WHEN Beyonce broke the internet with a baroque photograph of her pregnant self, veiled, semi-naked and backed by a riot of blooms, my overwhelming feeling was despondency.

Yes, I could see why the announcement that she was pregnant with twins, might, at this dark juncture in politics, have been just the upbeat news that was needed to create the most liked Instagram message of all time. As Hadley Freeman wrote in The Guardian, Queen Bey had come to save us at a time when what was needed was “escape from the dumpster fire that is reality”.

Yes, I could see why it offered some relief, coming on the first day of Black History Month, after President Trump had appeared, in his speech that morning, to be more interested in CNN fake news than black history. At least there was the comfort that Beyonce Carter-Knowles, icon of black feminism, a woman of net worth $265 million, runner-up to Donald Trump for 2016 Time Person of the Year, was going to be producing more mini-mes like her.

But that relief was scant. In the words of one tweet that went viral: "Sad that there are more Black people in Beyoncé right now, than in Trump's entire cabinet team." It was scant not just because of the racial politics of the moment, but also because of where the United States, and possibly the world, seemed to be at with regards to gender politics. Here, in these images, was a stirring reminder of women’s place and power in a capitalist culture that mostly wants us for our bodies.

For, Beyonce’s "bump bragging" as the Daily Mail's Sarah Vine described it, could, arguably be part of the problem we’re facing. After all, doesn’t it represent just another promotion of herself via her body and sexuality?

This isn’t a reassuring tweet from Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton. It’s a message from the fecund belly of capitalist pop culture. Yet, people seemed to see it as salvation. "You do see where this is going?" quipped Trevor Noah parodied on The Daily Show. "What’s happening right now in America. The Empire has taken over. The Dark Side is rising. And suddenly our queen is carrying twins. Luke and Leia! ... We’ve got to hide Beyoncé. Get Sasha Fierce to the mooooon!”

Beyonce baring flesh is no new thing. When her Time Magazine cover hit the stands in 2014, many complained that underwear was pretty much all she was wearing. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that Beyonce also follows the path of many a female icon who, having commodified their curves, then do the same with their pregnant bodies. Some might say that’s liberating. But it’s become an overly familiar trope, and, like all the other images we see of women’s bodies, another pressure on us to conform, whether that be to child-bearing itself, or a particular shape of pregnancy.

Certain statements are significant when they are first made. Until Demi Moore bump-bared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, pregnant women had to go underground and hide from sight. But since then a long list of celebrities, from Britney Spears to Shakira, have queued up to do a Demi, and what was once liberation has become commodification. Beyonce gets a pass for doing it, principally because the vast majority of the women who have bared their pregnant bumps have been white. But, radical as she may be when she references the white Venuses of Botticelli or Rossetti in her bump portraits, she still seems to be saying this is sexy, we women have sexual power, even when pregnant.

Of course, Beyonce’s pictures go further than any normal bump-brag. Beyonce is always fantastical, that’s her power and allure, and here she is representing a rococo vision of pregnancy. Not only does she look great, she is, in the accompanying poetry, the “Black Venus”, the goddess, lush and hyper-fecund. I can see why many find it a bit in-your-face.

The Old Master-type images on her website are followed by a stream of seemingly casual snaps from the Carter family album, in which there's more than a little smugness and privilege. If Gwyneth Paltrow had done the same, she'd have been derided as nauseating.

But what really concerns me is that, even as Beyonce delivers her mesmerising series of Black Venus images, the threat level to reproductive rights has gone up to amber, with Donald Trump reinstating the global gag rule on abortion and installing a conservative Supreme Court judge. It’s all very well revelling in imagery evoking earth mothers and the mystery of life – but women's capacity for reproduction can be as much our bane as our glory. In this context, it's not necessarily helpful to be be swept away by Beyonce's fertility goddess archetype.

The last thing we want is to be reduced to our wombs, or told that's where out true power lies. We don't need these dreamy myths. The reality of the bump, after all, is that it is sometimes dangerous, sometimes unwanted, and, for some women, the very opposite of empowerment.