Jeez, Salon, must you try to be the Globe or People with every tacky cut and paste montage, day after day? I don't care if you label it, it's still shoddy.

I expect better.

I think i may have missed it.

I have to echo and amplify the other posters' sentiments. This article reminds me of the bloviating spun into term papers in academia: its thesis is obfuscated by lines upon lines of over-obvious evidentiary "insights" which pile up an impressive amount of jargon familiar to someone in the discipline (read: phrases the term paper writer has heard the professor use a lot), but whose connection to any sort of point worth making beyond hearing oneself speak is unclear. This isn't "Media Studies 205: Seminar on Celebrity," it's Salon; if Joan and the gang throw something up for us to read, the act carries an implicit promise that the information contained therein is worth having. Most Salon readers, however, don't need this article to tell us that Angelina and Katie's PR-driven maternity campaigns aren't worth two ounces of our attention, much less our emulation, and we don't have the institutional power to bestow extra credit or a Summa stripe on anybody's gown. Neither the worship of celebrity parenthood nor its ponderous deconstruction are interesting or relevant enough to merit a forum on this esteemed site, IMHO - at least, not unless the writer has some genuine and original insights to offer. No offense, Mr. Harris, but this is a B-, at best.

I agree that this article reads as if it were written by an escapee from the PhD factory who battened onto a National Enquirer and mistook it for something interesting.

As if Hollywood hasn't always been full of people who work as actors and also have children whom they have had to pick up from school and throw birthday parties for. And as if there hasn't always been a fashion for 'perfect mother' stories and 'evil mother' stories - think Joan Crawford who has starred in plenty of both, real life and fictional.

It IS progress that Demi Moore posed naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, and that it is now socially acceptable to be an unwed mother. Great. But I don't think Hollywood has much to do with this either way. Hollywood just reflects and amplifies what is going on in broader society. They hardly matter because statistically they are so few. The archetypes they represent are powerful, and the stories they play out are mythic. But that doesn't mean they're changing the world one way or the other. They're just a way for us to talk about and think about ourselves.

As if a fashion designer coming up with the empire line waist for pregnant women suddenly made it okay to be seen in public. This is academic thinking gone insane. The real reason I think has to do with economic pressures that mean women have to go work much further into their pregnancies than decorum - and sometimes also comfort - used to allow. The clothing market has cottoned onto this and is supplying wearable clothes accordingly. But a star would never have had a problem that mundane in the first place. It's all the pregnant working women going on with their everyday lives in public that have made it acceptable for stars to also.

Finally, I think Salon needs to raise the bar, fast, on what they pick as their headline article. I've written this letter because I accidentally read the article because it was on Salon and I don't want that time to have been completely wasted. If it happens much more often I won't be risking the time spent to see if the article is worthwhile or not. I'll just stop reading Salon.

Some asshole like you refuses to spring for a subscription and who changes his name constantly is telling Salon to "take pride"? Oh man, that's rich!

Keep the photo montage motif Salon. I LOVE it because our resident asshole hates it.

Yawn.

Radical changes in a woman's body inspire tremendous fear and insecurity, which can be assuaged only through the reassurances of others who have undergone the same experience.

This is especially important because, as we know, pregnant women can kick like horses and they have to be quieted down every night before being locked up in the stall.

Those damned celebrities make it look so easy. Off with their heads!

I have no interest in hearing about celebrity

pregnancies.

Please! The media pushes extensive coverage of a few Hollywood people on us to a furstrating degree. Why does anyone need to know about the divorced-from-reality lives of Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, and Tom Cruise? And if we need to know anything about htese people, why isn't there a daily dose of tibits about Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, or any other Hollywood name?

National Enquirer, People, Us - maybe readers of those journals care about the strange circle of people who are obsessively in the spotlight. Why Salon?

If I hear one more reference to "Tomkat," I'll barf.

There is so much of importance happening in the world - please pass the news and analysis, and spare us the Twinkies.

Dear Editors,

I've just read three articles, including this one, whose main driving point was to compel me to check how much time is left on my subscription (31 days).

I've been reading Salon since its inception, but now I hardly recognize -- or comprehend -- what is being published in its name.

Maybe Mercury is retrograde. Still, it's quite disconcerting when the letters section starts being a better read than the main articles.

There are too many well-executed blaghs, news, arts and entertainment sites available on the internets for anyone to waste time and money on gobbledygook. Not to mention the Onion, which is free, fabulous and funnnny.

Please, Salon. Time to monitor the emissions. No more polluting the cultural landscape. You're better than that. But if you're hell-bent on self-destructing, ain't none of us going to be able to stop you.

-Katja

I have been saying for a couple of years now, and this confirms it, that having a child is now becoming a status symbol -- it has become so expensive, from housing to education to raise a child in at least a middle class way in a place like NYC that many are postponing it until they have enough money, which starts gambling with the biological clock. It's another stress added to the many areas for competition we already have. Goes to show, you can turn anything into a source of stress and angst...

Getting married will probably become the next new status symbol, because the odds of divorce are so high and the financial (aside from the emotional) fallout of such splits has become so crippling, only the very rich engage dare to take such a chance.