Dr. Trina Read offers up a very intriguing discussion on the idea of mothers not having erotic capital and how that can affect self image and potential career advancement.
Society takes women and compartmentalizes them throughout the different stages of their lives or by their personalities. Motherhood creates yet another compartment. Or, rather, more compartments. There are Moms and there are Yummy Mummies. They aren’t always considered the same thing. And that differentiation plays into what Trina is getting at. Once that difference is established, one a woman is deemed either a Mom or a Yummy Mummy, that affects how other people look at her and how she might look at herself.
I wonder what the reactions, in Trina’s story, would have been like had she been getting her kids through an airport while wearing a clingy dress and stilettoes. Would she have been noticed as a Yummy Mummy, and therefore as desirable as when she was without the kids?
While there is a market out there who do, in fact, fetishize pregnant woman (a fairly sizable porn market, actually), it does seem ironic that pregnant women or mothers are often removed from the erotic equation. I mean, it was sex that resulted in her being pregnant or a mother!
And much of this will come to a head at home. Partners can internalize the “moms are not sexual” idea and act on it—or rather, not act. This can lead to relationship issues.
