"Get Your Kid Off Your Facebook Page"

Several people here have noted how moombies like to post pictures of their children instead of themselves. Why do women hide behind their children, asks the mother who wrote this article, who also finds it disturbing.

I find it disturbing because it hearkens back to a more sexist era. Women fought for choices, and this is what their descendents are choosing, to revert to limited roles?

"But this is how they choose to represent themselves. The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafes and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs. John Smith, to a time when fresh scrubbed Vassar girls were losing their minds amidst vacuum cleaners and sandboxes."

And it's clearly an obsession.

"These Facebook photos signal a larger and more ominous self-effacement, a narrowing of our worlds. Think of a dinner party you just attended, and your friend, who wrote her senior thesis in college on Proust, who used to stay out drinking till five in the morning in her twenties, a brilliant and accomplished woman. Think about how throughout the entire dinner party, from olives to chocolate mousse, she talks about nothing but her kids. You waited, and because you love this woman, you want her to talk about…what?…a book? A movie? A news story? True, her talk about her children is very detailed, very impressive in the rigor and analytical depth she brings to the subject; she could, you couldn’t help but think, be writing an entire dissertation on the precise effect of a certain teacher’s pedagogical style on her 4-year-old. But still. You notice at another, livelier corner of the table that the men are not talking about models of strollers. This could in fact be a 19th-century novel where the men have retired to a different room to drink brandy and talk about news and politics. You turn back to the conversation and the woman is talking about what she packs for lunch for her child."

And it is symptomatic of poor parenting, which creates entitlement-minded brats.

"I have a friend whose daughter for a very long time wore squeaky sneakers. These sneakers emitted what was to adult ears an unbelievably annoying squeak with every single step she took. I asked my friend once why she put up with the sneakers, and she said, “Because she likes them!” Imagine being in this new generation, discovering with every joyous squeak of your sneakers, that Galileo was wrong, and the sun is not the center of the universe, you are!

Our parents, I can’t help thinking, would never have tolerated the squeaky sneakers, or conversations revolving entirely around children. They loved us as much as we love our children, but they had their own lives, as I remember it, and we played around the margins. They did not plan weekend days solely around children’s concerts and art lessons and piano lessons and birthday parties. Why, many of us wonder, don’t our children play on their own? Why do they lack the inner resources that we seem to remember, dimly, from our own childhoods? The answer seems clear: because with all good intentions we have over-devoted ourselves to our children’s education and entertainment and general formation. Because we have chipped away at the idea of independent adult life..."

I consider these women to be weak sisters. They choose to opt out of independent adult life and hide behind their children because they find the alternative to be too difficult. Real life is hard, and real life as a woman is even more difficult. These women take the easy way out and check their brains at the altar of wifedom and motherhood.

Here's an idea. Perhaps the freedom that women have now that they've never had before is just too much for some women to handle. Instead of going out and seizing the world, pursuing whatever career they choose or interests, they are scared shitless by the possibilities. They'll have to compete with other men and women intellectually. They won't realize that they have every bit as much ability and right to have whatever life they want. The fear and insecurity makes them fall back on the "traditional" female role: wife and/or mother. Being a wife means that someone supposedly loves you and fucks you. Being a mother, well, that is the most sainted position of all. You are above that pettiness like getting an education and making something of yourself. You have chyllldddrennn now. It is TMIJITW. Despite the fact that you live in squalor and never get to buy anything for yourself, it's all worth it because of the chylllddrennnn. These smug women who never tried to do anything with their lives are banking on their kyds to be the ones who cure cancer, so they can be the proud mother. They were too scared of the world to go out and try to cure cancer themselves.

A friend of mine's daughter actually had a business card that had her picture with SNOTLEIGH'S MAWM in big letters. Her own name was in smaller letters, enclosed in parentheses under the picture. How humiliating.

Sorceress, I've long thought some of the things you wrote, even when I was a kyd.

Having a kyd is a socially acceptable way for women to retire.

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bell_flower
A friend of mine's daughter actually had a business card that had her picture with SNOTLEIGH'S MAWM in big letters. Her own name was in smaller letters, enclosed in parentheses under the picture. How humiliating.

Sorceress, I've long thought some of the things you wrote, even when I was a kyd.

Having a kyd is a socially acceptable way for women to retire.

If possible, I'd try to avoid doing business with someone who had a business card like that. As a customer, I know that the priority wouldn't likely be on serving me or my business. The focus would be on the child. And that's fine for some folks, but I expect better treatment.

Sorceress,
I agree that a lot of women are probably scared by the idea as well as the idea that they won't be able "to have it all". Well the newsflash is that not even men get to have it all anymore. Since we are so fucked economically, every household in the traditional middle class now needs two incomes to survive. So men don't get it all either: they can't have the housewife/mother of the 1950s that the social conservatives sold to them. They have to contend with a wife that has to work as well just so they can stay afloat.

The reality now is that no one gets it all and so that makes the cop out to hide behind kids even more irrational today.

Meanwhile, another article claims "The site [Facebook] has a reputation for feeding envy, but unwed females say it can validate their choice to put career first." For a CF person, there were too many stereotypes (women who don't have children must be focusing on career, having a career means you rule out getting married, you must be married to have children and single to not have children, and women who don't have children must be wondering if they've made the right choice), but it was nice to see many of the concerns described as "cultural myths and trumped-up anxiety" designed to scare women into thinking that "we will be punished for being too ambitious and going against our basic nature." So I see this as targeted toward fencesitters, who require reassurance (although two of the people mentioned, Kelly and C, don't sound like fencesitters).

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My friend Katherine is successful, dynamic and fiercely intelligent -- but, unmarried and childless at 32, she feels pressure from some to hurry up and achieve something that really matters: settling down and having kids. There is nothing new about a woman wondering if she's sacrificed her love life for her career -- but what is new is how Facebook is allowing these women to compare how their life choices have panned out with those of their peers, and sometimes it's actually validating.

Katherine recently told me, "I go on there and I see these beautiful, intelligent women that I grew up with and they're all married to these accountant types who wear polos and golf on the weekends. Yes, they have kids, a home and a husband -- but it just looks so painfully, unbearably boring."

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"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."

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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."

The article author should try reading this site if she wants proof of how Facebook and other sites can provide a great deal of confirmation for the CF life.

Stuff like this makes me glad that I have decided to start a company and that I have the stomach for it. The only time that I would put a pic up on Facebook that is not me is if I get a new tat and want to show it off to everyone.

Success does not scare me-wasting my life on something that I don't give a shit about scares me.

Mine has me and my dogs. However my dogs are not my life....then again, maybe they are as pets can be a PITA at times. However, kids are a far greater PITA. They cost too much, give too little and if I want to spend a week in Jamaica, I won't go to jail for boarding the dogs.

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From a bottle cap message on a Magic Hat #9 beer: Condoms Prevent Minivans
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I want to pick up a bus full of unruly kids and feed them gummi bears and crack, then turn them loose in Hobby Lobby to ransack the place. They will all be wearing T shirts that say "You Could Have Prevented This."