Reply to Rant: “you look amazing”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ugh, I can't stand people like you, OP, not being able to handle kindness and compliments. Your post sounds like a humble-brag disguised as a feminist rant.[/quote]

The point is that it's not kindness. It is not kind to tell someone how great they look even when they are telling you that they don't feel right.

And also sometimes there's an expectation that goes long with "you look amazing." A lot of people expect new mothers to be happy and are angry when they are not -- there is still a pervasive cultural belief that a woman with a baby has achieved the apex of female life achievement, and therefore she better be happy. Despite greater awareness around PPD and maternal mental health issues. Sometimes people still get mad at postpartum women for not being content. "You look amazing" can also come with this pressure to be happy and have no complaints.[/quote]

OP, you are setting impossible expectations for ordinary human interaction. If you think you are surrounded by misogynistic villains every time someone looks for something positive to say, you have a problem. Get off DCUM, take a breath, and go see a doctor. You're only hurting yourself.[/quote]

OR we could encourage more people to think about a postpartum mom as someone in a vulnerable position who needs better support than just being told she looks great. OP is obviously struggling emotionally and the people around her are just focusing on her appearance. OP's complaint is that she needs the people around her to look past appearance to something deeper. That's not an unreasonable request, actually. She's asking for what she needs and you're telling her that her needs are unreasonable.[/quote]

Why is it "obvious" to the people surrounding OP that she is struggling?  Why do some many women feel the need to pretend they are superwoman and not seek out the help they need? [/quote]

The comment was that it was obvious from OP's post that she is struggling. Not that it is obvious to people around her (it may or may not be, we have no idea).

Numerous people have posted in this thread about telling people around them that they were struggling postpartum and being ignored or placated. A lot of people also have the attitude "oh it's hormones, it's not real" and will tell women that postpartum. [b]But PPD is partially hormonal; that does not make it imaginary. [/b]The hormonal roller coaster women wind up on when they are postpartum is extremely hard for some women to deal with and dismissing their experience as "just hormones" as though a woman should just be able to get over it because it's "just" a massive flood or drop in various hormonal levels causing massive and sometimes scary mood swings is just nuts.

If men experienced hormonal issues like this, it would be treated as a serious issue and treated appropriately. With women it's just "oh you know, women be crazy."[/quote]

Agreed, but the villain here is the hormones and the answer is professional help, rather than the legitimization of irrational reactions by reframing perfectly normal comments as misogyny. Many women want to get comments like these, and as a PP pointed out, take offense if you don't make them. The fact that OP does not want these well-meaning compliments is not plastered on her forehead, and no one is out to get her by making them. The pseudo-feminist righteous indignation is a symptom that should be heard for what it is, rather than an excuse to excoriate people who clearly mean well.
[/quote]

I don't think people who say this always mean well. I don't think they mean harm, but I think the idea that people say stuff like this because they are always trying to make you feel good is false.

I had a number of friends and family members make a big deal about how "amazing" (read: thin) I looked postpartum and it honestly had very little to do with me at all. It had to do with their own preoccupation with women's bodies, and was a reflection of their own thoughts and desires. Women would say it because to them, being thin after having a baby was the ultimate victory. Perhaps they had struggled with losing weight post pregnancy and were envious, or perhaps they had not had kids yet but were worried about and were inspired. It really had nothing to do with me.

And the kind of man who makes a big deal of how good a woman looks in the weeks postpartum is the kind of man who is focused on... how a woman looks. Again, it's not about her. It's about the way he perceives her. It's like "I still find you hot, cool."

Now, that doesn't mean these compliments don't feel good (for some). In fact the reason they feel good might be specifically because they know the women are jealous or inspired, or the men are turned on. But the idea that people say this because they are just really focused on making women feel good about themselves postpartum? Uh-uh. People are mostly self-centered. People are responding to their own thoughts and feelings and largely not actin out of empathy.[/quote]

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