#Kathryn Jezer-Morton

[beautsentences]

"…we can see how much friendship at its best overlaps with mothering. There has been an emphasis over the past few years on friendship as a site of self-improvement: radical honesty, callouts, the naming of slights and hurt feelings in the service of some kind of purified, scrubbed-clean higher self. All of this is fine, but I’m less interested in this rigorous version of friendship than I am in a softer, more accepting friendship that has more in common with caregiving. I am all too aware of my flaws; I don’t really need my friends to remind me of them. Rather than demand I be better, I would rather my friends accept me as I am. Isn’t that the kind of mother we all wish we had, too? And no, you don’t need to be a mother to treat your friends to the mothering they all need."

Kathryn Jezer-Morton

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Jerkins at Mother Jones:

Last year, despite minding other people’s business online, I didn’t know what a “trad wife” was. Now it seems like every time I log in to Instagram or TikTok, there is another video of a beautiful woman cleaning her home or making an extraordinarily long and needlessly difficult meal. These trad wives, short for traditional wives, are women who post online content showing themselves adhering to patriarchal gender roles while keeping house and raising children—and making it look easy.

[...] I wanted nothing to do with her or any self-identifying trad wife in my own small piece of digital real estate, but their immense popularity (and algorithmic dexterity) had allowed them to trespass, and I find myself unable to turn away. Chances are, neither can you. But while it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play—henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.

To fully understand the rise of the trad wife phenomenon, it helps to look at its origins. In some ways, trad wives resemble the mommy bloggers of the mid-aughts to early 2010s. Back then, momfluencers like Dooce’s Heather Armstrong and Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mother commanded massive audiences through confessional posts about breast pumps and postpartum depression. As writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton pointed out in a 2020 New York Times piece, mommy branding was different back then: These bloggers were messy; they did not hold back in revealing all of the stickiness and ugliness in their matrescence. But then the vibe shifted. In 2016 and 2017, when Seyward Darby was doing research for her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, she noticed an ominous subculture gaining prominence, one in which women were performing this highly curated image of wife- and motherhood. “It was aggressively anti-feminist, anti-diversity; some of it was proudly pro-white,” Darby says. Trump’s rise helped give these women a larger megaphone.

Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists, but, as Darby points out, “it is a slippery slope—and sometimes there’s no slope at all—between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.” Watching trad wife content can pull viewers into territory they didn’t expect. “What’s scary is that there is a subtext in all these videos,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tells me. For example, a trad wife might advocate for “natural living” or homeschooling, and then veer into anti–birth control rhetoric or religious indoctrination. “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of ­extremism.”

Not all trad wives have direct links to the far right. But what unites them is a romanticized vision of domesticity, or, as Darby calls it, “June Cleaver 1950s cosplaying.” As self-proclaimed trad wife Estee Williams, who rejects any associations with white supremacy, declared in a 2022 TikTok video, “We believe our purpose is to be homemakers.” It’s not simply about looking pretty. Their aestheticizing of housework is a throwback to the mid-20th century, when women weren’t even allowed to get a credit card or a loan. Publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal were responsible for promoting a certain kind of wife as a way to reestablish social order after World War II, when many women had entered the labor force. As Ann Oakley puts it in her 1974 book, Housewife, “a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient ­homemaker­…Women’s expected role in society is to strive after perfection in all three roles.” Most trad wife content is marked with this desire for perfection.

[...]

