This morning, Kylie Jenner announced she is expecting her second child with boyfriend Travis Scott. In an adorable video posted to Instagram, Kylie shared clips of her and Travis finding out she was pregnant, as well as telling their daughter Stormi and Kylie's mother Kris Jenner.
Now, ‘Kylie Jenner pregnant video’ is trending on Google – as well as ‘Are Kylie and Travis back together 2021?’ and ‘When is Kylie Jenner due’. After splitting in October 2019, rumours of Kylie and Travis being more than just co-parents to Stormi began earlier this year.
In May 2021, Kylie commented on the rumours for the first time, denying that the couple were in an ‘open relationship’. By June 2021, it was clear the pair where back together when Travis shouted out Kylie and his daughter on-stage at the 72nd annual Parsons Benefit, saying ‘Stormi, I love you and wifey, I love you.’
While Kylie hasn’t revealed her due date, fans speculate that she could be up to seven months pregnant after a racy tweet from Travis back in January resurfaced. The same month he and Kylie were spotted in Aspen together taking Stormi skiing, he tweeted: ‘Wheeewww that s**t was wet this morn,’ with a red heart emoji. As such, a number of people have now replied to the tweet with one fan joking ‘According to my calculations, Kylie Jenner is about 5-7 months pregnant lmfaaaoo.’
Of course, for fans of Kylie, the pregnancy announcement hasn’t come as a surprise. Last month, a number of videos went viral on TikTok claiming that Kylie was clearly pregnant judging by… wait for it… the nail art she posts on social media. Yes, really.
It started when a TikTok user named Tiffany posted a video analysing the fact Kylie only had French manicures in all her pictures for a while. ‘Kylie has a pattern of always changing her nails, this is not common for her so there’s a reason,’ Tiffany said. Essentially, she's suggesting that Kylie had batch-produced content when she had a french manicure, and was posting it over a number of weeks as if it was real time in order to hide the pregnancy.
‘For her last pregnancy she stopped posting body pictures which is so out of the ordinary, that’s all she used to post. It was so obvious, so this time she’s trying to be less obvious,' Tiffany added.
Over 3 million views later, the Kylie Jenner pregnancy conspiracy videos have kept rolling in.
‘Kylie Jenner is pregnant and I have receipts,’ Emily Schwartz posted on TikTok, to over 4.3 million views. ‘Yesterday was her birthday and she posted this picture of her in a green dress and the most important part of this picture is her nails. What colour are they here? They’re pink.
‘Kimmy made a little bit of a booboo,’ Emily continued, uploading a picture she screenshotted from Kim Kardashian’s Instagram account of Kylie’s birthday party - which occurred the same day she posted the picture of her with pink nails. ‘If you look over here in the corner [her nails] are green. She did not get her nails done in the middle of the day, she had a birthday party… which by the way not one person posted a picture of her from. This girl is everywhere, Stassiebaby didn’t post a picture of her, something’s up somethings weird… it smells like baby.’
Essentially, Kim had shown Kylie having green nails on the same day Kylie had posted a picture with pink nails as if it was real time. So, fans wondered if Kylie had planned her birthday post pre-pregnancy to hide her baby bump on the day.
Now, TikTok users are hailing the girls as legendary detectives for figuring out Kylie’s pregnancy before anyone else. But while they’re skills of detection are certainly impressive, should we really be celebrating this level of inspection into a woman’s womb?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: speculating about a woman’s pregnancy is massively outdated and harmful.
There’s some grace to be granted for the fact that these TIkTok users are young women themselves, clearly unaware of the overwhelming pressures on women to disclose private details of their reproductive plans. We can’t necessarily blame young TikToker’s for an obsession that was built by millennials on celebrity womb-watch for decades – but we can still educate them on the lessons learned from that entire, uncomfortable time in tabloid news.
Kylie Jenner hid her first pregnancy for a reason. Her name became synonymous with the ultimate paparazzi deception, quite literally going into hiding for nine months. It stands to reason that after 18 months of pandemic hell, Kylie might not want to do that again – but the explanation she gave for hiding her first pregnancy are still valid.
‘I knew for myself I needed to prepare for this role of a lifetime in the most positive, stress-free, and healthy way I knew how,’ she said after Stormi’s birth. ‘There was no gotcha moment, no big paid reveal I had planned. I knew my baby would feel every stress and every emotion so I chose to do it this way for my little life and our happiness.’
It’s somewhat surprising then that she has chosen to reveal her second pregnancy at all – and begs the question, did the viral public speculation force her hand? Type ‘Kylie Jenner Pregnant Conspiracy’ into TikTok, and there is an endless number of videos to scroll through. Such speculation does not just translate into Kylie’s social media’s being bombarded with pregnancy questions but real-life interactions too. At just the whisper of a potential baby bump, there’s no doubt paparazzi would be swarming Kylie for the first look of her second pregnancy.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that Kylie felt pressure to announce her pregnancy sooner than planned.
If the claims of those videos are proven to be true, it would suggest Kylie was going to great lengths to hide her pregnancy prior to the announcement. Knowing what we do about her anxiety around feeling safe with the baby, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Kylie announced her pregnancy sooner than planned just to quiet speculation and avoid paparazzi stalking – although she’ll certainly face it now too, regardless of whether the news is confirmed or not.
All this is to say that while we can’t possibly know if Kylie felt pressured to announce her pregnancy sooner, there’s no doubt that such viral speculation fuels a damaging narrative that women are the sum of their wombs. This obsession with women’s pregnancies harms us all – not just for the message it sends to women choosing not to have kids, but also because pregnancy can be an incredibly difficult time in a woman’s life.
Beyond the personal struggles one goes through in health and identity, it’s also means anxiety around your baby’s health, questions from strangers about your birthing plans, judgements about everything motherhood from what you’re eating and drinking to how you plan to raise your children. It’s all just… a lot.
In terms of public commentary, Kylie got to avoid all that for a sacred nine months before Stormi was born, and now – whether she chose to go public or was forced – she won’t be granted that same peace. So before you make, or ‘like’, a viral video about celebrity pregnancies again, consider what it means not just for the celebrity at hand, but all women.
Read More:
Enough With The Pregnancy Surveillance — Why We Should All Stop Trying To Guess Who Is With Child