In both shows female fertility and motherhood is fetishised – and both feature the oppression of women
There’s no getting around the fact that Yummy Mummies is a terrible – and a terribly boring television show.
Over the course of 90 minutes we meet three yummy mummies (YMs) from Melbourne, and one from Adelaide. All four women are pregnant and are apprehensive and excited about the upcoming births. But these are no ordinary women. They are rich and glamorous – and the normal rules of motherhood (looking tired, wearing vomit-stained clothes) will not apply to them. The voiceover tells us breathlessly: “These gorgeous girls have got it all. [Cue picture of a girl opening a gift box of gold jewellery and exclaiming ‘That’s stunning!’] The cars. The money. The perfect life.”
But decisions await them. Will they breastfeed? And what sort of pram will they buy? And most importantly, will the baby shower (Adelaide’s biggest baby shower, we are told) be Versace or Burberry themed?
Whatever the opposite of binge watching is, I have found it. Watching Yummy Mummies took four days. I kept having to pause it, take it in little sips. Too much of it at once was like drinking cordial concentrate.
It’s like when you’re on public transport and there’s an annoying person speaking loudly into their phone beside you and you just. Want. To. Get. Away.
Well here, you can’t – at least if you’re reviewing it. While one episode of this took days to finish, I binged on about five hours of The Handmaid’s Tale in one night – which SBS on Demand has just released onto its website.
In both shows female fertility is central. And in today’s high society, and in fictional Gilead, motherhood is fetishised.
Watching both over the course of a few days, I also had trouble distinguishing which society is really “free”.
The handmaids’ oppression is central to the structure of Gilead, but there’s a different sort of oppression in Yummy Mummies – one that is familiar, but depressing to watch. The tag of “Yummy Mummy” – which moved into popular parlance around 10 or so years ago – is a continuation of the extreme grooming trend that most young women are beholden to in their teens and 20s. These are the years in which you’re trying to attract a mate. And the labour and cost involved is extraordinary: the gym, the spray tan, the waxing every hair from your body (except your head, which you are “enhancing” with extensions), the clothes, the hair, the make-up. Pregnancy and motherhood once provided a relief from this aesthetic servitude. No more. You don’t have to be in a dystopian regime to be enslaved.
The yummy mummies of the show walk around in high heels, full make up, hot-tonged hair and tight dresses. They bitch about women who let themselves go during pregnancy, or after the birth. If they look frumpy, they are not trying hard enough.
Highly groomed and thin (with the bump) is attractive. One of the YMs says, “We’ve got a new Instagram account – its called Yum Mums. Everyone wants to know what we are up to, everyone wants to know what we are wearing because we look damn hot.”
The YMs demand a “payment” from their husbands for giving birth in the form of a “push present”. In the case of one YM, it’s a $99,000 rare diamond ring. The husbands – rarely seen or heard from in this program – provide the money and the genetic materials. It’s all very transactional. Their role is commodified and reduced. One of the YM got her husband to tattoo her name on his wrist: “Carlos is mine – I put my name on him. Makes sense.”
No it doesn’t.
The YM sphere is domestic and their work or careers are not referred to. Nor is childcare or money or cost of living. Instead they meet for mocktails and shopping, and walk along the Yarra in formation a la Sex and the City.
Yet – even as I damn the show, and by extension the women on it – I wonder how much this is really them, and how much is just set ups to elicit our scorn and disgust. The YM have had bad reviews in part because the characters are so craven. They are cartoon women, not real.
Are these women just used as stalking horses so we can express our anger and disgust at such conspicuous consumption? Have these women just been set up as targets? Is this just more misogynistic bullshit?
So don’t watch this show. There’s joy to be had in watching trash for pleasure. Some of the smartest people I know watch Real Housewives – and love it. But this show is boring. And the women are shown in either an evil or two-dimensional light. And the materialism is grotesque. And worst, it makes having a baby look like the least appealing prospect in the world.
Yummy Mummies is on Seven, Sundays at 9pm
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