Mom influenced the maddening picture perfect of mommy influencer culture. She has written about motherhood and feminism for the new york times, harpers bazaar, the Washington Post and elsewhere, she also writes the newsletter in pursuit clean countertops, where she explores the cult of ideal motherhood. She lives in new hampshire, Adrienne Gunn is a humorist and podcaster obsessed with pop culture. Visit her newsletter, the f is my happy ending on substack and find her podcast, dont ruin this for me on your fave podcast app, adrian received an mfa in creative writing from the university of oregon, and her first novel is forthcoming from Grand Central publishing in summer 2025. You can also purchase sarahs book right outside the bookseller, and we will be doing a brief signing after the event. So take it away. Hello. Now dont. Theyre ready. Theyre live. Hi. Hi hi. Yeah, youre alive. Your life. Welcome to chicago. Thank you. Im so excited. Im so excited to talk to you. Ive spent a lot of time with your book. And by the way, youre everywhere, right . You are. Youre in the Anne Helen Peterson substack. I saw you on the unladylike like they put you out this week to so youre everywhere. So why dont we start with talking about what is a man affluenza so the simplest definition i would say is somebody who has utilized their motherhood to monetize that social media platform. In my book, i focused on instagram. But of course, you be a mom sponsor on youtube on tok, wherever. But yeah, so thats the simplest definition. Okay. One thing i wanted to start with was if you could give us a sense of how big industry really is, like how much money is coming in and out of it because i think, you know, we think like, oh, moms are instagram posting mom stuff and thats that its no biggie. But actually this is like a lot of money. Yeah, its a multibillion dollar industry. Its really largely taking place of traditional advertising on both tv and in know glossy womens magazines. Its really where mothers are learning about know new sleep sacks best ways to train baby maternity wear rugs home decor you can really buy and hindered somebodys motherhood, which is one of the reasons its such a lucrative. Yeah. So how much would someone get paid for a post like. Someone with a huge i mean theres obviously tiers of influencers and can talk about some of the ones that you really get into the book. But so if youre a top tier influencer, how much are you getting paid to post like asleep sack . Right. So it does vary widely, brooke duffy wrote a book. Shes an academic, estimated this was a couple of years ago. Only 9 of influencers, primarily influencers, make enough to live on. So it really similar to i like to compare it to mlms in of the structure. Like there are a few at the very top that make a ton of money and could make you know 50,000 for one real two stories and one post about, you know, an amazon product for example like if youre if youre partnering with amazon, youre more likely to be in the top. But if you have, i dont know, 30,000 followers and you partner with like a startup essential oil company, maybe youre getting paid 5,000 for those same things. So it really does vary quite widely. Yeah. Why dont you give us a picture of well like ive been telling my friends, ive been asking them which mom or accounts do you follow . Im like, do you follow Ballerina Farm . They dont. And theyre moms. I think its because their kids are just a little bit too old. You know, like, its like had kids a little too early. Yeah, but why dont you give us. Tell us who farms is . Oh, gosh. Does anyone here follow Ballerina Farm . Anybody familiar . Okay, okay. Okay. You can. Now get your phones out. Ballerina farms. So when i first started researching this industry a couple of years, she had like 100,000 followers. She now has 6. 3 million. She a mormon, she has seven children. She lives on a ranch in and shes married to one of the children of the founder of jetblue. So she clearly from enormous wealth and privilege. But this is not really a big part of her. Her platform is really homesteader. Pull ourselves up by her bootstraps, homeschool the kids, feed the kids all homemade meals, my own sour dough. And she recently won the mrs. American beauty pageant, which is an interesting little twist in the narrative. But yeah, she has risen astronomically. And i think it really points to our expectation that a good be rooted in the domestic sphere that she be thin nondisabled you know his set adheres to conventional beauty standards. So yeah i think the her the popularity of Ballerina Farm shows that we really are living in sort of a midcentury you know, maternal ideal era. Yeah. All these moms, for instance, really do right . Can you tell also what a trad is . Because thats like a whole genre of content that you guys could be following. Yeah. I mean, you could a Ballerina Farm as a trad wife in that essentially a trad wife is someone who adheres to traditional gender norms she could be somebody that goes to target and drives a minivan but prioritizes having the house clean and her children quiet when her husband gets home from work and. Like making all of his meals or, she could be somebody that covers somebody in the book who really, if you look at her photos, they look like they could be taken. 