Toxic comments on the "mommy" essay

Yikes. I just got through skimming the comments on the WSJ essay I extolled in my last post.  With the exception of a few shining jewels of polite or even enthusiastic agreement, they are overwhelmingly critical and in many cases downright nasty.

Which, God knows, is not atypical in anonymous internet comments, especially in connection with articles about child-rearing or motherhood (more on that in a moment). Anyway, after reading them I was moved to dwell on this issue yet again to point out three things:

1.) Approximately half of the comment posters missed the essay's point entirely. They seemed to think Brodesser-Akner was complaining about her children calling her "mommy." Which I thought she made clear was not the problem. Her complaint involved the frequent use of the word by other adults to describe her, themselves, mothers in general, or any activity (blogging, working part time, bickering about work-family balance) in which mothers are, or supposedly are, involved.

2.) Those who, after reading an article, are going to take the extra time to log onto the site, compose a comment, and then post it, probably should not have the comment read, "This article was a waste of time." Why not waste a little less time by not adding a comment which is yet another waste of time?

3.) I can understand why, to many people, it may seem no big deal whether a woman with children is referred to (stressing again that we're talking by people other than her kids) as mommy, mother, mom, mama, ma, female parental unit, person of maternity or member of the child-rearing community. And sure, compared to, say, what’s happening in Japan, it isn't. But then, neither is probably 99.999 (add a bunch more 9s) of what's on the internet and only a slightly smaller proportion of what's reported in the WSJ, or any publication.

Still, the words we use to describe things actually are important. Media depictions of people and their roles are important. Those things shape our culture and influence the way we view each other and our contributions to society. Try this experiment: Say you're an employer, evaluating two comparable candidates for an important position. Both of their resumes indicate they're currently not in the paid workforce. In the interviews, you ask each what she's been doing. One says, "I work at home, caring for my children." The other says, "I'm a mommy."

All other things being equal, which one are you going to hire?

As I said in my last post, women's roles in business and politics have changed dramatically over just a couple of generations. Women's roles as mothers still lag behind. Mothers pay a wage penalty in the workplace compared to non-mothers with comparable jobs and backgrounds (including women without children and men either with or without children). Women still do the bulk of childcare and housework. As a culture, we're trying to figure out how to reconcile these things, still trying to work out the bugs. That's a big deal, and as we go through that process, the issue of what words we use, along with any number of other details, is indeed important enough to write about.

Dismissing mothers' concerns as "whining" or "overwrought" or "a waste of time" or "silly" or "trivial" or "yeah, yeah, we get it already" is incredibly common—even among people who are otherwise sympathetic to feminist concerns—for reasons I am still trying to understand. I hope to write about this, too, someday, because writing about something is often the best way to make sense of it. (If anyone can suggest a way to, say, google "whining" and determine how often words like those are used to apply to mothers compared to everyone else, I would greatly appreciate it.)

In the meantime, if we want people to take mothers' issues seriously, it doesn't help to refer to them as mommies' issues.

Let's give "mommy" a rest

There's probably a German word for this: the experience of reading something that precisely expresses some inchoate feelings that have been floating around the edge of your consciousness for a while without your having fully explored them, even though you do intend to do so at some point and maybe write an essay about them, which you now realize is impossible because this other writer has managed to describe said feelings so articulately that even though you're kind of disappointed at the loss of your own essay you go, "Yes! Yes! This!!" and click immediately to your blog to link and post about it. I suggest, Readingfeelingtheregoesyouressaybloggenfreude.

That's the experience I had upon reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner's "Time for a War on Mommy" in the Wall Street Journal's online blogs.

Brodesser-Akner complains about the ubiquitousness of the word “mommy” to describe women with children—especially as a modifier to “track,” “wars,” “blogger,” etc. The label, she argues, does a disservice to everyone involved: to the particular women in question, to mothers in general, and even to their children—who do not, contrary to conventional wisdom, necessarily benefit from growing up under the impression that their maternal parental units’ lives revolve entirely around their existence.

Photo from momlogic.com

Let me just pull a quote or two to give you the gist:

Why are we grown women calling each other Mommy? Is being a mother such a silly avocation that we have to baby it up, stringing it with the hormones and gushy feelings of what our children call us? Does it strike anyone that calling a woman who has had a child Mommy is demeaning and infantilizing? Does it strike anyone that calling philosophical disagreements Mommy Wars is no different than screaming “GIRL FIGHT!” as two strippers go at it in a mud pit?

And

Maybe you think I’m taking this too seriously. But consider this: When we allow our children to name us, a name they use before they can speak, and then we go by that name in the world, are we doing them any favors? When our children see that we are first and foremost a mother, and a mother in their terms, I believe they suffer.

I have long hated the use of the word "mommy" by anyone but my kids (who, sadly, haven't uttered it for at least a decade, and in fact now often upgrade to the crisply mature “Mother”).

As someone who longs to dignify the role of motherhood—to spread the idea that although, yes, we often spend an inordinate portion of our days watching cartoons and managing poop, caring for children is ultimately an important project, one among many important projects in which we are engaged—I find the word “mommy” demeaning and condescending. To me, it sends the message that a being involved with children is silly and trivial and babyish. And so, it implies by extension, am I.

By the way, like Brodesser-Akner, I wrote a Salon essay that ran under a headline with the word “mommy” in it. But in that case, the subject’s mommyishness was the whole point—I was talking about a phenomenon (schmaltzy mass-emails about motherhood) that in itself was demeaning, condescending, trivializing, etc. etc. I was fine with that.

So I disagree with Rachel Larimore who, writing for Slate's XX factor, half agrees with that "mommy" is overused but pooh-poohs Brodesser-Akner's annoyance as overwrought. Larimore skirts the edge of arguing that what words we use to describe things don’t much matter. Which seems a strange position for a writer to take.

“And really, aren’t the terms mommy wars and mommy track largely creations of the media?” Larimore asks. Well, yeah. Is someone who writes a blog for an online politics and culture magazine seriously arguing that if some term’s widespread use is confined mainly to the media then we can safely ignore it, confident that it has zero effect on anybody's actual lives or their perceptions of things?

Larimore also notes that fathers "don’t sit around wringing their hands about it all or devout thousands of column inches to the issue." Right. Maybe that has something to do with stay-at-home mothers outnumbering stay-at-home fathers about 34:1, with even mothers with full-time jobs still doing the lioness’s share of work at home. Maybe it is related to the fact that, although fathers are unquestionably changing more diapers than they did a generation or two ago, in that same time many many many more mothers are working outside the home (sorry, too rushed to look up statistics; might actually be more than three "manys") while still struggling to get their domestic lives to catch up from 1963. In any case, are a few thousand column inches here or there really too much to ask, considering they're analyzing one of the most dramatic social changes of all time?

By the way, I noticed, among the comments, one by a poster named Taffy forlornly asking, “Was my comment removed for a reason?”

I don’t know if that’s THE Taffy, as in Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the author of the WSJ piece. I don't know if Slate actually removed Taffy's comment, or why. But I'd like to let The Taffy know—as well as, really, any Taffy, along with people not named Taffy —that your comments (including, needless to say, comments defending any and all uses of "mommy") are welcome below!