“Why is she acting like that when she’s a mother? What will her kids think?!”
This is the commentary I found adorning my Facebook feed after Beyoncé’s 2014 “Drunk in Love” performance. While many openly expressed their love of her bold sensuality, others were seemingly repulsed by her promiscuous performance after learning that she’d soon be a mother.
Her self-titled album, following the birth of her first child Blue Ivy, painted Beyoncé’s dominant control over her own sensuality in a new light. The modest performances and innocent flirtation were trademarks of the past, and in their place was a liberated, free woman unafraid to her display her pleasure, her comfort in her own skin, and her awareness of her own unbridled desires, with no warnings or even a promotion prefaced album to deliver it in. But still, Beyoncé’s every action was greeted with the cries of those denouncing her every action because of her newfound motherhood.
In Western society, women are expected to leave their sexual energy at the doors of motherhood, allowing society to strip them of their own sensuality in order to fit them into a box of piousness and purity. Pressing this phenomenon further, several pregnant women reported experiencing a significant decrease in street harassment and catcalling when they became visibly pregnant.
The reduction of women into two-dimensional, flat natured identities is a largely a function of the patriarchy. Instead of openly recognizing the multi-dimensional nature of the female identity, women are expected to adhere within stiffly defined roles of self-expression and identity.
Even though women’s views on sexuality are evolving with the times, premises held about the sensuality of mothers seems rigid and unchanging. To a large extent, this can be related to a combination of societal norms, religion, and tradition. Because mothers are seen as caregivers, many relegate them to a place where they are ‘unaffected’ by primal desires, such as lust – an idea that is in direct conflict with the presence of children. Without giving into desire, there would be no mothers.
The relationship society has with mothers is a microcosm of their relationship with the feminity; our lives as females are compartmentalized – childbirth is never seen in the context of conception, “good girls” can never be seen within the context of their own sexual desires, and “good mothers” are women that are thought to never indulge their basal desires.
Somehow, we’re all expected to exist in fragments, ready to become whatever society needs us to be in that instance of time.