So why are many millennial and Gen Z women an eager part of the trad wife audience? Here’s my theory: We’ve given up. The popularity of the trad wife content is demonstrative of a psychological resignation. In the past several years, we’ve experienced a pandemic, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the end of the Girlboss­­ Era. The rise of the trad wives marks what Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of the 2024 book The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, believes is “a response to the failures of a neoliberal workplace feminism” stretching from the 1960s to the present day—one that focuses on individuality. “What women fought for was an entry into the workplace,”­ Mukhopadhyay explains, but “being a mother in the workplace was almost untenable.” Even after decades of supposed progress, she points out, “we’re still not paid equally, and most women still don’t have resources commensurate with how hard they work and how they contribute to their families.” According to a 2023 report from the liberal research and advocacy organization the Center for American Progress, women were 5 to 8 times more likely than men to work part time or not at all because of caregiving responsibilities. Maya Kosoff, a content strategist and writer who admits to me that she has become obsessed with trad wives herself, says their popularity is “a reaction to perceived systemic failures” that seem like they “can be easily solved by turning to the simpler life of homesteading.”

And look, escapism isn’t anything new. When life gets harder, it’s only natural that one would daydream about a different time. But fantasies are dangerous when the stakes are so high for American women right now. We have only started to feel the effects of the Dobbs decision. “We have not seen how bad it’s going to get as women are pushed out of public life over the coming years,” journalist and MeToo activist Moira Donegan tells me. “Our main educational institutions, our workplaces, our elected officials are going to start to look more male.” Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom similarly argues that attacks on reproductive rights represent an erosion of women’s place in a democracy. “Women only get to be full citizens if they have control over when and how they have babies,” she says. “When that changes, your citizenship becomes vulnerable, so you attach yourself to a citizen: men. I think this reclaiming of being the traditional wife is here so long as there’s a threat.”

Mother Jones does a solid report on the explosion of tradwife culture in the wake of the Dobbs decision, in which abortion bans serve as a tool to drive women out of the workforce.

Tradwife influencers romanticize the 1950s aesthetic, and most of them tend to have far-right political views (especially on gender roles).

Read the full story at Mother Jones.

[jessicafurseth]

Reading List, Heatwave edition.

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. ... I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible." [George Bernard Shaw]

[Image: Robert Herman (1980) via 90sanxiety]

*

"Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really 'pseudo emotions'; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I’m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription." This is incredible. [Mitch Therieau, The Paris Review]

Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world [Jay Owens, The Guardian]

#GraveTok [Jessica Lucas, The New York Times]

Semesters for adults [Allie Volpe, Vox]

Your movers have opinions about your relationship [Gina Cherelus, The New York Times]

How to Take a Photo of Your Girlfriend [Kate Lindsay, GQ]

"Collective effervescence is the way we feel connected when we’re in a crowd of other people, even if we don’t know them. When we’re all focused on a concert or a play or a movie, we feel a sense of social connection and it makes us feel really good." After the pandemic, people forgot how to behave in public [Alex Abad-Santos, Vox]

"If we want to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work. Retreating inward, and tying our identities to all of the ways in which we’ve been hurt, may actually make our inner worlds harder places to inhabit." I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings - Jill Filipovic, The Atlantic

Is Tradwife Content Dangerous, or Just Stupid? [Kathryn Jezer-Morton, The Cut]

Why Barbie Must Be Punished [Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker]

"When you get a woman in her 40s or 50s who has progressed in her career and is probably more willing to speak her mind, I think it's intimidating to the insecure men in our workforce. They would rather diminish that woman, not promote her, keep her in her place. It's not that they don't want her in the workplace — they just want her in a role that's going to support the men in the workplace and not compete with them. And certainly not give them a contrary opinion." Women Face Age Discrimination at Every Age, According to a New Study [Kelli Maria Korducki, Insider]

"Algorithms do the work for cheap, but when they reflect our taste back at us, it feels misshapen and insulting, a crude and unfair representation. When everything is available, all knowledge, all information, all entertainment ….nothing is perceived as valuable. Not the labor that creates the thing, not the person behind it, not the thing itself. The only valuable thing is our time, and if we spend it on something that isn’t amazing, isn’t exquisitely for us, we understand it as time wasted, instead of time gloriously wandering." The Sterile World of Infinite Choice [Anne Helen Petersen]

"We are living in a streaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is beloved for giving us more choice than ever before, while also making it harder than ever to actually enjoy that abundance." Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate [Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic]

