Three months after giving birth to her baby boy, Rihanna is re-emerging into the public eye – edgy ensembles included, naturally. But while some news and fashion platforms focus on her latest looks – like those thigh-high Y/Project boots – others are fixating on her weight under the well-masked guise of body positivity.
“Rihanna’s not in a rush to lose the baby weight. She’s really embraced her body and doesn’t feel pressure to lose it quickly,” stated an insider source to US Weekly last week.
The Barbadian singer made headlines throughout her pregnancy for the daring, bump-baring outfits she wore, which helped inspire women across the globe to embrace and celebrate their pregnant bodies instead of shrouding them in loose, drab and unmemorable clothing.
Now, the mere fact that Rihanna dares to go “out and about” in public after giving birth seems to be newsworthy in itself. While her Fenty lingerie sets from Paris Fashion Week may have been replaced with loose grey sweats, in many cases, the narrative has switched to one that analyses her body rather than the fashion that clothes it.
From Bad Gal to Private Mum.
With some of her postpartum looks consisting of oversized casualwear, critics and commentators are praising Rihanna for refusing to conform to “snapback” culture – which essentially pressures women to magically “snap back” to their pre-pregnancy weight and appearance after giving birth. It is, of course, an extremely unrealistic expectation to have of new mothers whose bodies have gone through tremendous transformations during pregnancy.
But ironically, the scrutiny over Rihanna’s size and headlines such as this one that reads “Rihanna flaunts her post-pregnancy weight” and this one that says she’s “embracing her thickness,” which zero in on the state of her weight loss – or lack of it, prove that snapback culture is very much alive and well.
Though much awareness has been drawn to the psychological harm caused by snapback culture, it’s still quite challenging to overcome – just ask me, a woman about to embark on her 37th week of pregnancy, who has been through this all once before – and never “snapped back” the first time.
After my first pregnancy, I took three years to return to something close to my pre-birth body. Over the nine months in which I was growing a baby in my womb, I ate “for two,” indulged in all of my cravings, attended hypnobirthing sessions and booked a handful of prenatal yoga classes without any concern at all about weight. This time, by contrast, I’ve been admittedly more mindful about my body. But while I may now have a healthier pregnancy than my first, the motivations I’m fuelled by are perhaps less progressive than I'd like to think they are.
Snapback culture has me thinking twice before reaching for that third slice of pizza, that fourth chocolate chip cookie and is pushing me to constantly check my Fitbit to make sure I’m on track for hitting my daily steps target in these final days of pregnancy.
While walking through a shopping mall over the weekend in an attempt to complete these steps, I visited a Uniqlo store and ambitiously purchased a pair of soft and stretchy jeggings in size medium, to be worn sometime after I give birth. A sales associate looked at me doubtfully and recommended a larger size, but I refused, insisting the smaller one would motivate me to “snap back” after giving birth.
“Hannah's hoping for a girl, Dave's just hoping that it's his.”
I may have used those words jokingly, but I couldn’t help but realise that I, too, was feeding into the toxic body standards and expectations we have of new mothers. That even though I identify as a spiritual feminist, mother of a daughter, who detests cultural and societal pressures that view females from “the male gaze,” I too was perpetuating a harmful narrative about weight gain – and loss during pregnancy and motherhood.
Snapback culture is vile, anti-feminist, and unfairly anxiety-inducing. It thrives among those who police our bodies and fuel our body insecurities, but like other societal pressures, it has suckered me in with its persistence.
Just yesterday, at a health clinic, a woman in the queue behind me remarked that I was “tiny” (her eyesight must have been hindered by whatever ailment led her to the clinic in the first place) and that I shouldn’t have any problem at all losing weight after delivering. A stranger commenting on my pregnant body – it was snapback culture at its finest, and the worst part is the guilty satisfaction I felt upon hearing her unsolicited comment.
It can be shocking and sickening to realise that while you think you might endorse body positivity, you’re actually part of the problem – a cog in the wheel of the cyclical societal tendency to hyperfocus on women’s bodies, even when they are creating, nurturing and birthing miracles.
Self-forgiveness and self-compassion are vital.
While apps like Instagram have helped in spreading body diversity and positivity on one hand, on the other, snapback culture has been undeniably augmented by social media, where I get a strange thrill from seeing before-and-after body transformation Reels from fitness-influencers-turned-mummy-bloggers, even knowing that my own journey will not mimic theirs. And while social media can certainly be blamed for sustaining snapback culture, I know it’s rooted in far deeper cultural, societal and, most importantly – patriarchal notions about women’s bodies.
For all our advancements, from furthering body diversity in the fashion industry to raising more awareness for the collective feminist plight, the unrelenting obsessions with discussing and controlling pregnant and postpartum bodies continue to prevail.
Writing this has been a surprisingly self-reflective experience. My Uniqlo jeggings are now folded away in a drawer for whenever – or if ever, they fit me. Right now, I’ve got my eye on another fashion splurge, one that I’d like to imagine Rihanna would don proudly – perhaps with her equally-conversation-starting, thigh-high boots. It’s this roomy, lilac-hued hoodie emblazoned with a phrase we should all be championing: “cancel snapback culture.”
