Fathers and mothers of very young children often develop strange nocturnal vices. Things they do at night when they don’t sleep, either because their kids don’t sleep either, or because it’s not so easy to catch up between takes, when you’re too tired even to sleep.
In 2014, when her second child (she now has three) was a newborn and her first child was still a toddler, American journalist Sara Petersen scrolled endlessly on Instagram while the baby slept in a Sweet Snugapuppy Dreams Cradle rocking cradle. Fisher Price ‘N Swing (ugly, functional, colorful). Wherever the Instagram safari began, Petersen would arrive again and again at the account that obsessed him, that of @taza, Naomi Davis, a mother of five (then she only had two) who posted lovely photos of her family on outings. to nature and in his stylish New York apartment. Later, in the middle of the pandemic, the whole family moved to the Arizona desert, to an even more instagrammable house, with cacti on the porch.
“Have you seen this woman?” Petersen forwarded the most impressive photos to her best friend, who also had a newborn and was therefore fully available to chat at five in the morning.
“How good the bangs look on you,” her friend replied. Indeed, Davis’s bangs were never greasy, nor dirty, nor to an odd degree. Not her bangs, not her kitchen counter.
Taza was, she admits, her “gateway drug” to the momfluencer universe, the women who monetize their identities as mothers on social networks. Petersen admits to being a favored audience for these influencers – his own kitchen is painted in the shade of white that several of them recommend and over the years he has bought clothes, junk and furniture that they put up with and without
“I think my susceptibility to the lure of momfluencer culture, as a feminist trying to resist capitalism, says something about the power of that culture, but it also speaks to how my race, class, and cultural background affect the internalized ideals I hold. about motherhood. These ideals are only accessible to one type of people and they have been created by white men. What we have to do is think about why performing and selling those ideals is still so powerful”, says Petersen to La Vanguardia.
In the long taxonomy that he has made of this industry that moves billions of euros, Petersen has been identifying different types of influencer mothers: the wellness preacher, the cool/minimalist, whose interiors are never contaminated with colored plastics and other childhood detritus like the Fisher Price crib used by the author and whose style is brilliantly satirized on the Tik Tok account @sadbeige, and the trad wife, the apostle of a traditional lifestyle with delimited gender roles.
Many of them base their practice on what has been called “choice feminism”: since I choose this lifestyle, and I am a woman, what I do is in itself feminist.“Trad momfluencers describe their decision to be led by their husbands and to remain subservient to male authority, as an example of choice feminism. They argue that they are acts of emancipation, despite being rooted in patriarchy and gender essentialism.
In the book, she also extensively covers the phenomenon of Instagrammers who, during the pandemic, became radicalized and dragged part of their audience with them, and went from selling essential oils and diaper pads in biscuit and terracotta colors to promoting “natural immunizers.” instead of vaccines and finally end up aligning in some cases with QAnon, the dangerous faction of far-right conspiracy theorists. One of them was Rose Henges, @roseuncharted on Instagram, who went from posting photos of beaches and healthy desserts to referring her followers to QAnon accounts through highly calculated posts, complete with pastel pink infographics advocating for gun ownership and the use of the hashtag
Petersen watched the growth of this faction in real time while researching his book. “A year after I had the first draft, I went back through it to update the number of followers of momfluencers who had more explicit white supremacist content. And each and every one of them had gained a following. It was depressing, but not surprising, when you consider how extremist politics have infiltrated AFA school boards, are influencing things like anti-trans legislation, and are involved in various moral panics.”
For the journalist, however, it is other conservative momfluencers that are not so explicit, and apparently “apolitical” who can cause the most potential damage. “If you align with a momfluencer on her passion for fresh markets, organic mattresses, and homemade spray cleaning, for example, it’s much easier to open your mind to her claims that supporting Donald Trump is the best thing to do. for
Two researchers into the processes of radicalization in different factions of extremism, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko, have already dedicated a book to this phenomenon, entitled Pastels and pedophiles (Stanford University Press), which traces the line that goes from the confines of the darkest internet to the pastel pink and mint green of Instagram panels of yoga moms and chia cookies.
Although this is only a small group within that sphere and there are momfluencers that exude progressive values, the algorithm and the same system tend to reward quietly conservative voices. One of the Instagrammers that Petersen analyzes most obsessively in the book and in her weekly newsletter is Hananh Neeleman, better known for her five million followers on that social network as Ballerina Farm. Neeleman, a former dancer turned farmer and mother of seven children, each blonder. Neeleman’s posts making her own butter in her rustic kitchen exemplify the lifestyle that sells most easily within that niche of influence, that of supposedly calculated simplicity.
“She offers a type of disorder but her disorder is related to aesthetic and cultural ideals. The relative chaos of her kitchen has been generated by the preparation of a meal that she has made herself using ingredients that she has gathered from her own farm. She does maybe she has to wipe the stove but her stove is a forest green Aga range that sells for $20,000, not some ugly secondhand thing someone has used to reheat frozen nuggets. Even her motherhood is aspirational and serves to underscore her motherly qualities.” A piece of information that is hardly mentioned in the Ballerina Farm feed is that her husband, Daniel –some husbands of the momfluencers have taken the opportunity to create their own profiles on the network, as if they were a Barbie Ken that assumes a secondary role, but they are usually bland and interchangeable figures, considered benignly useless and, of course, only partly responsible for raising their own children – he is the son of the owner and founder of JetBlue airlines, and thus both are heirs to an enormous fortune . That’s impossible to tell if you hang out on Needleman’s Instagram, or even on his website, where it gives the impression that the family lives off the pigs and goats they raise.
In general, making the work invisible, that of being a digital microcelebrity (the work of recording stories, tagging them, managing contracts with brands, etc.) is also an essential part of the deal, because making it clear that you are charged for all that display of Maternal love somehow puts an end to the mirage that sustains the entire business: after all, the main idea is that a mother always sacrifices herself for her loved ones, not that she obtains any kind of benefit.
In Spain there are momfluencers like Paloma Martínez Monasterio (@paloma-babybe), mother of seven children almost always dressed to match, who combines sponsored posts in her feed with exhortations to celebrate Family Day, a celebration generally promoted by anti-abortion associations and who question LGTBQ rights.
Others, like @soyunamadrenormal, with twelve children, have a more openly religious message, although what works best commercially is a tone like that of @verdeliss, the Spanish momfluencer with the most followers (1.4 million), who has eight children and she combines fitness posts (she has run 12 marathons in 12 months in different cities around the world) with commercial collaborations and very moderately demanding messages such as “society demands that we feel fulfilled mothers, at the same time that it drags us into fast-paced lives and applauds successes away from the presence”, accompanying a photo in which she takes a nap with two of her children while she breastfeeds the youngest.
“Being a new mother today is much more connected to exhausting consumption than a decade ago,” concludes Petersen, who lived through the evolution with her own children. By the time the third came around, in 2019, the market had evolved in such a way that there were already one, or about ten things right in every category, from teethers for teething babies to breast pumps. In the vibrating hammock category, it was no longer worth the Fisher Price, for example, but the Snoo, which costs 1,500 euros, or something more organic and beige, like the Moonboon, which costs 750.
