The momfluencer trap
“These blissful versions of motherhood that are bought and sold on social media are more lucrative because so many American mothers are desperate to hope for something else.”
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
An earnest rec for my favorite momfluencer: Youtuber Rhiannon Ashlee. —Kate
Sara Petersen and I first connected during a very weird time in my life. It was 2020, and if you can believe it, I was having a hard time. My way of coping was to go all in on a certain type of content creator: homesteading tradwives whose picturesque lives of homeschooling and baking seemed unaffected by the pandemic, as opposed to my life, which felt like it had entirely collapsed around my hallway of a Bushwick apartment.
I wrote an essay about this obsession, which resulted in Petersen and I connecting for her book—Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. The book is out April 25, but I got a chance to read an early copy, so can confidently encourage you to go here to give it a preorder.
It’s been interesting to check in with Petersen‚ who also writes the Substack
, every few years, as my own experience with motherhood presumably gets closer and closer. My relationship with that life stage is very much informed by the images of motherhood I consume online.The social media performance of motherhood can be extremely fraught, as my recent interview with Alexia Delarosa showed. But today, as Petersen emphasizes in her work, performing motherhood online is also inevitable. How do we go about navigating this public performance of something so universally encouraged but, in the U.S., so fundamentally undersupported?
In this interview for paid subscribers, Petersen and I talk about social media as parental validation, motherhood as an online identity, and the gateway drug that was Love Taza’s Naomi Davis (Naomi! We miss you! Come back!).