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Beached whale or bitchin' babe?
Turns out pregnant is sexy. Who knew?
By Helene Stapinski
[10/20/99]

For the bad times
Sometimes a friend in crisis is better than a friend for life.
By Lauren Kessler
[10/19/99]

For all the girls
First, my daughter came out. Then, she took me out with the girls -- to see the Sinatra who packs a dildo.
By Lee Uttmark
[10/18/99]

I cannot tell a lie
What happens when a hooker confesses to her parents.
By Tracy Quan
[10/15/99]

Anyone for a poop daiquiri?
I can't do the stony-face thing when it comes to bathroom humor.
By Carol Hall
[10/14/99]

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It was a feeling of power that changed once I started looking pregnant.

Toward the end of my second trimester, I went on my first expedition in search of maternity clothes. I was wearing torn jeans and an aggressively reddish-brown leather jacket. I'd been dressing like a slob, in my biggest pants and my husband's T-shirts, and I had finally faced the fact that I needed some clothes that fit. I wanted to be more comfortable and to look more presentable. But the transition from the slatternly sensation of knowing my top button was undone to the oppressive security of a big, elasticized stomach panel was rougher than I'd anticipated. I took one quick pass through the sweet pastel summer dresses, the stone-washed jeans with narrow ankles and the happy-colored stretchy leggings and began, unexpectedly and uncontrollably, to cry.

Also Today Beached whale or bitchin' babe? Turns out pregnant is sexy. Who knew? By Helene Stapinski

I couldn't help thinking about how I must've looked, weeping before the racks of cheerful maternity frocks. Everyone knows that pregnant women are awash in hormones and are expected to cry at the drop of a hat. Maybe I should learn to revel in the temporary freedom to cry whenever I'm moved to, without explanation. This type of pregnant woman's prerogative represents a unique privilege and, at the same time, a precipitous loss. The loss has something to do with this: I've observed that men just love a woman crying in public. It's as if she immediately becomes more mysterious, evoking dramatic questions, then imagined explanations, then fantastic resolutions.

But the pregnant -- along with the drunk and the ugly -- are exceptions to this rule. The pregnant woman holds no mysteries: She wears around her waist a physiological excuse for her tears. End of story.

Now I can't really deny that hormones may have had something to do with my in-store breakdown, but that is a reductive way to think of things. Another easy explanation would be that my tears were all about a woman's alleged fear of becoming fat and unattractive. That may have had something to do with it too, but not much.

I feel self-conscious about my big, round belly when I am naked, not when I am clothed. My husband never ceases to find ways to tell me I'm pretty and also to indicate gently when he doesn't think I'm wearing the right socks for my shoes. No, this black despair at the maternity clothing store was not about losing my figure; it was about losing my style.

Clothes give us our public identity. This is especially true for women, who are more intensely scrutinized by men and women alike. Our clothes have a big job -- they moderate between our naked selves and an often hostile public. In the store that day, however, applying my own exhaustively arbitrated principles of style was out of the question. Judging from the racks of clothes in front of me, I was being welcomed into the ranks of the gentle, the sweet, the profoundly uncomplex.

Insulting in principle, this struck me as more egregious because the experience of pregnancy had, in fact, made me less gentle and sweet and certainly more complex.

Next page | I turned to Uma Thurman and Lisa Kudrow