing about pregnant women being horny all the time…well, it's true." At expectingsex.com, the women are "knocked up and horny" and ask, "Who says sex has to stop when we're pregnant?"

Though it may be a desexualized body publicly, it cannot be denied that the pregnant body is actually markedly sexed. Pregnancy is a visible sign that a woman has had sex. A fact not lost in pregnant pornography, as evidenced by pregnanthoneys.com call to see "Beautiful pregnant women caught in the act that got them there in the first place." Their non-virginal status is continually prompted as pregnant women are referred to as not just sexed, but hyper-sexed. They are "sluts," "sex-crazed," or, as on pregnantnudewomen.com, "whores who can't get enough."

According to Karen Carr, the pregnant body is also the most visible marker of heterosexuality. She argues that images of pregnant women "often exist to re-establish the ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family, a site where men maintain control" (1995: 7). This stabilizing factor may be another reason the pregnant body is desirable to men in pornography; it can be used to perpetuate the supremacy of heterosexuality and patriarchal gender ideology. At the same time the pregnant body's hyper-sexuality transgresses the hegemonic image of the desexualized pregnant woman, it also reinforces sexual stereotypes.

Non-Maternal Bodies
In popular discourse, "pregnant mothers" is a term almost used to describe pregnant women, but in pregnant porn, the women are rarely referred to as "mothers." The few references I did find were phrases such as "soon to be mamas ready to drop," "cum slut mothers," and "prego moms," none of which replicate the category "pregnant mothers." It is obvious that in pregnant porn there is a clear division between a maternal body and a pregnant body. Pregnant bodies are acceptable subjects or objects of pregnant pornography, but maternal bodies are not included.

Besides the absence of the maternal body, the birthing body is also disappeared in pregnant porn. Though it is alluded to that the time is near and the woman is "ready to drop," there is no mention of labor or birth. Again, the pregnant body exists only in its pregnant state in pregnant pornography.

Perhaps the biggest difference in pornographic discourses of pregnant bodies is the absolute lack of the fetus. I could not locate one mention of a fetus, embryo, baby, or impending child. The pregnant body in pregnant pornography does not exist for its usual functions. The uterus is divorced from its function of carrying a fetus and lactating breasts are disassociated from breast-feeding an infant. It presents a paradox of a pregnant woman who is not a mother-a paradox that is embraced by feminist theories on the pregnant body.

Subjectivity in Pregnant Pornography

I agree with the feminist rejection of the term "pregnant mothers" in favor of "pregnant women," so as to demystify the automatic assumption that all pregnant women seek to become mothers or only people who have been pregnant can take on mothering roles. On the surface, pregnant pornography's refusal to use the term "pregnant mothers" could be seen to support this statement, but pregnant women are unfortunately not "women" in pregnant porn. They are "sluts" or "whores" or are infantilized as "babes," "cuties," or "honeys." The pregnant body is not conflated automatically with motherhood in pregnant porn so as to give women the autonomy and freedom to choose how they define their selves, it is segmented as a sexual object to pleasure men. That is its sole function. Any competition from maternal duties to a fetus or child would get in the way of this sexual purpose.
Though I am sure that psychoanalytic theory would have much to say about why the maternal body cannot be a subject of pornography, I see it as the continued inability to conceptualize pregnant women holistically and as distinct subjective selves. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky argues that we mostly see pregnant women as an "abstraction" and rarely see them "within their total framework of relationships, economic and health needs, and desires" (1997: 147). Seeing pregnant women as sexual objects may transgressively work against unfair cultural policing of their sexuality and maternal roles, but to see them solely as sexual objects, is to deny pregnant women agency as complete human beings.

I want to be clear that it is not necessarily the sexualized images that I am arguing against here. As I discussed in the beginning, many of the photographs are indistinguishable from the sexualized photos of pregnant women on the web sites of unassisted home birth activists. I do not mention these sites in order to create a binary of bad hardcore pregnant porn for men and good pregnant erotica for women. Though distinctions are merely constructed. Indeed, I have been highly critical of Laura Shanley's erotic birth web site, unassistedchildbirth.com, for presenting all pregnant women as maternal bodies and tying women to essential notions of nature and femininity, again denying women the ability to define their subjective beings. As feminist theory grapples with re-sexualizing the pregnant body, it is important to recognize the context in which these images are placed.

Conclusion
In this paper I have demarcated and described pregnant pornography as a genre, while theorizing and hypothesizing its existence, purpose, and cultural meanings. While I find pregnant pornography lacking a holistic vision of pregnant women, I am not prepared to dismiss pregnant pornography completely as an invalid site of reconfiguring the pregnant body, especially when we do not have any idea of how people are interpreting these images.
To further explore my hypotheses, further research is needed on how these images of pregnant pornography are perceived by audiences. Interviews can be done with male viewers of pregnant pornography in an attempt to determine what they find appealing in these images and how they feel towards pregnant women in light of these images. It would also be vital to interview female audiences, particularly pregnant women, to determine how they interpret, internalize, and utilize pornographic images of the pregnant body. Most of all, I am interested in the women who pose for these pictures-What are their motivations for participating in the porn industry during pregnancy? Do they feel stigmatized within the industry? Within broader society? How do they feel about cultural perceptions of the pregnant body and pregnant women's sexuality? How do they feel their involvement in pornography responds to these perceptions? Future research on this topic would benefit from moving beyond images and texts to include the voices of bodies and eyes that compromise pregnant pornography if we are to better understand its role in conceptualizing pregnant women and their bodies, sexuality, and desire.

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