Pity the actress who's seen in public wearing an oversized T-shirt these days. All it takes is one paparazzi shot of a belly that looks anything but flat and the "bump watch" begins.
"Pitt & Jolie: New Bump Pics!" screams an US Weekly headline. "Little bump?" asks Star, drawing a bright yellow circle around Gwyneth Paltrow's midsection.
The celebrity media seem convinced that every gorgeous woman in Hollywood has either given birth recently (Jennifer Garner, Michelle Williams, Denise Richards, Heidi Klum), is pregnant (Paltrow, Katie Holmes, Gwen Stefani and, most notoriously, Angelina Jolie) or should be.
But beyond selling magazines and fueling conversation on the Starbucks line, this growing obsession with "celebrity moms" — from their "Can you believe she's had a baby?" bodies to their array of high-ticket baby gear — is rippling out to affect "regular" moms across the country.
Suddenly, moms are hot. And the public link between motherhood and sexiness, which began with Demi Moore and Madonna and has taken a leap forward with Jolie, makes room for a broader definition of what motherhood can contain.
"Angelina has made pregnancy and motherhood fashionable," says Sally Lee, editor of Parents magazine. "She's expanded the notion of what a family is, and that has a great deal of impact."
Motherhood and tattoos
The enormous visibility of Jolie, who has managed to blend high-profile parenting with tattoos and leather, offers a fresh role model to women who believe miniskirts and motherhood aren't mutually exclusive.
When Ariel Gore began publishing "Hip Mama: The Parenting 'Zine," in 1993, "it was like a joke," she says. "People considered a 'hip mom' such an anomaly. The flak I would get when my kid was a baby, just for having some holes in my jeans or something so irrelevant like that, was incredible."
Gore credits hot single moms like Jolie for hastening some of that change. "They're putting other family structures out there, and it helps people's grandmas be like, 'Well, I guess that's how they're doing things these days.'"
If anything, an actress, married or unmarried, who doesn't have a baby seems hopelessly out of the loop. Motherhood has become a central part of promotion: Reese Witherspoon didn't simply talk up "Walk the Line" on a recent visit to the "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." She brought her crockpot and dished up a meal she often serves to her kids.
Single motherhood no longer a scandal
It's hard to imagine that there was a time when motherhood, especially the unwed kind, could spell the end of an actress's career. In 1935, Loretta Young resorted to pretending to adopt her own baby daughter — and later altered the child's emerging family resemblance through painful plastic surgery — rather than admit that she and Clark Gable were the parents.
"Hollywood actresses wanted to keep their luster as an attractive, young unmarried woman," says film historian James Robert Parish, author of "The Hollywood Book of Love."
Motherhood was out of the question, Parish says. "In the '20s, '30s and '40s, big actresses would have abortions — Judy Garland, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford — not only because the studios would be mad, but because they were so afraid someone else would replace them in the public's affection."
Today, pregnancy only fuels that affection.
One byproduct of this fascination: Regular mothers are starting to think they're falling dramatically short. And who can blame them, with the deluge of TV sound bites and glossy photo spreads depicting blissful, well-rested celebrity moms who delight in parenthood's every moment?
Look: Debra Messing stops by Dean & DeLuca with baby Roman! Look: Angelina picks up a few groceries at Whole Foods with little Maddox! And they do it all while pursuing their careers!
No one bursts the bubble by mentioning that those jaunts to the store are strictly optional — because the rich and famous often subcontract the grunt work so they can hit the talk-show circuit, film the next movie, spend the day at the spa — or hit a club at midnight in that miniskirt that already fits again.
"The regular mothers of America, meaning you and me, are forced to read about all these things that these perfect celebrity mothers do so that their kids will be Nobel laureates by the time they're 12," says Susan Douglas, author of "The Mommy Myth," which examines the unrealistic demands of modern motherhood. "But they have a SWAT team of nannies, so of course child-rearing is a pleasure."