As I was saying, apparently mothers can't do anything right on Facebook. They post pictures of their babies instead of themselves, and all of their updates have to do with the baby, or some other icky "domestic" thing, like laundry. And those apparent failures make the smug, woman-hating pseudo-feminists really, really happy, because it reaffirms their decision to be single. No, she can't just make the decision that's right for her and get over it, because that wouldn't be at all judgmental enough; she has to troll her married and babied friends' Facebook photo albums and point out how boring everything she's doing looks.
"C," a 30-year-old program director of a community foundation in Iowa, tells me by e-mail, "I look through all their photos (babies, babies, babies) and feel so thankful now that I didn't continue following that life path," she says. "It actually helps affirm my own choices." That said, "Every so often I'll get a comment from an 'old friend' or family member that implies something along the lines of 'Don't you wish you had children' or 'You'll meet a nice fellow some day,'" she says. "But based on what I see on [Facebook], there is no way I want to join the ranks of the mommies and wives." It's "helped me really crystallize in my own mind who I want to be, because I've seen so many examples ... of who I don't want to be."
I would insist on going by an acronym for this piece, too, if I were telling a widely-read publication that my friends are a dreary and dull class of people.
Kelly, a 31-year-old who works at a reproductive rights nonprofit, is from a small town where many people never leave and she says her life now is "worlds apart" from the lives of the people she went to high school with. "I may not own a house, have a husband or two children, but I never wanted those things, and based on our Facebook profiles I seem to be having a much more exciting life," she says. "Reading someone's status update about how noisy baby clothes are in the dryer actually makes me a little sad -- of all the things you could have said on Facebook this week, that was what stuck out for you? Depressing."
Dude. My most popular Facebook status updates are about how my jeans shrunk in the dryer and how I hate misleading nutrition labels on ramen packages. That's what people talk about on Facebook.
Ultimately, of course people with kids are going to post about their kids. People who write articles like this invariably do not have kids, and forget that a person's relationship to their child is vastly different than the relationships people have with their significant others, friends, and pets. It's why posting a picture of only your child makes sense, while posting one of only your spouse or your mother does not. If you can't imagine what it would be like to be these people, then you probably shouldn't try to write with such authority about them.
Ultimately, of course people with kids are going to post about their kids. People who write articles like this invariably do not have kids, and forget that a person's relationship to their child is vastly different than the relationships people have with their significant others, friends, and pets. It's why posting a picture of only your child makes sense, while posting one of only your spouse or your mother does not. If you can't imagine what it would be like to be these people, then you probably shouldn't try to write with such authority about them.
What's with all the dang woman-on-woman hate surfacing lately? Let's knock it the hell off, already!
