What keeps you coming back?
The momfluencers you can't quit
Hello to everyone who found me from
! I’m a longtime reader of Culture Study (and of ) and I think if you’re a fan of AHP’s many curious, funny, strange, revealing deep dives into what makes culture culture and what makes humans human, you’ll find plenty to keep you busy here. Welcome! And thank you so much for reading.A few good places to start
The tyranny of gender binaries and the pathologization of ponytails
Conservative Christian momfluencers and the romanticization of a fantasy that never existed
This week, two momfluencers who feature heavily in my thoughts, dreams, words, and book, made news. Julie D. O’Rourke (of Rudy Jude) had her third baby and Hannah Neeleman (of Ballerina Farm) won the Mrs. America pageant. After launching Momfluenced, I took a deliberate backseat to my regular momfluencer consumption, but as soon as O’Rourke announced her pregnancy on Instagram, I found myself drawn back, compulsively “checking” on her. I tried to understand the compulsion in this essay, but I’m not entirely convinced I figured it out.
I hadn’t consumed any BF content all summer really, but a friend tipped me off to her participation (again) in the Mrs. America pageant, and I’m afraid the heady contradiction/perfect pairing of seemingly effortless trad vibes and competitive, hair-sprayed femininity was simply too much for me to resist. I’ll be writing about it in Friday’s newsletter!
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve shared any links or product recs, and I thought it might be fun to play with the far-and-away most popular compilation of recs, Ugly Shit Sara Loves, and offer you, my beloved paid subscribers, a weekly roundup of Five Pretty/Ugly Things. Maybe it’s an essay about the devastation of climate change written in beautiful prose. Maybe it’s a zit cream packaged in a gorgeous glass vessel. Maybe it’s sexism but communicated via brilliant satire. This newsletter started out as a critique of the relentlessly pretty performance of ideal motherhood on social media, and what’s always been most interesting to me about that critique (and others) is the intersection of both beauty and ugliness. Almost everything in life contains a bit of both (see also).
Readers of Momfluenced might also remember Pretty/Ugly as being the title of chapter four, in which I plumb the depths of my own personal preoccupation with maternal performance. So cheers to breaking down the Pretty/Ugly binary and here’s some links!
- is 100% correct about the cover of the Britney Spears memoir.
I’ve tried a lot of Instagram sheet companies, and I haven’t found any I like better than these babies from Target. They’re satiny-soft, 100% cotton, and I find the pattern hard to beat. Classic yet fun? Timeless yet lighthearted? I feel like I’m trying to describe a Cosmo day-to-night outfit, but I love these sheets.
I found you through AHP and I'm so glad I did. I'm a Gen Xer, one who blogged - though it was more of the spicy type than the mommy bloggers (but follow them I did) - and I bought your book. It is just fascinating! I'm about halfway through but one thing you wrote really has haunted me and it was section on mirror neurons. That we look at Instagram and feel all swept up by a perfect shot (chickens! New York apartments! adorable babies!) and then we feel as if we actually HAD that experience. In some ways it makes us less likely to try to create that experience for ourselves. And in a way we did have a mediated experience (as my communications prof husband would say). We consume to feel as if we did the thing, but we didn't actually do the thing, so we are still hungry as if all are eating is food flavored cardboard.
This happens in our online experience of news as well of course, but in a deeply negative way, around varying propagandas-Is Seattle really dying or do we feel like it is because we watched that "documentary" about it? Etc.
I also happened to watch the Netflix series Painkiller and while I was watching the scenes of people ruining their lives over opioids, I was scrolling Twitter on my phone ( not concentrating, mindlessly looking for....what?) and I thought SHIT, that's terrible! Every time I'd stop for a while I'd get this itch to scroll much like an itch to smoke.
It's off my phone now and I'm committing to a type of social fast. Longform only, news, and a focusing on posting and creating rather than consuming it, and figuring out how to readjust how my neurons work (ha!). That very topic of how we believe we experience through a mediated journey through social media deserves its own book I think, especially since tech is trying to figure out VR.
Thanks for all these amazing posts.
I am OBSESSED with very large families and Mormon Instagram. I’m not sure why. I’m not at all doing it to mock them or because it’s funny. It’s a pure sort of fascination with the logistics. My own kid logistics are mind boggling but not like that. I view it as a sort of escape and release valve.