Tag Archives: capitalism

Rich Women’s Pregnancies, Spotlighted on TikTok

@amanda.steele24 pov: you bought *the* maternity dress (in my am@z0n) ???????????? #maternityfashion #pregnantootd #33weekspregant #youngmom #pregnancyfashion ♬ If We Ever Broke Up – Mae Stephens

Debbie says:

Kelsey Shelton’s article at Women’s Media Center, “How Young Influencers are Commodifying Pregnancy” is right on point … except that Shelton doesn’t say that influencers have been commodifying pregnancy since long before “influencer” was a word.

We live in capitalism, which commodifies everything: Sarah Lindig has an article at Marie Claire on maternity fashion history, going back several centuries and showing actual ads in newspapers and magazines as early as 1909.  Each generation uses the media of its time turn pregnancy into a profit source, along with parenting, children’s clothes, children’s toys, and and and ….  And by definition, turning something into a commodity means encouraging people to spend the most possible money, and thus shaming people who have less. Shelton almost certainly knows this, and I wish she had put it into her article.

With or without a historical context, her concerns are well-taken and well-expressed. And the concept of celebrity pregnancy centered for its own sake is probably mostly new to this century. After beginning the article with a list of pregnant influencers, few of whom are familiar to me, and says:

Their pregnancy announcements were usually followed by a photo shoot accentuating their swollen bellies and fun TikToks that document their pregnancies. Once their baby is born, followers can expect a photo dump on Instagram spotlighting the newborn or even an engagement or wedding announcement.

But the campaign doesn’t always end with the pregnancy. Several influencers made motherhood part of their brands by launching baby skin care lines in the case of Kylie Jenner, managing baby-centered TikTok accounts like Jenna Marie Greer’s, or creating a pregnancy-themed YouTube series….

She identifies these young affluent TikTok influencers as a trend, a substantial number of highly visible young women getting pregnant around or before age 25, and documenting their pregnancies in very slick and fashionable real time.

The prospect of pregnancy as a trend is concerning for a number of reasons. There’s the way influencers’ babies are seen in promotions and ads for their moms’ businesses, like props. There’s also the fact that these young women are having a very unique experience with motherhood thanks to their wealth. For example, in one pregnancy vlog in which Amanda “gets real” with her followers about becoming a mother, she says, “It just feels right, you know? In no way is this something I’m dealing with…This is something that I truly, like, am so so excited for.”

“Deal” is a distinct and deliberate verb choice; dealing with something requires handling, it requires coping, it requires strategy. If you’re rich, pregnancy might not be something you have to deal with. You can pay people to support you, you can afford the best doctors (you can afford health care in general), you can afford time off work.

Not to mention the post-pregnancy costs of the baby once they arrive.

I’m all in favor of women celebrating their pregnancies, though I hope they know that there are real risks of miscarriage, and death of baby and/or mother in childbirth, so I hope they are prepared for how to handle that with their avid TikTok followers.

Mostly, however, my concerns are Shelton’s concerns:

But I know one thing to be true: Influencers do have influence. There is certainly a relationship between social media consumption and eating disorders, for example. It saddens me that some girls might become pregnant despite their lack of resources and in spite of the abortion rights that are quickly fading away, because of these influencers.

And because they imagine themselves pregnant in fashionable outfits, twirling for large Internet audiences, building not just a family and a new life, but also perhaps a business, or a brand, or an imaginary life in which they won’t have to “deal” with the child who is the desired, delightful result of the pregnancy, because everything will be smooth and taken care of — just like it is for Amanda Steele and her ilk.

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How White Supremacy Consumes Indigenous People for Profit

Laurie and Debbie say:

The Empire of all Maladies by Nick Estes, published at The Baffler, lays bare yet another aspect of the history of America which has been shrouded in some toxic combination of myth and lies.  Estes is examining the story that Indigenous people died from inability to withstand European diseases, instead of the truth that the vast numbers of people who died were killed by a combination of intentional destruction and a willingness to reap the benefits of reckless disregard for their lives. And yet, Indigenous people were not destroyed. They are living here, today, in reservations that should be their autonomous lands — and yet, when Donald Trump wants to hold a rally on the rez, the people who get arrested are the ones who own the land and protest the rally, not the invading colonizers.