1872. And, you know, she wears floral dresses. She espouses evangelical ism, christian ism. Thats not a word. Christianity. But again, they are people who often denounce feminism and argue that womans natural place is in the home being led by her husband. Right. Right. Do you have a sense of these accounts grew so quickly and so. I mean, i do think that during the pandemic, a lot of moms became quickly radicalized. We became really angry, really fed up the most privileged of us saw unfairly the system stacked against mothers. I think, you know, some of us privileged protected us from seeing know the holes in the infrastructure. But yeah, i think a lot of mothers became radical kids became really angry and outspoken about. The systemic lack of support for mothers. And while that was happening, i think we a backlash. A lot of these trad mom influencers argue that there is, you know, a socalled attack on the Nuclear Family and attack on traditional values. And so i do think any time we see progressive forward, particularly when it comes to feminism. We will see those steps backward. Yeah. And so theres this really interesting dichotomy right, this women led industry making lots of money and motherhood. But then theres an aspect about maybe not shaming mothers, but theres an aspect that its like aspirational, right . And if youre not like these things, then youre not doing motherhood, right and so when the way people interact with this content, can you talk a little bit about that, how it affects our own ideas of what being a mother is . Yeah, i mean, i first started researching this because of my own personal relationship to the culture. I used to follow somebody named naomi davis. I dont know if anybody remembers her. So had a blog called love taza. She lived in the Upper West Side of new york. All of photos were bright, vibrant colors, and she really performed a fun type of motherhood, a joyful type of motherhood that i at the time was failing to find within. And do think many of us glom on to mom for answers who we perceive to be succeeding in ways that we perceive ourselves to be failing. And again, i think thats a symptom of the cultural pressures we put on mothers. Yeah. As long as theres any notion of an ideal way to be as a mother, think my influencers in the mom cleanser industry and Just Marketing towards mothers in general will. Yeah. Theres this weird thing that is about sort of like masochism. Like moms searching out content that will make them feel bad about themselves. Yeah like, whats that about . Yeah. I mean, you could call it masochism. I think also, though, it comes from a sense of hope. Like you know, i know for myself, i was consuming that kind of looking a way to embody motherhood, that made me feel better. Like, you know, maybe if i buy the products she recommends for flying with toddlers like i will be checking some sort of good mom box and ill be able to sleep better at night. I mean its intellectually when you tear it apart, it doesnt make any sense. But i think a lot of this operates on a more subconscious level. And i think, again, were conditioned believe that ideal motherhood is attainable when. Of course its not. And its not real and it doesnt exist. And there is no such thing as an ideal mother. But we are culturally conditioned to believe that its possible and that we should aspire to it. When did you realize, like when you were looking at these accounts as a new mother, that perhaps they were affecting in ways that like werent making you feel better or giving solutions to some of your mom problems . I think once i had a second kid and was thoroughly disabuse of any notion that motherhood could be this magical identity that completely me. I think, yeah, once i had my second kid, i knew intellectually that was not the case. I also a lot of rage about the state of institutional motherhood in this country and yet i found myself gravitating towards these really archaic notions, you know, steeped in traditional femininity. And thats where i was, you know, whats this disconnect . I better on paper and yet im still feeling this pull. Right. Obviously, theres a lot of like racial issues at hand here. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how you talk a lot about Michelle Obama in, your book, and the sort of the way that she presented herself and how still the that she was received was different. I would love if you just talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So i mean, i owe all of that analysis. Carina mitchell, who wrote a book called from slave cabins to the white. And in that book, she analyzes how the public received Michelle Obama. You know, she should checked she checked smokes most, boxes, video motherhood. Shes then she adheres to traditional beauty standards. Shes in a heterosexual marriage, but shes black and motherhood in america has really been defined by whiteness for hundreds years. And karissa in her book, points to the massive of the movie the help, which came out when Michelle Obama was first lady and really posits that, you know, many americans, white americans, you know, because of racism, uncomfortable with the idea of a black first lady reigning over the domestic sphere and in the