In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies and faux pas in pop culture… and all that it affects.
It began, long ago now, in 1991 with Demi Moore. Her cover image on Vanity Fair’s August issue stemmed from Annie Leibovitz being struck by the sight of her (of course, you would be too if you had to go home to that cold fish, Susan Sontag, every night) nude pregnant form. Capturing a moment that would become an immortal one. One copied time and time again by many a celebrity after, but never quite imitated with as much defiant chutzpah. Indeed, it was Demi who launched a trend that said, “It’s okay to flaunt your belly. It’s not gross, it’s sexy.” To be sure, seeing it repeated over and over again as time wore on didn’t make it sexy, so much as eye-rollingly hackneyed.
Even so, some celebrities managed to make it uniquely “their own”–Britney Spears on Bazaar, Cindy Crawford on W (with the alluding headline, “Move Over, Demi” and Cindy looking, to be honest, kind of the size of a normal person in her model-thin state of pregnancy). And then, when the print magazine medium grew more irrelevant, there was still Instagram to unveil the “big bump” that would be utilized as just another food baby meme. Beyoncé’s twins photo, taken and curated by Awol Erizku in 2017, launched the meticulous art of “the reveal” when it came to post-00s celebrity pregnancy, ripped off rather blatantly by Cardi B amid a similar flower backdrop (though Bey had the sense of modesty to actually wear a bra so as to not need to drape her arm over her tits in the original pose established by Demi). The Kardashians and the Jenners, too, would be no strangers to showcasing bellies on social media, for half of their fame stems from the news headlines that propagate every time they do the same.
And so, for Katy Perry to come along and try to “reinvent the wheel” of the pregnancy-is-sexy gambit seems not only unnecessary, but full-stop inane. Starting in the embarrassingly bathetic “Never Worn White,” in which she makes an entire music video out of stomach-clutching, Perry has re-upped the shtick for her latest single and video, “Daisies.” Directed by Liza Voloshin, Perry is painted as some sort of wannabe meadow nymph while she loafs around with her bleached blonde hair and exposed dark roots attempting to highlight some level of “naturalness” and “authenticity.” By the middle of the video, she has, of course, chosen to disrobe under the guise of needing to as she wades into a babbling brook. One that babbles on almost as much as the lyrical mumbo jumbo of the song designed to “inspire” thanks to her own tale of hardship (you know, the one about how she grew up in picturesque Santa Barbara and was denied Lucky Charms because her born-again Christian mother felt that the word “luck” was too closely related to Satan).
In her naive white girl way, she has the gall to ask, “When did we all stop believing in magic?” Uh, bitch if it didn’t happen when the world was forced to stop in 2020, then it already did long ago, at the bare minimum when Trump was elected to office. Or maybe it was around the umpteenth image of a celebrity memorexing their “pregnancy story” with a faux natural (read: elaborate production) slant designed to make the average pregnant woman feel even more disgusting during her own indentured servitude as a host to a spawn.
Clearly intended as a “different” way to do pregnant nudity “tastefully” (otherwise known as: that Christian guilt from her youth still lingers), Perry’s appearances in the buff in the brief few seconds of the video are tantamount to a Sasquatch sighting (one could imagine “Mr. Skin” scouring for it in the days when his website was more relevant). Alas, if she was going to graft the whole exposed pregnant body thing, she could have at least tried to make it more interesting (and less hooey) than the many who have done it before her. Which doesn’t include the more individualistic Madonna, who never appeared naked on any magazine (neither with Lourdes nor Rocco). Incidentally, Perry would try to repurpose Madonna’s iconoclastic ways recently by posting a maternity version of the infamous cone bra she was going to wear to the cancelled Met Gala. At least destiny saw fit to put a kibosh on that form of reductiveness. Though, unfortunately, not this one, here below.
