What if the tabloids announced your pregnancy to the entirety of the world, breaking the news to everyone, including yourself?

Gossip pages and tabloids are constantly searching for headlines and tend to hover around the ones that comment on women’s bodies and physical appearances. Every other day a new celebrity is presumed to be pregnant just because she wore a baggy shirt or was photographed at certain angle.

An example can be found in the photograph above when Kendall Jenner posted a mirror selfie in a polka dotted dress. To the average follower, it’s nothing more than a model showing off her perfected physique, one that has acquired her fame and prosperity.  Why not show it off?

However, tabloids find the slightest shading on the dress of where her hips meet her legs and spin it into their next headline: “Fans Now Reckon Kendall Jenner Is Preggers Thanks To This Instagram Pic.”

Eventually, Jenner responded to the accusation with a light-hearted tweet stating “I just like bagels ok!!!”

Even so, despite Kendall’s ability to laugh off the assumption, the way in which the media feels the need to comment on the bodies of women or the changes in their bodies is not ok. Such practices can enhance the already prevalent eating disorders and body dysmorphia diagnosis’ existing in the modeling industry.

And Jenner’s story is not the first, nor the last, occurrence of this happening.

Just 4 weeks ago, a picture of Justin Bieber holding his wife, Hailey, at the MET gala stirred the media into a frenzy to guess the Biebers’ due date.

Such headlines took the couples embrace of each other’s hands and created narratives about how Justin’s gesture is not him wanting to be closer to his adoring wife, but in actuality is him hinting to the media that they are expecting.

And I mean, obviously TMZ or DailyMail is much more qualified to comment on Hailey’s reproductive state than Hailey, herself. It’s not like she has a right to announce such life changing events on her own time, right?

Reporters police patrol women’s bodies, searching relentlessly for the smallest difference to fixate upon and publicize to the world. As if females don’t already have a never ending list of reasons to be insecure of their appearance, eating a bagel for breakfast shouldn’t be one of them.

Pregnancy surveillance isn’t entertainment nor journalism.

 

Women’s Bodies Are Not A Headline.