Every “chronically online” conversation is the same [Rebecca Jennings, Vox]

The Wild History of Not Eating Meat - on Alicia Kennedy's new book, "No Meat Required: The cultural history and culinary future of plant-based eating" [Diana Hubbell, Gastro Obscura]

My first boss busted me for skiving off work. I still don't regret it. [Anna Codrea- Rado]

"That myth of a restful vacation becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ll tell myself that I need to get away in order to relax, but then I’ll get more stressed as I prepare for the trip. I’ll cram too much into the days beforehand, from finishing up work tasks to finding time for a pedicure. By the day before departure, I’m a wreck. And yet, rather than question this approach, I’ll see it as evidence of how much I needed that holiday in the first place. But do I actually need a holiday or do I just need more breaks in my regular life? Would I be so desperate for a holiday if I had a little more breathing room in my day-to-day?" The myth of the restful vacation [Anna Codrea- Rado]

[rachaeldanielle]

[Hannah Neeleman] makes motherhood look easy; we all know it’s not. Agnew’s profile of the Neelemans reminded me that there’s always a lot more going on than what’s made into content. All the Reels in the world wouldn’t be able to contain everything that happens within a family. That’s part of what makes momfluencers so maddening and fascinating to begin with: They seek to contain the concept of “home,” which we all know from vivid universal experience is absolutely uncontainable. Home is never one way. No topic is less suited to representation on social media.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton on the Ballerina Farm controversy and the appeal of momfluencers

[valhallaisland]

Making friends is a process that does not lend itself to visual documentation.

— Kathryn Jezer-Morton in When Lonely Children Go Viral, Should We Rejoice?

[oxymoron0-o]

Our modern understanding of childhood was invented in the late 19th century, and I wonder if our contemporary idea of what it means to be an adult emerged out of that same definitional project: being an adult is to be a not-kid. Kids are dependent on others and need constant care. Therefore, adults are independent and can look after themselves. It feels like this definition of adulthood is wearing thin under the pressures of our times. Adults can survive independently, but should they? Is there really any historical precedent at all for fully independent adults apart from that which benefited a capitalist consumer marketplace? It’s obvious that retailers would rather we each had our own living space and didn’t share our appliances or tools — more space that needs filling means more demand for stuff. And, yes, sharing is a pain sometimes, but maybe it’s because most of us have so little experience with how to do it. All of these conversations about how to create enmeshed communities where we give and receive support emerge from our shared lack of experience. All we know is self-reliance; it’s the only thing we’ve learned to work toward. Adulthood as we know it is a series of consumer milestones: car, office attire, non-Ikea couch, first home, KitchenAid stand mixer. What if it were understood completely differently? We define adulthood as a point at which you can leave a community behind and start out on your own. Imagine if, instead, it was a point at which a community could rely on you to show up for others?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, “Was ‘Adulting’ Actually Good For Us?”

[radishreader]

... Late-2000s mommy bloggers brought an overdue, if disorganized, correction of the archive, with women sharing stories of maternal discontent all over the internet. For them, motherhood was often a disaster. They depicted everything from their negative feelings about their children to their discomfort with their postpartum bodies. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a sociologist who has written about the rise of motherhood culture on social media, calls the early years of the mamasphere “the Confessional Age” and an “emancipation.”

As with all internet trends, there were issues. Heather Armstrong of Dooce, once named “queen of the mommy bloggers,” eventually found herself experiencing treatment-resistant depression. And Lacey Spears made the disturbing quest for public power online acute when she poisoned and eventually killed her son with toxic amounts of table salt, the result of what experts have called Munchausen syndrome by proxy (now listed in the DSM-5 as “factitious disorder imposed on another”). She had been chronicling her son’s false illness, and her sacrificial care work, on her blog.

