Questions about power, influence and authority

I recently became a paid subscriber to Culture Study, Anne Helen Petersen's Substack newsletter, after enjoying it for free for the past year or so.  Petersen is childfree by choice, and writes sympathetically about both motherhood/parenting issues and choosing a life without children (among many other subjects). To date, she hasn't had much to say about those of us who are childless-not-by-choice -- I would love to see her in a conversation with Jody Day of Gateway Women ! But essays like "Your Own Harriet" -- which I absolutely loved -- are relevant to all of us without children, no matter how we got here.   

Petersen is fascinated by the world of social media influencers -- "momfluencers" in particular -- and has devoted several recent newsletters to the topic. As she explained in a post last October ("The Ideological Battlefield of the "Mamasphere"): 

I’m not a mom but I like to know what the moms are up to. You should too, regardless of your identity, because “the moms” — meaning, the moms embodying and directing ideals of femininity and domesticity and parenting — have a lot of power, and power demands attention.

She's introduced me to two others who think and write extensively on these topics, and I now follow their newsletters as well:  Meg Conley of Homeculture (who wrote movingly about miscarriage last  year), and Kathryn Jezer-Morton of Mothers Under the Influence, who is actually doing a PhD on the subject (!) at Concordia University in Montreal. 

I had interesting reads in my inbox today from both Petersen and Conley. First, Petersen interviewed Conley (again), this time about "The Edenic Allure of Ballerinafarm." I'd never heard of Ballerinafarm before:  it's a working farm in Utah, as well as an Instagram account/brand, run by a ballerina/beauty pageant queen turned mom (of SIX children, soon to be seven)/homemaker/farmer. Explains Petersen: 

The Neelemans currently sell Ballerinafarm beef and pork, along with a cornucopia of Ballerinafarm-branded merch. But the real product is the lifestyle: pastoral, filled with beautiful moppy-haired children and their graceful, angel-faced mother. There is a lot going on here! And I am grateful that Meg agreed to unpack some of it with me, using a set of analytical tools and frameworks you don’t often see in influencer commentary.

Then I got a newsletter from Conley herself.  Last month, she wrote a lengthy, detailed piece about the influential Magnolia Network, and how her friend Aubry's life has been upended for the past two years by a home makeover (for Magnolia's Home Work TV show) gone very wrong. In this update, she writes about the fallout from the first article -- how she was tagged in a response from the program's hosts (the Merediths), which led to a flood of outraged DMs from their followers. I found this passage particularly interesting (and you'll understand why when you read it): 

...The reactions I got in its aftermath did not surprise me. The rancor I saw in response to Aubry’s story did kind of surprise me. Aubry is a single woman without children. She’s chosen her life and it’s a good one. Aubry is very, very upbeat. Meredith Blake called her IG account "relentlessly cheerful." Which made me laugh. Because...that's accurate! But in a lot of the commentary I saw, she was characterized as shrill, greedy and jealous. This was not how other married with children clients were characterized when they came forward with similar stories about the Merediths.

One homeowner is the mother of five children. While I saw Andy and Candis’s followers push back against her story, they still granted her the authority to tell it. In their online commentary, many framed it as a difference of perception, a simple misunderstanding or a shame that her experience didn’t work out. Her children and marriage somehow gave her the rights to make claims about what happened in and to her home. The Meredith’s reinforced this authority in their video by acknowledging her claims even while denying they were truly at fault.

In their video, the Merediths singled Aubry out as the person whose authority they were most eager to undermine. They did this with images and videos of her inside of her home. They repeatedly referenced their own children. For those looking for it, this created a story of a A Mother with Children Done Wrong by a Woman Without Children. This reinforced the narrative I saw spawning across the internet around the Merediths. The one that said, A single, childless woman lacks authority to correctly witness and relay what happens in her own home.

Well. F*** that, you know?

There's a lot more -- but this is all absolutely fascinating stuff.  It's all worth a read and worth pondering.