Gisele Bündchen is pregnant and expecting her third child. The supermodel, 44, debuted her bump this week while hitting the gym in Miami, just one day after it was reported that she and boyfriend Joaquim Valente, 37, are expecting a baby. Gisele already has two children, son Benjamin Rein, 14, and daughter Vivian Lake, 11, from her former marriage to Tom Brady.
However, as soon as the news was announced, Gisele was met with misogynistic responses from online critics who branded her a ‘cougar’ or claimed that her new man was a ‘rebound’ following her divorce. Some suggested that the Brazilian model’s age meant she’d had to ‘give Joaquim kids quickly while she still can’, while others said that she should have ‘started earlier’ and speculated about how the baby had been conceived. ‘I would think by 44 she would know what to do to prevent getting pregnant. It’s really too bad in my opinion, it just doesn’t seem right, nor fair, for her children who already having to deal with the fallout from the divorce,’ one other comment read.
While romcoms starring an older-woman-younger-man pairing are having a major moment, it seems like the real world is unreasonably behind when it comes to age-gap relationships where the woman is older (the other way around, of course, is completely fine). There’s so much ageism and sexism in the rhetoric surrounding Gisele’s pregnancy, from the suggestion that her other children will suffer because she’s having another child to the idea that she had to get pregnant quickly to snare Joaquim – like she’s not an actual supermodel…
And then there are the ‘concerns’ about her pregnancy at 44. The speculation about whether Gisele used IVF assume that women can’t naturally get pregnant in their 40s, yet also are sticking their nose into something that just isn’t their business. When Cameron Diaz became a mother for the second time at the age of 51 this year, people were quick to theorise that she had used a surrogate and criticise her for that. Women can’t win.
Gisele previously compared her divorce from Tom Brady to a case of ‘when a door shuts, other doors open’. Her pregnancy is another happy example of this. The former Victoria’s Secret Angel announced her divorce from the NFL star in 2022 after 13 years of marriage, with the divorce reportedly amicable. Gisele later explained in an interview that Tom’s busy football career had got in the way of their time as a family, but that this was ‘one piece of a much bigger puzzle’. ‘Sometimes you grow together; sometimes you grow apart,’ she said.
Joaquim is someone Gisele had known for years, after he began teaching her son Benjamin martial arts. Eventually, she began training with Joaquim too. The pair remained friends and spent time together after her split from Tom, although they didn’t begin dating until a year after the divorce. Earlier this year, Gisele shut down sexist criticism claiming she had been romantic with Joaquim before splitting from Tom. ‘This is something that happens to a lot of women who get blamed when they have the courage to leave an unhealthy relationship and are labelled as being unfaithful,’ she told The New York Times. ‘They have to deal with their communities. They have to deal with their family. Of course for me, it just happens to be a little bit amplified.’ And when Gisele suggests the criticism is misogynistic, people should listen.