help. Of course, the you know the black women in that movie are upholding a white womans domestic space. So she really posited that because of this racist discomfort with a black woman in our nations most visible domestic space, the the help a sort of release valve that racist you backlash against Michelle Obama. So thats all her analysis and just included it in the book. Yeah i just thought it was really interesting, like the way that michelle called herself the mom in chief and still right. We were like, you know the was not as accepting clearly it should have been and then theres still all these like in the mom lawrence or space, its really like the biggest accounts are dominated by white women and talk a lot about the cult of domesticity. Can you talk about that . Tell everybody what that is. Yeah. So in the late 19th century, after the postindustrial revolution pre pre revolution, both women and men worked both inside the home and outside home. But once there was a move toward factory work, there was a sort of moral panic. We really wanted to preserve, like the moral center within the home. And so the construct of ideal woman was created and the ideal woman was pious. She was domestic and she was selfsacrificing. And of course, this ideal was only attainable for mostly wealthy white women, you know, enslaved women routinely sexually assaulted and raped. You know, they were not pious, so they were not ideal. Ideal working class women were working outside the home, which was unseemly. So they were not ideal women. And really, the construction, this ideal also served to vilify anyone who didnt fit it. So as much as it upheld a certain type of white woman also, you know, it was created just as much to marginalize and disempower women that did not fit that ideal. And do you feel like man influence or culture has a pretty strong parallel . Yeah, unfortunately i do still see like most popular lucrative account are still very much rooted in domesticity, rooted in whiteness, rooted in traditional core tenets of femininity. And i, you know, talked to several black male influencers, specifically who said, you know, when were deals with brands and companies, brands and companies, if theyre helmed by white people, are imagining the ideal customer as. And so theres several corners of the market that theyre just not considering when they go to partner with them. On influencer. And yeah, theres no oversight in this industry. Theres no, you know, human department. So pay disparity and inequity is a huge issue. Issue. Yeah. On our walk over here, we were talking about joe jonas and Sophie Turner who are getting divorced. I dont know if you guys know, but the all the headlines immediately were about Sophie Turner having cocktail in london and what a terrible mother she was. Yeah. Tell. Tell me your reaction to that. So i talked somebody from the Washington Post two days ago about this, and she me the same question. And i was like, its. Its the quotes. The quotes. First of all, theres like only a few specific quotes. One of them is something like, hes a homebody. She likes to party. They very different lifestyles. What does that mean . What does that mean . Like its, completely ludicrous. That the idea of somebody socializing with friends would prevent them from making their children feel loved and respected and supported and for like they have nothing to do with each other. But because shes a mother shes supposed to be home doting on her children, you know, completely selfsacrificial. Yeah. I mean, like all the reactions are immediately all the headlines. I mean, obviously, his pr team is involved, but were like specifically about that, she was a bad mom and that she to party and that he is at home taking care of his children when in reality he he shes filming a movie. Hes on a tour. Right. So caring for the children. Right. But i dont know that its joe right. But still, she was really vilified for having a cocktail. I mean, yeah, its its a bummer, obviously. Its a its a big bummer. I mean, im a bad mom. I had a cocktail last night. You did . Wow. And from your book, i understand you dont traveling and not being with your children, do you feel bad . Also, not my children right now. Yeah. Bad, bad bad. Yeah. Im not either. Oh, my gosh. I know. Its unseemly. They might arrest us. I could take us out. Another thing i think is really interesting about your and the work that you do is this parasocial relationships, which i noted that was in a very intense parasocial with the girls from and the city. Every time i watch and just like that, im getting very and its because im like i feel that these are my friends, but can you talk a little bit about relationships and also that mirror neurons thing because thats fascinating. I thought so too so yeah a paris parasocial relationship mimics psychology how we feel with our you know irl relationships with people we actually know in our real lives except of course, we dont these people so we can form, you know, emotional attachments to planters or celebrities. I know ive dreamt about mom for answers before as if theyre, you know, occupy my real life, which they dont. But of course, its a one sided relationship, but it does a powerful effect on our consumer, because if we, a mom sponsor