I’m not sure when I first heard the phrase “the post-birth body”. Certainly, it wasn’t until after I had acquired one of my own. When I had my first child seven years ago, if the post-birth body was alluded to at all, it was in horrified whispers between friends, usually over wine: the cuts, the tears, the stitches, the flabby bits, the loose bits, the bits we’ve lost and the bits we have somehow, horrifyingly, managed to acquire.
But suddenly, post-birth bodies are everywhere. You can’t open a celebrity magazine without coming across one frolicking lithely on the beach in Barbados, or encased in Lycra outside the gym. “Look at me!” they seem to shout. “I grew a human and I still look like this! What’s your superpower?”
The post-birth body is in vogue. In theory, this ought to be a good thing: we should probably be grateful for anything that leads to a more honest conversation about women’s bodies.
When I was pregnant for the first time, I read every book I could find on pregnancy – as far as the chapter “Birth: what to expect”. If there was a chapter called “Post-birth: what to expect now everything is in the wrong place”, I didn’t read it. I laughed uproariously when a friend offered to lend me her inflatable neck pillow to sit on afterwards.
I was woefully unprepared for the havoc that giving birth and breastfeeding would wreak, even on the bits far away from the immediate front line, so to speak. My hair. My eyes. My hips. My entire digestive system. Even my feet have never been quite the same. And yes, I needed that neck pillow for weeks.
A dishonest discussion
The trouble is, the conversations we have about the post-birth body are anything but honest. Instead, they typically take the form of self-congratulatory interviews with celebrities about how their bodies magically "snapped back" into shape mere minutes post-partum. "It's all the running around after the baby," they coo, as their immobile six-week-old looks on.
We’ve become so used to the idea that celebrity bodies behave according to different rules that when Kate Middleton appeared sporting a rounded stomach hours after the birth of her son, there was widespread horror. The concept of the post-birth body has become another one of those other, entirely modern preoccupations – stand up, “thigh gap” and “designer labia” – which seem to have been invented by tabloid editors purely to remind women of all the ways in which we don’t measure up.
Allen breaks ranks
So hurrah for Lily Allen and the video for her new single, Hard Out Here, which is a parody of the music industry, a poke in the eye to the misogynistic media and a witty riposte to our ridiculous standards for women's bodies, the post-birth body in particular (she is the mother of two young daughters, and lost a son in the sixth month of pregnancy).
The video opens with Allen on an operating table, as plastic surgeons carry on a conversation with her agent. “Jesus, how can someone let themselves get like this, huh?” someone asks.
“Lack of self-discipline,” one of the surgeons concludes.
“A lot of women do this after they have babies,” observes another. “They just kind of let go.”
Her contribution to the discussion is gloriously summed up in a message depicted on giant balloons. (Look away now if you’re the kind of chap who, like one lovely man I know, fainted in his wife’s antenatal class at the use of the words “cervical plug”). “Lily Allen has a baggy p***y,” it reads as she prances about in front.
It is refreshing to see a mother and public figure like Allen reject the “snapped back” schtick, and put her post-birth body out there with the kind of bracing honesty Caitlin Moran brought to her discussion of female masturbation and pubic hair.
More of this, please. One more thing. It is unbearably corny to claim childbirth gave you a new respect for your body, so hang on to your sick bags, because here I go. I am chuffed that I managed not to die either time. I may be a bit baggier, I may be permanently dented in spots, but I did it. What’s your superpower?