Beyonce’s Birthing Antics: Our Celebrity Motherhood Obsession Finally Caught Up To Us
So at this point in the Beyonce Birthing Scandal 2012, parents are unsure who to believe. Immediately following the birth of newborn Blue Ivy Carter, various media outlets reported that parents, including one father with twins in the NICU, couldn’t get to their kids courtesy of Bey’s private security. Lenox Hill Hospital released a statement denying the allegations and after an investigation by the State Health Department, even those agents dismissed the complaints — the very same day that they were filed.
But if parents did get prevented from being with their newborns, as reported by even The New York Times, then such a scenario reveals just as much about us and our obsession with celebrity motherhood as it does about Lenox Hill’s disregard for non famous mommies. The truth is that if we didn’t view these mere actresses and singers as royalty, esteeming their births as practically Christ-like in comparison to our own, Beyonce and Jay-Z would have never been allowed to cart their entire private security team up to that hospital.
If we didn’t react as we often do to headlines detailing the baby shower of Jessica Alba or the delivery of Angelina Jolie‘s twins, there is no way Lenox Hill would have accommodated such outrageous demands by the Carters given that other women were also giving birth that evening. But because we’re so immersed in narratives about Jennifer Garner getting pregnant with her third and what Gwyneth Paltrow feeds her kids, these mothers somehow do seem to live exalted lives in which even when they step into a hospital, we let their awesome aura of fame prevent us from seeing our newborns.
Now, of course it’s always fun to click around and smirk at the fact that Christina Aguilera actually thinks that she suffers the plight of single motherhood. Or to laugh at how professional funny woman Tina Fey handles sex questions from her daughter. But when it comes to celebrity parenting coverage, there is profoundly fine line between entertainment and exulted accounts of their pregnancies.
Motherhood is still a relatively new arena of tabloid fever, as in the last ten years alone we’ve seen the growth of “bump watch” and “is she pregnant?” followed by thick black circles and closeup photographs. It’s also in this golden decade that celebrity babies have managed to creep onto the covers of fashion magazines and within photo spreads as the ultimate accessory. Yet, it almost goes without mentioning that the only ladies who seem to get a career boost following the birth of the child are celebrity women, who manage to parlay their pregnancies and births into astronomical sums of money regarding covers or announcements or “first post-baby interview” in which they share with us all their hypnobirth or what have you. [tagbox tag=”celebrity mom”]
We allow this to happen not by chuckling at their stupid quotes, but by buying into the absurd complex that somebody else’s parenting or birthing is somehow more paramount because they happen to be famous. And last Saturday, that father who couldn’t get to the Intensive Care Unit to see his twins, should there be any truth to the reporting, was met head on with the repercussions of such a culture: that he and his family didn’t matter because they weren’t Beyonce or Jay-Z. And he and all the other parents who were belittled in the face of their security can thank not only the times we live in, but the media we support that talks to us like we’re second-class parents.
(photo: WENN)