for seven years and we saw her wedding video, we saw her give birth in a tub at her house like. We have all these vulnerable pictures of her life. It makes us feel like we know her. So when she recommends, you know, the best way win baby were more to trust her and buy that baby guidebook or whatever it is. So it does have a real impact on how we spend money. You put the book, some of the things you bought god. So do you have like. Can you tell us some of the things that you felt . Oh you body i buy at 4 a. M. On instagram and then i go back to sleep for about an hour. Yeah, im more like a 6 a. M. Purchaser before. Ive been fully caffeinated. I bought a wooden marble run my children because fruity had won. Julie d orourke. I cover in the book shes yeah shes really got me but i bought like a 72 marble run. I mean, ive bought so many Beauty Products and skin care products, but i think the runs sticks out as being maybe the most ridiculous, right . Because you dont want a plastic one . No, of course. Right. That wouldnt again. Bad mom. Right. That wouldnt be good. Yeah. Did you when you were receiving products in the mail, were you having like conflict emotions about it like when i received products that i off instagram, a lot of times i was like, this is not great. You know like that was a mistake. And then feel like i go through my life thinking im smarter than instagram, but then in reality im not necessarily at all right, oh god, i wish i could say that felt more of a i shouldnt have done this. I also do think thats just the way we shop. Its so enmeshed in how we shop. Yeah, i think the marble run, though. I think the marble looks like i set up for my kids and it was like, you know, now magic magic take place and yeah, they played with it. Maybe once so were not into it now. Well, speaking of magic, so i dont think we did the mirror. Oh, yeah lets do it, because its really interesting talking about like consuming other peoples magical moments versus sure, were on the floor, the marble run, having our own right and the marble room is actually a perfect example of that. So i talked to a psychologist about why i it was that i was so eager to consume a strangers moments rather than create this moments in my own life. And she talked mirror neurons which basically hearkens back to missing lin limb syndrome. So when they were studying missing limb syndrome, which is when say, you know, i didnt have this arm, but i felt like tingling or itching. So essentially they found out if they held up a mirror and had the patient itch like this arm but held the mirror in a way that it looked like they were that itching would go away. So she posited that, maybe when you are buying the marble run, you psychologically are saying to yourself like, youre a good mom because bought this thing even though the kids play with it, you didnt see them play with you, didnt like laugh with them while they played it, you didnt actually experience moment in your real life. But the act purchasing that marble run told your subconscious that you did something good for your kids or you you know, enacted role of good mother for a moment and i think the same she also said the same could go for looking at somebodys newborn photos or looking at a photo of a mother curled up reading to her children by candlelight or whatever it is, theres something that happens in the brain that convinces us that were looking at this image. We are this is a good image and it checks the box for us in our own lives, even though we didnt experience it. So when you recognize that like consuming other peoples kind, joyful moments was kind of giving the sense that you know, fulfilling you in a way, did you like did you make adjustments to make those moments with your kids instead . I mean, i dont think i ever thought like, oh, im nailing motherhood because i bought or run. I do think more holistically after researching the book. Im just not as attracted others. Performances of motherhood it hold the same emotional power as it once did. I think i just when you know is sort of the dirty roots of the maternal ideal in country, its hard to continue to romanticize that ideal and just doesnt feel it doesnt feel fine. Me it doesnt its. Not something i aspire to anymore, i guess. And that was the piece that sort of loosened grip on me. Yeah. And you do talk about and maybe you can talk a little about this here about like there are spaces on social media and on instagram that are really serving women and communities. Yeah. Yeah, i have a whole chapter in the book about many, many incredible that are you know featuring maternal advocacy activism that are speaking to mothers real needs. Im thinking of people like casey her account is basically people through the the slog of everyday in the home. So you know if youre in dishes or laundry and something within it, you cant through that she has like practical, you know, step by step guides. She talks about things like, you know, creating a beautiful, bespoke laundry room as not an act of good motherhood, but as esthetic hobby and sort of, making the connection between, esthetic hobbies and mothering. Its like really useful framework. But shes just one of the many mom sponsors. But yeah, theres so many more influencers providing