Mothers quickly learned to monetize their stories, transforming their raw and real platforms into lifestyle brands. By 2015, Jezer-Morton says, following the success of bloggers like Ree Drummond, who became a Food Network brand, and Glennon Doyle, who leveraged her blog, Momastery, to publish her first memoir, we had entered the “Influencer Age,” with momfluencers like Oh Joy and Love Taza depicting “the Insta-perfect life that everyone knows is painstakingly staged, but that we love to follow — and critically dismantle — anyway.��

Multilevel marketing corporations, which have since the mid-20th century posed as a solution to the boredom and overwhelm of housewifery, also found new footing online in the 2010s. MLMs built their digital mythos around the prospect of power and community, appealing to ordinary mothers who felt alienated from public life by offering up a ready-made digital commons — online communities where new moms could connect, build a life around products, and feel like they belonged again. By 2017, more than half of Instagram’s 800 million users were women, and mommy publications were teeming with listicles, memes, and tips about moms gettin’ that side hustle, many of which referenced multilevel marketing schemes.

Large corporate MLMs have since faced lawsuits and backlash, making them less popular, though companies like Beachbody — a fitness and nutrition conglomerate that bills a monthly fee to “coaches” who in turn sell Beachbody shakes and workout products — have profited off pandemic life, targeting mothers in particular....

[resolutedoubt]

“I’m a fair-weather friend to commune living—I want the good parts (community interdependence) without the bad parts (the community never goes home). My parents ultimately made the same choice; they both left the commune before I became a teenager. If you’re ready to commit to the life, I commend you, and I counsel you to invest in the biggest dishwasher your money can buy. (I’ll help you research it online!) But whether or not you’re living on a commune, community interdependence requires us to give up our stubborn belief in the myth that we have complete autonomy over how we spend our time.

Neoliberal family life has turned the very idea of accountability to others into a dreadful burden. We associate having to check in or do favors for others as a kind of systems failure. If you’re looking to optimize your schedule for maximum efficiency, having to pause and account for someone else’s pace and needs—someone who isn’t even related to you!—throws a spanner in the works. At a certain point, though, we owe it to ourselves to ask what rewards we’re reaping from having optimized our nuclear families. For what?

Everyone’s life is everyone else’s business on a commune, and while that can be a huge pain in the ass, it also means that there is usually someone close by to help out with cooking, or cleaning, or child care, or with a ride in to work or a hug. The casual ongoing negotiation of interdependence that happens on a commune normalized sharing my time and attention while I was a kid. It meant I was comfortable being cared for by people who were not my parents, and I didn’t expect to do exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted to do it. These are qualities that I desperately try to cultivate in my own children, but it’s very hard to do that when no one else ever cares for them, and we rarely commit to do anything that isn’t in the entire family’s immediate best interest.”

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, What It Was Like Growing Up on a Commune, The Nation

[sparklyandhaunted]

As my kids get older, I am learning how labor-intensive it is to teach them to be independent, and I’m beginning to think that we have the helicopter-parent/hands-off-parent binary all wrong. Maybe helicopter parenting is a form of neglect, one that might even be comparable in its harmfulness to the kind of neglect that forces kids to grow up by their own wits. The crisis of teen mental health in the wake of COVID can be explained in all sorts of ways, but a common denominator is that many teenagers feel that they have no control over their lives, which is distressing for any human.

- Are Helicopter Parents Actually Lazy? by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

[madejarie]

We define adulthood as a point at which you can leave a community behind and start out on your own. Imagine if, instead, it was a point at which a community could rely on you to show up for others? -

What We’ve Learned From a Decade of Adulting

By Kathryn Jezer-Morton

[jessicafurseth]

Reading List, Spring! edition.

