The trad mom promise of a "perfectly balanced world"
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The trad mom promise of a "perfectly balanced world"
What some conservative momfluencers are selling, and why people are buying it
As part of my final Momfluenced edit, I updated the follower counts of all the momfluencers mentioned in the book. Depressingly, the follower count for every single alt-right/Q/trad mom mentioned in Momfluenced has gone up since I finished my first draft of the book in April 2022. When I first started researching the book back in 2020, Hannah from Ballerina Farm had a little over 145,000 followers. Now she has 2.4 million.
Some of these momfluencers are simply low-key troubling, declaring themselves “apolitical” despite splashing their pages with photos meant to glorify and celebrate a type of life made possible only by socioeconomic privilege and adhering to heteronormative ideals, white Western beauty standards, and tightly conscripted gender roles. Mothers looking beautiful in their beautiful homes with their beautiful children. Mothers milking cows, making sourdough, hanging laundry, sweeping floors. Fathers mostly out of frame and mostly out of the house.
Some of these momfluencers, though, are high-key dangerous as they “do their research,” exhort their followers to simply “ask questions,” oppose critical race theory and comprehensive sex education being taught in schools, spread disinformation about vaccines or homemade baby formula recipes, and hashtag posts with QAnon dog whistles like #savethechildren.
Both the low-key troubling and the high-key dangerous momfluencers, though, are typically aesthetically aligned. In the mamasphere, you are less likely to see oafish white men screaming about men’s rights and Hillary’s emails and more likely to see powder pink infographics about choosing femininity over feminism. By adhering to the aesthetics many of us have been culturally conditioned to view as “good” or “safe” or “maternal” (and therefore incontrovertible), conservative momfluencers can attract homesteading enthusiasts and MAGA-hat wearing Mama Bears alike. Come from the tutorial on seasonal garden bed maintenance, leave wondering if maybe you too have been brainwashed by the “liberal elite.”
Check out this momfluencer’s reel about ducks. The ducks are cute! The captions are funny.
Check out her photo of farm-fresh veggies. Bright colors. Farmhouse sink. Visually interesting composition. Pretty, pretty.
Check out this before and after bathroom reno. Inspiring! Resourceful!
Check out this reel celebrating farm life. Our heroine is dancing! Her children are wearing hand-knit bonnets. A cozy fire warms the hearth. A brook babbles. Goats frolic. Edenic.
Now, check out this beautiful photo taken of our momfluencer with her husband.
So gorgeous, right? The stormy skies, the verdant grass, the seemingly passionate embrace. Sure, our momfluencer is a mom, but, as this photo communicates, motherhood has not adversely impacted her sex life or her sense of romance. She’s a mom, but she’s wearing a flowy goddess dress and she’s super into her husband and he’s super into her. Honestly, #goals.
This momfluencer (whose name, according to her bio, is Megan) offers followers recipes for “healthy” chocolate, interior design inspo, DIY life hacks, suggestions for “baby’s first solids,” liver capsule giveaways, promo codes for Airdoctor air filters, veggie canning how-tos, and spon-con for organic hemp sheets. And importantly, this account offers all of the above but makes it pretty. Megan’s photos are richly hued, thoughtfully framed, and many of them feel soothing to engage with. They provide a brief respite from that dentist appointment I’ve been reminding myself to make for months, the after-school carpool spreadsheet, and the quotidian angst of being a human in 2022.
And it’s the aspirational aesthetics paired with the wide variety of offerings (food! farming! shiplap! ducks!) that make captions like the one accompanying the hot make-out pic so insidious.
The feminist agenda makes me sad.
What a glorious role that I get to bask in as a woman. Married to a strong man. A nuclear family unit. That more women can’t achieve this position! If only they would let themselves!
He cares for our outer world. He protects us from threats. Both physical and spiritual/emotional. Be that through what we see on the TV or on the news, or the books we read. He is our filter of protection. He goes out into the world to make resources and earn money.
Then in turn I care for our inner world. I take the money he earns and decide what the wisest thing would be to buy with it. I keep the house and make the food. I give him babies and raise his children.
It is a perfectly balanced world. So satisfying. I would never feel offended that I don’t “get” to go out into the world and work. I feel this is my potential being met in the best way.
Once you commit to the role you were made for, it all makes sense. The nuclear family is one of the most powerful tools we have for good! No wonder society is afraid of us. Trying so desperately to destroy the family by pushing feminism, gender confusion, and all the other nonsense.
#family #femininitynotfeminism #againstfeminism #nuclearfamily #patriarchy
Megan does a lot with this caption.