resource is where otherwise they would be hard to come by. Mia is a fat mom influencer and crowdsourced hundreds of fat positive Health Care Providers is a huge problem, especially when it comes to fertility treatments and, you know, birth trauma. So these are like real, you know, concrete ways make mothers lives better. That would not be easily accessible were it not for social media. Yeah, i love that. So can you talk a little bit too about ethics of like commodifying children on the internet . I mean, its its a pretty fraught topic. Yeah i didnt cover it a ton in the book, only because i was more interested about, you know, the maternal experience. But i do interview the you know, i talk to every month hunter the book about how they felt about it almost. Every single one of them you know has thought about it quite deeply many of them explicitly. Their kids like, is this still fun for . And when their kids say no, they, you know, thats it, they dont include their kids anymore. I was really to see illinois passed one of the first bills to protect child or children of influencers to legally require parents to put a certain amount of money in savings accounts. Theres bills in other or theres laws in other countries. Its called the right to be forgotten. So if a kid grows up and wants, you know, everything deleted, they can legally request that. But yeah, i think consent is really almost impossible because how can a five year old meaningfully to having her likeness to, you know, 2 Million People on youtube like she doesnt know what that means and what the ramifications its could be. So i think its a really ethically murky area for sure yeah my kid is 14 and hes only now like dont post that yeah. Until then. And you talk about how really any mom on instagram is a mom influencer and sort of performing motherhood. What do you mean by that . I think were performing, you know, every facet of our identity all the time for various audiences. You know, i a version of myself at preschool pickup thats very different from the version of myself that had cocktails last night, for example. But i think when were immersed in influencer culture, were absorbing so many esthetic images about, how to look and present as mother that its impossible not replicate that on our own feeds. And i think particularly for millennial mothers, weve really been taught to equate our value with our ability to esthetically curate a life. So i think that becomes complicated too when it comes to motherhood yeah, i to save time for questions and youll be able to up to the mic but i have pretty important question that i need ask you, which is i loved in this book how you really contextualize ways that youre doing interviews like moms are hiding the bathroom to get on the phone with you. Youre driving to play dates like people are trying to get their kids to watch a show. So how are you managing your own writing life and time do this. You have three kids like its its difficult. Yeah. Mean i always defer to kate bare. Shes a poet and shes asked this question a lot and shes always she always has same thing which is child care. I mean its the same way anybody does any work. But during the pandemic, the book, you know, there wasnt child care. So when i was writing it. I couldnt conceive of writing it. Just i guess providing that transparency because every mother i talked to the book, we were all doing our own version of, you know, evading our children and trying to work while raising our kids. So it became like a clear throughline, as i was writing it. Yeah. And now that the pandemic sort of waning, do you find like its easier for you to carve out your times. Do you have like a schedule where youre writing or do you how do you manage it . Oh, yeah. Im like, i dont have a system. Im kind of a chaotic worker, but like, like i can only like actually write and use brain when kids are running around me. Im i just i so it has be when theyre at school or yeah or a babysitter. Its like impossible was also writing a book during the pandemic and like zoom class was happening my job happening it was a total nightmare. Yeah, yeah. Its awful. Yeah. Cringe okay. Do we do we have questions about mom fluency that weve got to have some moms in here . Elizabeth, did you have a question . And i wanted to pull a question out. It would be do you think that there is a bubble where people are tired of looking at like rich, white, like monica lewinsky, lot more than 20 years later. Oh, gosh, i got that right. Yeah, it is not real. Elizabeth wants to know if theres a bubble about looking at white women. Has the bubble burst yet . Sarah . Will it ever . I mean, unfortunately i think there will always be an audience that because the rich, you know then says hetero mom still you its what consumers think or its what marketers think is the prototypical mother. Its what media is the prototypical mother. So i think will always be an audience for that fantasy. That being said, i do think there is so much fatigue with like the pretty white mom and her pretty white house, particularly postpandemic i think, you know it doesnt feel like escapist fun in a way that maybe it did prepandemic so yeah, for sure. I think theres fatigue and theres just so many great accounts you can follow that