Image: Eric Stefanski

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"When I get too convinced of the right way to approach a morning, a conversation, a meal, a relationship, I start to feel kind of swimmy and off, almost carsick. So I get out of the car and in doing so, realize there was no car. (This is the sort of notion an editor would suggest I “unpack a bit for the reader”.)" How’s it going for those who have travelled a long way to get here? [Miranda July]

"What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?" The disappearing internet [SE Smith, The Verge]

Reddit: The nicest swamp on the internet [Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic]

Do we all just have brain fog now? [Katie Arnold-Ratliff, The Cut]

"Scientists are still trying to understand how reasoning works in the human brain — nevermind in AI." Companies say AI can “reason” now. Is it true?[Sigal Samuel, Vox]

We’re All Nostalgic for a Fake Past [Kathryn Jezer-Morton, The Cut]

"It’s been said that “news is the first rough draft of history.” But maybe it’s actually Google Reviews." The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews [Will McCarthy, Longreads]

"We have a system in our brain that is designed to move away from stress. What happens in depressed people is, you end up having a sensation of anhedonia, where it’s not worth it to move towards the reward, or you develop learned helplessness, where you need to move but you cannot. ... The mental pain is related to the inability to move.” On learned helplessness [Elizabeth Hlavinka, Salon]

Unfortunately, we are going to have to keep making dinner for the rest of our lives [Rachel Sugar, The Atlantic]

"People rarely want to have sex with someone they resent or a person they see as just another chore on a long to-do list." ‘I felt like I was his carer’: why straight women in relationships lose interest in sex [Alyx Gorman, The Guardian]

"People have tried before to find a new model for local news in London. They have typically failed. The reason is at least partly psychological. The city is both geographically and spiritually amorphous. (Around forty per cent of London’s population was born overseas, a slightly higher proportion than in New York.) It resists coherence. I wonder, on some level, how much it wants to know about itself. “London is a disparate capital,” Greenslade, the former journalism professor, said. “People in East Ham are not interested in what happens to the people in Southall, and the people in St. John’s Wood really couldn’t give a toss about what happens south of the river. So it is very difficult.”" London Is a Local-News Desert. What Comes Next? [Sam Knight, The New Yorker]

Hackney Marshes: Rewilding efforts sees 'overnight' animals rebound [Josef Steen BBC]

The Outrun, now on UK Netflix

The Small Bow - a podcast about recovery in all its forms, by AJ Daulerio

"Divorce helped me clue in that, in every arena of my life, I can bail. I don't have to do this, whatever THIS is! I have a few requirements in the world: I have to pay my rent, I have to be nice to my friends, I have to call my mom, and I have to fight fascism. But everything else? Every argument with a man who doesn't see my worth? Every inch of anger I gather over being disrespected professionally? Carrying shame from relationship to relationship, none of which was my shame to begin with? Fuck that." Scaachi Koul speaks to Heather Havrilesky [Ask Polly]

You Haven't Even Begun to Portal [Anne Helen Petersen]

[izayoi1242]

Did Moms Exist Before Social Media?

By BY KATHRYN JEZER-MORTON How the “mamasphere” went from scrappy blogs to multi-platform personal brands in the past decade. Published: April 17, 2020 at 03:03AM from NYT Parenting https://ift.tt/2yjBPri via IFTTT

[valhallaisland]

You might argue that it was a boomer’s privilege to be a relaxed, self-actualized parent, and there’s truth to that: Life was cheaper in the ’80s and early ’90s. My parents made less money than I do, and yet they had more time—it’s heartbreaking math. But when we lean too heavily on “OK, Boomer,” we sell ourselves short. Don’t we deserve to live our lives and be parents too? Can’t we imagine this being fun?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton spent a chunk of her childhood growing up on a commune.

Our team at work had an “off site” in a little game world we could walk around virtually. It was custom designed to look exactly like our real office. Many people’s virtual Zoom backgrounds are photos of our office. A vast landscape of almost infinite options and people choose... the exact thing we already had.

[javierpenadea]

"Did Moms Exist Before Social Media?" by BY KATHRYN JEZER-MORTON via NYT Parenting https://ift.tt/2yjBPri

[dianeintransit]

Favorite tweets

cleaning and having one (1) drink. If I have 2 I start to feel very bad indeed

— Kathryn Jezer-Morton (@KJezerMorton) March 29, 2020