It's no secret that women who work on camera have it tougher than their male counterparts.
Men age gracefully, while women are pressured to keep looking young. A man with wrinkles is distinguished, while a woman with wrinkles is old.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to me then that pregnant women newscasters are often targets of vile, hate-filled comments about their appearance. It shouldn't surprise me, yet it does. It also makes me sad, both as a woman and a someone who is currently pregnant.
No one I work with, or for, has called me names since my belly started growing. Instead, people have been gracious. Telling me I'm glowing or how great I look, or questioning I'm really as far along as I say I am because I'm tiny.
But for Katie Fehlinger, a meteorologist at a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia, that hasn't been the case.
Thirty-five weeks pregnant with twin girls, Fehlinger said she tried to ignore the negative comments she received. Comments like she looked like a "sausage in casing," or "sticking (her) pregnant abdomen out like that is disgusting." Finally, Fehlinger answered back on her Facebook page, in a message meant more for pregnant women out there, rather than her haters.
"You are beautiful," she wrote. "Even during the most uncomfortable - and let's face it, less than glamorous - symptoms of pregnancy, what women go through to bring their precious children into the world is, simply put, AMAZING and you should be lauded.
"Frankly, I don't care how 'terrible' or 'inappropriate' anyone thinks I look. I will gladly gain 50 pounds & suffer sleepless, uncomfortable nights if it means upping my chances to deliver 2 healthy baby girls."
She notes that while everyone has a right to their opinion, it's also worth remembering the old-age advice: If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.
Fehlinger is not the only pregnant meteorologist (seriously, why do weather women get such a beating about their appearance!) who has stepped up this year to tackle the abuse viewers have been giving her about her image.
Back in April, Global BC's Kristi Gordon responded on the air to similar comments viewers had about her image. One viewer wrote: "Nowhere on North American TV have we seen a weather reader as gross as you. Your front end looks like the Hindenburg and your rear end looks like a brick s**t-house. We now turn off Global." And I thought us Canadians were nice folk.
Gordon said she was prepared for some of the negativity, because she had gotten it the last time she was pregnant as well. But this time, the criticism seemed to be hitting a little too close to home.
“I feel like I’m a pretty confident person, I wouldn’t be in this industry if I wasn’t. I don’t feel like this is affecting me, or has affected me,” she said on air. “But I thought about some of the things I did last night: I checked the mirror to see how big I’m getting, I asked my husband, ‘Am I not seeing it? Am I getting really big?’ It wasn’t until I went to bed that I realized that - despite us saying that these guys are crazy — it’s amazing that when you say something mean about someone it still affects them."
Pregnancy affects everyone differently. Some women gain a lot of weight, others not so much. Some women show everywhere, while others carry it all in their tummy. Like everyone else on the planet, there are days that some of my clothes fit me better than other days. My belly is growing a person after all, so it's not going to look the same way every day or every second of every day.
Let's stop judging and shaming pregnant women — both those who are on the airwaves and those who are not. There's just no need to be judgmental about something like that.
RELATED: This Pregnant Meteorologist Addressed Her Haters On Air
There are many things that have changed throughout the course of my life that I am amazed by.
The progress we've made in gay rights, equal pay for equal work, to name a few. There have been many things that have changed in my nearly 33 years, it's really remarkable to think about how different the world was "when I was a kid."
One of the things that has really changed is how widely accepted breastfeeding is nowadays. My mother didn't breastfeed my siblings or I. The first time I ever saw a woman breastfeed, I was 10 years-old and just amazed (and slightly horrified) by the whole thing. Maybe it was just in my world, but breastfeeding was just not something people did. Formula and bottles were everywhere when my siblings were young, and then when my parents' friends and family members began having babies.
With less than four months to go until my baby is expected, I am now faced with a choice: To breastfeed or not to breastfeed.
Sure, it doesn't seem as prophetic as Hamlet's to be or not to be, but to me it almost is.
Everything I've read since becoming pregnant encourages new moms to breastfeed. It's healthier for the baby, it's a way for mommy and baby to bond, it's what we were born to do, etc.
But then I read stories of women who can't breastfeed and then worry that their child is going to go without the necessary nutrients, or that they won't bond, or that it means they've failed as a mother because it's what we as women were born to do.
Neither my husband nor I have strong feelings around how we feed our child. This will be the first child for both of us, so we're both not sure what to expect in a lot of areas, breastfeeding is just one of them.
So following this past World Breastfeeding Week 2015, I ask you dear reader: How did you decide to breastfeed (if you did)? If you didn't, why not? Give this soon-to-be-mom your breastfeeding truths and words of wisdom. I could really use them right now.
A curious thing came popped into my Facebook news feed recently: Photos of women posing with the foods they craved while pregnant (usually with a bare belly hanging out because hey, why not).
I did some poking around and apparently this is a thing pregnant women do nowadays.
It's not a new trend (I found some blog posts from last year on it), but it made me pause and wonder if the Internet and social media is just encouraging us to share a little too much about our lives. Or perhaps it's a sign that we're just looking at life too often through a lens.
I recently passed the halfway mark of my pregnancy. While I haven't been overwhelmed with cravings that scream Oh-My-God-I-Must-Eat-BLANK-Or-Else-I-Will-Just-Die, my husband would likely say that I have had cravings (like the Big Mac I had for dinner, or the Dairy Queen I sent him out for in the rain). That doesn't mean enjoying those items means I want photographic evidence of the moment I dug into that Big Mac, or scraped the bottom of the ice cream container trying to get every last drop.
I look at these photos and ask myself why these women felt the need to document this side of pregnancy. To each their own, but some of these photos just strike me as a bit of Too Much Information, especially to put online. I also find some of the facial expressions in these photos to almost have a sexual look to them, which also feels odd.
Since the explosion of the Internet, blogging, and social media, it feels to me like we feel the need to document and post about every single part of our lives. And with the influx of photo sharing apps such as Instagram and Snapchat, along with the fact that posts on Facebook and Twitter “get more reach” with a photo attached, it just seems like much too much when it comes to selfies.
I admit, I’ve never been one to particularly like having my photo taken. It’s why if you scroll through my Instagram feed, you’ll likely see more photos taken from my point of view, rather than of me doing something (for example, I take photos of my dinners on the plate, not photos of me about to take a heaping bite).
It may seem odd to say this in post I'm writing as the YMC pregnancy blogger, but my husband and I have very clear limits on what we want to share about our baby online, especially when it comes to photos. For example, it's been a conscious decision not to post any of our ultrasound photos. We've shared the images in person with family and friends, on Skype, or in text messages, but they don't exist on Facebook.
While there can be a feeling to photograph and detail every part of one's pregnancy, there's also a lot of pregnancy that's not pleasant and, in my humble opinion, should remain private. Images of you surrounded by the food you're craving is one of those things. I really don't see a day your kid is actually going to want to see those pictures or enjoy seeing them.
So let's take a cue from our parents who had babies offline in a world without social media and keep some things just between us.
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