But the public outrage over Cardi B’s alleged affair is not really about cheating at all. It’s about the harmful belief that a woman’s value, particularly a pregnant woman’s, lies in her ability to adhere to a narrow, socially acceptable code of behaviour.
Cardi B and Offset’s marriage has been rocky for some time, with cheating allegations going both ways. It’s interesting (and by interesting, I mean horrifying) that the public are willing to put aside Offset’s cheating and only criticise Cardi B’s decisions simply because she “has his baby inside her”. There’s an uncomfortable undertone of male ownership here.
The baby Cardi B is carrying is hers as well as Offset’s, and will later become a person of their own. People’s insistence on calling her out by saying she had sex with “someone else’s baby inside her” as if it’s an entirely separate entity to her, is ridiculous. What’s really being said in these opinions, whether they realise it or not, is that Cardi B’s growing pregnancy made her choices more shameful, as though being with child should have stripped her of her autonomy and desires.
Some of the criticism seems to be led by misinformation-led moral policing of women’s sexuality. There’s a deep-seated misconception that it’s disgusting or even dangerous to have sex while pregnant with someone who is not the biological father of the child, and that’s derived from the male desire for ‘paternity certainty’– a phenomenon as old as time where women are essentially slutshamed and expected to have sex with a small number of people so that men they may eventually have children with can be sure their babies are genetically theirs.
Because this idea is tightly woven into the fabric of society, we can’t always help but have a gut reaction of disgust when a woman sleeps with “too many” people (essentially where slutshaming comes from). The idea that women must always uphold a higher moral standard, even in the face of betrayal, is exhausting and hypocritical.
When pregnancy is involved, that sexual scrutiny becomes all the more unbearable. Women are expected to be “pure” and sexually loyal to the father of their child, even if that father has not extended the same courtesy.
That’s because of plain old dehumanisation. The intense reaction to Cardi B’s rumoured affair highlights how we, as a society, view pregnant women not as individuals but as child-carrying containers. As soon as a woman becomes pregnant – famous or not – she’s expected to make any and all decisions through the lens of her child. She’s a baby carrier first, and then a person. This is the same kind of thinking that underpinned the overturning of Roe v. Wade – a monumental blow to reproductive rights in America that has left US women forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term in states where abortion access has been severely restricted. Since Roe v. Wade’s fall, anti-abortion rhetoric has gained traction, prioritising the foetus over the woman carrying it.
Cardi B is being shamed not just because of her infidelity, but because she dared to act on her own desires while pregnant. Her autonomy, it seems, no longer belongs to her – just like millions of other pregnant women who are being stripped of their rights across the world. Sure, access to abortion care might seem like a much more pressing issue than a woman’s right to have sex while pregnant, but none of this exists in a vacuum. The two issues are undeniably connected. We’re trying to live, connect, and share experiences with each other on a backdrop of rampant misogyny and dehumanisation of pregnant women, and that’s an impossible feat.