The eye-opening aspects of this story are historical more than they are current.

Debates about the epidemiological vulnerability of Indigenous people first came to prominence in the 1970s as historians backed away from narratives of European cultural superiority in search of more scientific explanations. This biological turn identified microbes as a primary culprit in the mass death of the Indigenous, suggesting that the depopulation of the Americas was an inevitable result of Native communities’ contact with diseases from the old world. In a 1976 essay, the historian Alfred W. Crosby put forth the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis, which posited that Europeans brought diseases—in particular, smallpox and measles—that wiped out 70 percent or more of Native people in the Western Hemisphere because they lacked immunity. In what was framed as the most extreme demographic disaster in human history, the most affected regions experienced a 90 percent depopulation rate, including deaths related to disease, which is estimated to have reduced the population of the Americas from one hundred million to ten million.

Estes describes this thesis as having “wide traction.” Certainly, we both learned it in school.

Indigenous scholars have long contested this thesis—though few were paying attention to their rebuttals. Disease as a result of colonial policy and actions “was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. For the Lenape historian Jack D. Forbes, it was not so much the Indigenous who were suffering affliction, but the Europeans who had been infected with what he called wétiko, the Algonquin word for a mind-virus associated with cannibalism. The overriding characteristic of wétiko, as he recounted in his 1979 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, is that “he consumes other human beings” for profit. This concept is nearly synonymous with the European psychosis of domination and plunder.

The metaphor of capitalism as disease is not new, but the connection between the disease of capitalism, the virus that consumes other beings, and the diseases Indigenous people are believed to have succumbed to, is illuminating–at least for the non-Indigenous reader.

Estes goes on to thoroughly debunk the “virgin-soil” theory, citing data revealing when tribes were decimated, destruction of Native land, and the effects of diets enforced by the colonizers,

Shifting his attention to the present day, Estes calls out not just the extremely high rate of COVID-19 disease and death among Indigenous people, but also the readiness of the federal government to blame this disparity on “underlying health conditions,” the causes of which we have just been shown. And the Native people are responding:

Since late April, after statistics revealed that the virus had a greater impact on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities, so-called anti-lockdown protests surged. Men armed with assault rifles and donning military-grade body armor stormed state capitol buildings, demanding haircuts and the reopening of beaches and ice cream parlors. That is why the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe have set up health checkpoints. “We will not apologize for being an island of safety in a sea of uncertainty and death,” Cheyenne River chairman Harold Frazier wrote to the governor of South Dakota, one of five states to issue no stay-at-home order in response to the pandemic.

After detailing the shameful and destructive failings of the government in responding to Indigenous needs during the pandemic, Estes widens his lens again to cover the willingness of colonialists to exterminate the people in their way by any means necessary.

Most historians have failed to draw what are obvious connections between heightened rates of infection and conditions of war, invasion, and colonialism. We need only look at the cholera outbreak in Yemen to see the relationship of disease to U.S. foreign policy. No one is disputing the fact that the infection of millions and the deaths of thousands there at the hands of this preventable disease are the result of a U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war, which has destroyed Yemen’s health care infrastructure.

One of his illustrations for the blindness of contemporary U.S. policy is the “space program” Trump touts whenever he finds an opportunity, and the glaring discrepancy between that and the needs of the people the man is theoretically responsible for “governing.”

Yet a new world is coming into existence, even as fires burn in the Amazon or on the streets of Minneapolis. It has always been here. It was present at Standing Rock, in the chants of “water is life”; it could be heard among the Wet’suwet’en calls to “heal the people, heal the land”; and it resounded once again as hundreds of thousands took to the street to demand that “Black lives matter.”’

Read the whole article; it’s important.