All the World's a Stage

Recently, Emily has received more than one comment about how she looks like she’s really happy and doing well, “according to Instagram.” This is true. She doesn’t post about the heart-wrenching strain of her recent divorce, and always “forgets” to make videos of herself sighing loudly and stomping around the house when she is fed up with her kids. You should also not be fooled by Alexina’s many images of her free range children frolicking in the sunlit forests of Vermont. These beautiful moments do happen, but let’s just say that they are orthorexic slices of life rather than the whole pie. She’s not sharing videos of herself yelling at her older children to get their dirty feet away from their baby brother's head or posting pics of her leaky breasts or herself covered in baby pee, poop or puke. But it’s all happening. 

As Sara Petersen writes in The Cut this week, this performance of motherhood is largely played out on social media and is therefore not meant for our children, but for ourselves. She writes: “It is for us, who were trained to perform for the male gaze and whose primary value as sex objects no longer holds so much currency. We perform mothering online as a way of accessing meaning when, most days, the work of motherhood doesn’t seem to mean much of anything according to the many men legislating against paid family leave, universal preschool, and childcare subsidies.”

But it isn’t just Instagram. As women, we spend so much of our real lives performing for others. We do this when we try to be lighthearted and unassuming in the workplace so that men will see us as agreeable, when we starve ourselves so that our bodies don’t take up too much space, when we apologize for everything and nothing, and when we brush off sexist comments in order to be easier and not come across as a shrew. This tendency toward performance and looking is deeply rooted in - cue the lights - the patriarchy. We see this in diet culture, which eats away at our sense of empowerment by telling us that we are never quite good enough (because somehow the sex appeal of “mom bod” never quite took off the way “dad bod” did.) And we see this acutely in pornography and depictions of sex in media, which rest on the idea of sexuality as performance rather than connection, and instructs us to be aroused by seeing and being seen rather than relating.

Still, social media has taken the level of performance to the nth degree. Petersen has written about this extensively in her book, “Momfluenced. Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture.” She writes, “On Instagram, the private work of mothering is turned into a public performance, generating billions of dollars. The message is simple: we’re all just a couple of clicks away from a better, more beautiful experience of motherhood.” This picture-perfect act of motherhood can never be performed well because in the real world we have kids and jobs or other responsibilities that keep us from having fresh cut flowers, an always-clean floor, and a wardrobe of sad-but-superior beige linen for our children. 

If we compare ourselves to momfluencers rather than seeing them for the performers that they are, we will never be enough. And, perhaps most importantly, we will never be truly empowered or free. Maybe over the next week we can challenge ourselves only to perform things like dance moves that our kids will make fun of, or bedtime stories that will leave them wanting more. At the end of the day, our kids are the audience that we are really influencing.