“‘you are pregnant?’ So first of all I will answer and this will be the last time I answer this question: “No”, she opened the status with an unequivocal statement. “In the last two months the most asked question is of course when we get married. I had no problem with that question, and even if there is a date and even if we do not count when we decide,” Polk addressed the issue that concerns the gossip and fan sections, just before she came to write the post.
“The second question is am I pregnant. The number of times I have been asked no longer makes sense. In what world is this a sensible question to ask?”, She wrote angrily, going on to elaborate on how intrusive and illegitimate this question is when asked by curious strangers.
“How do you know in what given situation the woman is? And if she has been trying for a while and is unable to be absorbed? Any such question is like a sharp knife to the heart. If she is in treatments and everything to succeed in getting pregnant? Any such question only puts her under extra pressure. Not to enter? And if she very very very much wants to be a mother but rejects it for personal reasons? And if her medical condition currently does not allow her to enter? The point is that you can not or should not know the personal condition of that woman unless she chooses to share. “A question of the type ‘Are you pregnant?’ Is simply a question she did not turn to ask,” she wrote.
“Lots of girls shared with me their story and their difficulty in being absorbed and how any such question killed them a little more from the heart, and most insanely, that women themselves are the ones who asked them. So I’m their voice now. Please stop!”, Polk demanded at the end of the post and concluded: ” “Pregnancy is a sensitive and personal issue. Very personal. Be sensitive! Every woman will decide if and when to share. For one it is easy, for another it is not.”
Folk is not the first celebrity to address this issue and express her anger on the issue. The hashtag #Zaulimahraham, became popular in Israel in 2019, when celebrities such as Lucy Aharish, Maya Wertheimer, Anna Aronov, Maya Dagan and others also referred to their unbearable and unacceptable intrusion into their womb in angry posts that were posted on social media with this explicit request for clarification.
Even overseas, quite a few celebrities are often required to address questions about their fertility status when gossip columns announce on their own behalf pregnancies that have not been and back them up with intrusive paparazzi photos.
Just a little over a week ago, actress Natalie Portman was outraged that in 2021 gossip columns still find no point in flawing in announcing a pregnant woman just based on changes in her body structure, as these determined she was pregnant after being documented with a small bulge in the abdomen.
And she’s not the only one. Slavs such as Courtney Kardashian, Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Aniston (who even wrote an angry column in 2016 for the Huffington Post about the obsessive preoccupation of gossip and the public on the burning issue of whether she is finally pregnant) have also expressed outrage in the past when forced to comment on Pregnancies to let them.
Despite the support that Folk’s post has garnered, this is probably not the last time he has encountered such a request from celebrities. One can only hope that in the not-so-simple balance between the need for gossip columns to produce headlines for the credit of women in general and celebrities in particular for privacy on their bodies, will find the golden path.