She perfectly positions herself as a “good woman” in the first line by feeling “sad” about the feminist agenda rather than “mad,” an emotion people socialized as female are trained to avoid at all costs because an “angry woman” is hysterical; a dangerous nuisance and a shrew who should be silenced, whereas a “sad” woman is a storybook archetype; as a damsel in distress, she is passive, she is feminine, she can be easily subdued or shushed or gaslit out of her tears.
Angry women, according to the ethos of #femininitynotfeminism are only angry because they have not yet leaned into their “natural” roles as submissive wives and doting, selfless, self-sacrificing mothers. Anti-feminist women can afford to feel sadness for all the angry feminists, because they’ve figured out motherhood, partnerhood, and LIFE in a way that angry feminists simply have not (and never will, because to attempt a feminist life is a perversion unto itself).
Megan is also clear to highlight her own agency in the above passage. Lest an angry feminist read the above caption and mistake Megan’s life as one of drudgery, inequality, or servitude, Megan assures us she “gets” to fulfill this “glorious” role. She “feel this is [her] potential being met in the best way.” Who wouldn’t want to describe their life in these terms? According to Megan, her lot in life is a choice, not a burden.
And listen - Megan’s married to a hottie she evidently isn’t too tired to have sex with AND he takes care of all the things poor angry feminist women are routinely losing sleep over.
Hottie husband protects Megan from physical intruders and also magically keeps her safe from emotional agita and intrusive thoughts. As good as a home security system and a therapist.
Hottie husband gives Megan the best TV recs and the best reading recs so she doesn’t have to go through the trouble of being curious about her own individual interests, needs, or passions.
Hottie husband “goes out into the world to make resources and earn money,” which means Megan doesn’t have to think or worry about money. Sign me up!
While hottie husband is taking care of all “outer world” concerns, Megan manages the “inner world” of the home (which is famously where the heart is). In return for the privilege to grocery shop and meal plan, she births babies and engages in childcare.
The message is clear: if you conform to traditional gender roles and invest all you have into your nuclear family, you will be less angsty, wholly protected in all ways, and your romantic partner will also be akin to a highly specific, customized link roundup.
You’ll be beautifully fulfilled doing this work because every [good] woman should be fulfilled by the same thing: domestic labor and childcare (knowing that these things are guaranteed to fulfill you also makes it easier to care less about only reading and watching shit your husband recommends).
Perhaps the most alluring draw to this type of lifestyle is the elimination of doubt, uncertainty, and inner turmoil. As a submissive, anti-feminist wife and mother, you don’t need to fret about “having it all” or “work/life balance” or whether or not you’ve made the right choices in life.
Once you’ve bought into the tenets of the heteronormative nuclear family and traditional gender roles, you will be happy because the lifestyle mandates you be happy.
“It is a perfectly balanced world. So satisfying.”
Megan ends her caption with a light threat (“No wonder society is afraid of us”), by celebrating the “power” of the nuclear family, aligning herself with anti-trans and anti-queer rhetoric (“gender confusion”), and neatly tossing any other life choices or lifestyles into a catch-all for “nonsense.”
It’s relatively easy for me to pick apart the holes in this type of argument, which actively excludes and demonizes a whole host of lifestyles and identities, but to dismiss accounts like this as retrograde and humorously out of touch is misguided and dangerous. We need to be curious about why accounts like this flourish (Megan has 108K followers), and what they offer consumers.
Because of the systemic constraints of American motherhood, many American mothers live their lives in a state of perpetual longing for something, anything, that will make life feel less impossible, less existentially fraught. For something, as Megan writes, that “makes sense” in a country with utterly nonsensical maternal policies.
And many conservative momfluencers offer a way of life, that seems, for all its political dissonance, singularly simple. For mothers who live in a society with almost no social safety nets or institutional support, a culture which demands mothers adhere to impossible ideals and cherish every moment even if their moments are making them miserable or even sick, a lifestyle which promises fulfillment, ease, harmony, and freedom from doubt sounds pretty damn appealing.Not just to Trumpers and climate change deniers, but to me.
The trad mom promise of a "perfectly balanced world"
Also super ironic that she's framing the husband out to be the "provider", granted, we probably don't know what he does for work or how much he earns, but it's likely that a significant portion of her family income comes from her influencing.
It's so disingenuous and dangerous that she's promoting this "balance" to her audience, when in reality she's not actually living it. She's not fully dependent on her Husband and if something were to happen (divorce, lay offs, etc) she would probably be ok, whereas her followers who buy into this narrative but do not have the safety net and income of influencing would be in a financially dangerous situation. She's selling a fantasy she doesn't actually live.
CHILLS I TELL YOU CHILLS