Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose

Author:Jessica Grose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Theoretically, there was enough room on the big internet for these worlds to coexist: the sometimes unpleasant real talk that scares the shit out of childless lurkers but that offers solace and visibility to the moms struggling through it; the political commentary and nuanced vision of Black motherhood; and the gilded palace of momfluencers that presents a spotless and pleasant world for anyone to dip into and out of, even as we know in our hearts it’s not the full story.

But when advertisers realized what a gold mine the mamasphere was, who do you think they wanted to put more money behind: self-proclaimed “bad moms” who admitted things like, “I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any,”20 or moms who “focus more on the lovely and the beautiful,” as the Mormon blogger Natalie Holbrook did?21

Unsurprisingly, the lovely and the beautiful sold more onesies than the cranky and tired. Though some of the cranky and tired, like Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com, did incredibly well for themselves for a while there in 2008 and 2012, before Instagram became ascendant. It’s also worth noting that for all her crankiness, Armstrong is still white, model tall and thin, blond, and formerly Mormon.

Creating quality content is a full-time job, one that frankly deserves to be paid for. Blogging or Instagramming from home is also a way for moms who lack structural support or a desire to work outside the home to earn an income while also caring for their children, and that’s a good thing.

Still, according to news reports from that period, almost no one in the online motherhood market was striking it rich. “The best estimates are that perhaps only a few dozen women are making big bucks blogging, from their sponsorships and advertising deals on their sites, speaking engagements and other media gigs related to the brands they have built with their blogs,” an ABC News report from 2011 noted.22

Watkins said that at Babble, when Fortune 500 companies came knocking, “the publisher started pulling content that the advertisers didn’t like, including some of the big buzzy pieces we had launched with. And the website very quickly became geared more toward pleasing advertisers than creating something new,” she said. “Advertisers wanted our young, hip audience; they didn’t want anything that could potentially be controversial or brand damaging.”23

They also weren’t very interested in non-white moms. Denene Millner said that she was making money off sponsored posts on My Brown Baby, but only while she was still also a columnist at Parenting. “I promise you, the second I no longer wrote the column, the amount of money people were throwing at me eventually dried up,” she said.

And anytime she wrote about race for Parenting, or spoke about her blog on TV, she received the most vile, racist emails in her inbox. “It left me open and vulnerable to the crazy,” as she put it. When she was on Today, arguably the biggest venue for America’s mothers at the time, “I never realized any kind of contracts from that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.