“Why shouldn’t that be?”
Image: Getty Images
When Daan was just pregnant, she was afraid that she would no longer be sexual. Because motherhood and sexuality don’t go together, do they? It is a cliché image that she believes needs to be broken.
Her fluorescent green top is pushed up to her neck, a tiny drop of milk hangs from the nipple of her right breast, and a baby a few months young hangs from her left breast. I don’t think she’s that old herself: sunglasses in her long, dark brown hair, small tattoos on her arm, a resigned and at the same time powerful appearance.
Every year, artist Lara Verheijden makes a Berlin and Amsterdam nude calendar and sometimes those nude photos also show – dressed – children. The presence of those children most likely turns the naked women into mothers. It’s something I hardly ever see: mothers who are sexually explicit. In any case, it is seldom clear on sexually tinted photos that the woman in question is also a mother.
Of course I don’t know if Verheijden does it on purpose, but her nude photos seem to me to be an indictment of the cliché of the sexless mother. A seasoned cliché that needs to be broken: your sexual quest doesn’t have to be over when you have children. When I just found out I was pregnant, one of my fears was that I wouldn’t be sexual anymore. Later: if that belly would become visible; later, if I were to go through the streets with a pram. I was afraid that I would never feel sexy and attractive again, but also that the world would no longer see me as a sexual being.
The sexy mom
That fear was well founded; For centuries, the woman has only had the choice between being two types of woman. You are either Saint Mary (she even conceived without having sex) or you are the whore. Virtually all women in the arts are portrayed as one of these two stereotypes, rarely as a combination. That’s why my fear didn’t come out of the blue: I became a mother, and therefore ‘holy’. I couldn’t even make the choice myself anymore, it was fixed with my pregnancy.
“In the tit coming together stereotypes of women; he is horny and holy”
This is also why society is so panicked about bare breasts. These two stereotypes do come together in the tit; a breast is both a nice thing for sex and a useful attribute for breastfeeding. The breast is horny and sacred. Most people can’t handle that, that they find something attractive that babies can also be fed with. In other words, a mother cannot also be sexual.
attractive to the other
Yet cracks seem to appear in the image of the sexless mother every now and then. Forerunner was Demi Moore, who in 1991 was the first nude and heavily pregnant on the cover of the Vanity Fair popped up. At the time a very inflammatory image, now almost every pregnant celebrity appears half-naked on the cover of a random magazine. Still ‘sexy’ (see the high heels and the lace negligee), but with a round belly. Those photos are a sign that pregnancy has also been sexualized these days. And that is increasingly happening with motherhood itself.
Recently, a chic Amsterdam gym advertised a campaign in which a completely polished woman breastfeeds her baby, break the norm, was there. The idea was to normalize breastfeeding in public (why that is a task of a gym remains unclear), but what I think is mainly normalized is that women should always be attractive – also when they breastfeed, also in their duties as a mother . attractive to the other.
I find the mothers in Verheijden’s nude photos sexy in a different way – first of all because they appear in a nude calendar; they are meant to be sexy. Moreover, the portraits of the pregnant celebs do not seem to differ from non-pregnant women. There is nothing really to indicate the actual presence of children: there is no visible milk, pregnancy stretch marks or fatigue. They are simply pictures of women as they have been portrayed by men for centuries; sexually passive and meant to be watched.
Helicopter view
The fact that women have been portrayed almost exclusively by men for such a long time has led to women eventually also behaving in a sexually passive way. They have the male gaze internalized. They behave in a way that they think ‘the man’ finds hot, instead of expressing themselves in their own sexual way.
A study by scientist Marta Meana shows that women – more than men – become aroused because the other of them is aroused: they engage in narcissistic desire. These women experience sex in a kind of helicopter view: they see themselves from a distance, wonder whether they look sexy for the other person, whether they are slim enough, whether you see crazy hair somewhere. In short, they have distanced themselves from their bodies. They don’t look at the person(s) they’re having sex with, but they look at themselves through the other person’s eyes.
“These women don’t feel their own arousal, and don’t see the other. And so there is little possibility of connection”
The sad consequence of this kind of desire is that these women never learn to discover their own desires and feelings, they don’t even feel whether certain actions really turn them on, they are only concerned with the other person’s arousal. But another sad consequence is that they don’t see the other during sex either. They don’t see that the person has such beautiful arms, or a beautiful genitals worth exploring, they don’t even see that the other person may also feel vulnerable and perhaps insecure. They do not feel their own excitement, and do not see the other. And so there is little possibility of connection.
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Sex with another
In my previous relationship, I secretly kissed a strange man after three years. It happened during a girlfriends holiday in Portugal, very cliché all. As a result of that event I wrote my book Sometimes love is this. Because I was so eager to understand why it had happened; why I so longed for sex with another.
I don’t want to condemn sex with someone other than your own partner at all. You don’t have to justify your sexual desires to me, but I did want to understand my own, or rather: I wanted to better understand my sexuality. What turned out? That narcissistic desire I described earlier causes women in long heterosexual relationships to lose their desire to have sex with that partner. Because they are actually addicted to being desired. So when that intense first crush is over, you look for someone who does desire you completely again – so that you can feel excitement again.
If you only find yourself attractive through someone else’s eyes and approval, it’s natural to feel unsettled by the lack of attention. You want, no you have to be seen again in order to feel something yourself. Of course, women don’t naturally desire in a narcissistic way, they are taught (and forced to) in a patriarchal society where their sexuality exists only for the pleasure of the man.
Self-love
There appeared to be two simple solutions to get more in touch with my own sexual feelings. One: consciously looking at the other person during sex, and no longer observing myself from a distance, so that I end up in the moment, and number two: masturbating.