dont make you feel as youre failing. So yeah i do think maybe the bubble burst a little as a follow up to that. Like there is a whole theres a comedy genre. Yeah. One of i dont know if you talk this in the book because i havent read it, but sad beige book. Yes. Shes so great and like totally making fun of that. Yes static. And i dont know if you have anything else to say about that. I interviewed hayley for my newsletter actually not the book but yeah there are so many satiric accounts, theres a ton of satirical, earthy, crunchy by influencers. Theres a whole thing with mouth tape like in the earthy, crunchy community, like its supposedly to breathe through your mouth at night, i dont know, but yeah, theres tons of hysterical parody accounts to follow that are satisfying and validating. Why dont you tell us about nap dress now that youve brought up the beige one . Because people are like, what the hell is, the nap dress . I mean, it kind of looks like a less structured dress would see on like bridgerton or in a jane austen. Its like elastic smoking here. Yeah, i think it again taps into the nostalgia a time when you know gender roles were really sharply delineated taps into sort of the fantasy of like, you know, domestic earth goddess flowy, easy motherhood and where did the nap part from because you could nap in it. Well its just so versatile. I mean, it started out as a nightgown for hill house home. They tried to sell pajama as and then it took as a dress so yeah, i mean it does look comfortable you didnt buy one. I have it. Yeah. And im shocked. This is for a much taller person than you can hear me. This is very i have to say, i didnt really get out of this. Oh, entirely. But the earthy, crunchy. Are they getting corporate support, too . Theyre making money. Yeah, yeah. Just curious. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. Any type of mother can, you know, partner with a brand and money, you know, a Company Selling baby slings wants to partner with a mom, flints or who, you know, lives in the foothills of california, you know, only where is shades of like oatmeal think theres a type of more influencer or for almost every type of product so yeah for sure. Hi im going be a grandmother in three months, so. So im here for my daughter. Okay. And i remember from when i was first a mom and the things you feel bad that the ideal you know i had a csection i didnt breastfeed perfectly blah blah and in a way all this social media, this horrible. Oh yeah. So now she has these standards and i know she cared. I know she wants to take a job. Yeah, shes nesting right now and all this. So im just hoping that maybe reading a book like this, it makes you think about from different angles. Well, relief words. Although inevitable, everybody has to go through it. Im. Im going to be the best. I want to be good. And that my god, i failed. And yeah, its kind of a human thing, but maybe this will give her a little. Yeah no i mean i that, i really did want to write book for that purpose. So people would feel freed from these unrealistic standards and free to create their own maternal values according to themselves, not somebody elses. You know idea of perfect. So yeah i i that was my goal with the book. So just hi. So you think mentioned this a little bit when you were talking about farm in the beginning, but does the book explore roles of religion particularly like the Mormon Church . Im thinking of like the trope of the utah mom being like perfect, like millions kids like and theyre all doing great. Yeah. Do you about that at all . Yeah, i dont talk about it a ton i will say that mormonism sort of sets up the perfect stage for my influencer culture. You know, they really prioritize. They prioritize motherhood and, wife, hood, they prioritize, you know, their bodies, a reflection of god. So, you know, theyre more likely to look a certain of them way. And theyre also in their religion to record keep like a big part of their faith taught to journal, talk to like scrapbook. So blogs really became like a natural offshoot of that. And so i think thats one of the main reasons that so many mormons populate this space and of course, the fact that they have a lot of kids doesnt hurt because pregnancy and newborn engagement goes way up so that definitely i do talk a bit about evangelii called christianity in the book though do we have any questions . Well, i have one last question. Yeah. I have to ask you, what are you reading . Do you like excited about . Like, you know, obviously nobody should follow Ballerina Farms. What should they follow. What do you what do you liking right now. Um im, currently reading a book about the history j. Crew im im obsessed with john giants like obsessed. And i just read a book about, the cultural legacy of the american girl. Im really interested in how. Her girlhood was marketed towards millennials and and yeah what is a book though that i really really loved recently. Oh i maggie ships head circle great circle the circle circle the great circle. I loved it so much. So thats another recent. Really, really loved. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here sarah is going to be right over there signing books for you and enjoy the rest of your time in chicago away from your