The Cult of Momfluencers, Part 2
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I am so excited to tell you about this iPhone game that I am newly absolutely obsessed with. It's called June's Journey. If you're a true crime fan, but you don't like anything too violent, I feel like this game is totally going to be up your alley. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery game that takes place in the 1920s, so the aesthetic is very colorful.

and vintagey. It centers on this protagonist named June who has to travel back to her family's luxurious island estate to solve the mystery of who murdered her sister. And you participate by finding hidden clues to help uncover the murder mystery. And I love that you also get to decorate the island estate as you go, which makes the game so fun and aesthetic and relaxing. I feel like I'm generally pretty bad at iPhone games.

The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable facts. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only.

This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern-day cults we all follow. I'm Amanda Montell, author of the book Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism. I'm Issa Medina. I'm a stand-up comedian, and you can catch my tour dates on my Instagram. Every week on our show, we analyze a different fanatical group or guru from the zeitgeist, from med school to the real housewives, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? Hey, occulties. It's Amanda here.

Today you're going to be hearing a re-aired episode. It was our most listened to episode of this year, the one on the cult of momfluencers. And I wanted to reintroduce this episode into the feed in light of a very, very disturbing piece of recent news. A piece of news that I would really consider cult news regarding one particular YouTube momfluencer taking her particular style of quote-unquote influence to a dangerous extreme.

Today I'm going to be spending about 10 minutes talking about this worst case scenario example of a momfluencer cult leader. It's the case of Ruby Frankie and her involvement with the controversial project Connections, spelled C-O-N-N-E capital X-I-O-N-S, very Elon Musk. There's something about that letter X, which she ran with a woman named Jodi Hildebrandt.

This story raises some seriously unsettling parallels with not just the sort of relatively harmless everyday cults that we sometimes cover on the show, but with the power structures, manipulation, and abuse often associated with extremely destructive, get-the-fuck-out-level religious cults. This is a pretty serious story, so...

Let me get my NPR voice out testing. So it's no secret that in the realm of parenting influencers, this niche but really popular category of YouTube creators and Instagrammers and TikTokers, there is a tendency to present this utopian, overly idealized image to the public.

much like a cult leader, can create a facade of divine authority on a compound with flower crowns. Ruby Franke is a woman who was once celebrated for her family YouTube channel called Eight Passengers. She appeared to be, you know, kind of the epitome of a perfect mother. She is this conventionally beautiful, thin, white, Mormon, blonde mother.

However, beneath this veneer of what could be considered by some to look like familial bliss, there were signs of a seriously troubling power dynamic at play that has now led to her arrest. And I think that juxtaposition of like perfect feminine mommy energy and secret non-maternal bad behavior is part of what makes the story so riveting.

But it also invites us to question what we expect a cult leader to look like in the first place, right? And then when that expectation is defied, it really shows us how much that freaks us out.

So Ruby Frankie and her husband Kevin are parents to six children. The oldest is 20, the youngest is nine. And Ruby launched her YouTube channel, this 8 Passengers channel, back in 2016. She amassed over 2 million subscribers before deleting it earlier this year. And there on that channel, she would frequently share these sort of like family-centered videos, often on parenting.

I had never heard of this person until the news of her arrest had emerged in headlines. But there were viewers and subscribers who had for quite a while been pointing out Ruby's extremely controversial and allegedly abusive parenting style. Now, I do want to mention really quickly up top that the fact that the family is Mormon and resides in Utah is not a detail to be ignored simply because...

Those who've listened to our episode on the cult of the troubled teen industry may remember that Utah is really the unofficial headquarters of that industrial complex and that so many extremely controversial and punishing unregulated reform schools are helmed by those involved with the Mormon church.

So there seems to be something of a pattern here. At the very least in this culture, a permission structure for a very disturbing, this is for your own good style of parenting that looks sort of pristine on the outside.

We'll also talk later in the re-air episode about how since the beginning of blogging, Mormon society has encouraged women to blog. Okay, it's weird, but it's true. So reform school culture plus mommy blogger influencer culture. I mean, bada bing, bada boom. Eventually you get Ruby Frankie.

I'm going to walk through some of these allegations, and I'm getting a lot of this information from a BuzzFeed News article from a reporter named Laila Mohabed. So one example is that back in 2020, Ruby's son Chad alleged in a video that's since been deleted that his parents had punished him for a perceived infraction by forcing him to sleep on a beanbag for seven months.

A couple years before that, Ruby had enraged a lot of her viewers and subscribers when she revealed very cavalierly that she'd refused to drop lunch at school for her daughter Eve, who was then only six years old, after the little girl's teacher informed her that she had forgotten it. As a sort of lesson to be more careful in the future, she told her she wasn't going to bring her lunch at school.

In general, it appears that food deprivation was one of Ruby Frankie's number one means of control over her children. And you can still find this footage of Ruby talking about this as though nothing is wrong online. I've watched these videos of her explaining in a hauntingly calm voice to her children that these punishments of deprivation of various needs are deserved.

Another of Ruby's really concerning videos actually launched a petition to send CPS, Child Protective Services, to her home in Utah, though the case was ultimately closed due to quote unquote insufficient evidence.

So there was totally a history of viewers trying to alert emergency services that Ruby Frankie was up to no good. And as scary as all of those examples are, things took an even cultier turn in 2022 when Ruby Frankie revealed that she was stepping away from YouTube to further her involvement with this project, Connections. I guess Connections could be described as a sort of like

parenting self-help and advice company that was founded by Jodi Hildebrandt, who is also Mormon. She's also a therapist, but she actually once had her license suspended for disclosing a patient's personal information to Mormon church officials. So this was a shady character, but again, has the sort of nurturing mom next door appearance to her. It's

It's now come out that on the Connections YouTube channel and Moms of Truth Facebook group, the name of this Facebook group is already a red flag to me because there is no one who loves, you know,

waving the flag of truth or like smearing truth war paint on their face more than a QAnon-er who like to call themselves truth seekers. Scientists don't call themselves truth seekers. It's implied by the nature of their very work. It's a sort of show don't tell situation. If you're waving the flag of truth and screaming it from the top of your lungs like, I'm

mantra or a rallying cry. For me, that's a sign to sort of perk up and say, you know, like, why do you feel the need to get in front of the narrative and sort of claim divine authority on, like, what is truth? Does moms of truth imply that other moms don't have access to the truth? It's already culty, linguistically. So on these platforms, Ruby and Jodi began expressing, you

shocking messaging including homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. They've been accused of encouraging followers to cut off family members who didn't agree with the ideals of the group. Followers noticed that one of the tenets of the group seemed to be to teach parents that their children are fundamentally manipulative and evil.

Followers grew concerned as they put forth messaging that a parent has no obligation to love, support, nurture, or care for their children at all. And that a parent's sole duty is to save them from sin by any means necessary. Again, allegedly.

So this is some, you know, pretty extreme ideology and controlling behavior already. Actually, Ruby and Kevin Franke even filmed a video for Connections in which they bold-faced admitted to pulling their 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter out of school in order to make them clean floors all day as a punishment because Ruby said they were acting selfish. And the wild thing about this to me is that it wasn't as if they were hyperbolic

hiding these abuses from the internet. Ruby was boasting about them, making content about them in a way that reflects the sort of megalomania that is found in so many of the most destructive cults in history. Some of these figures self-aggrandize to such a point that they don't even realize that

that outsiders can see them for who they really are. And in the case of a momfluencer, those outsiders might not just be, you know, the friends and family of followers. It's the entire internet potentially. It's 2 million people in the case of Ruby Frankie. So let's get into the incident and the arrest, the thing that put these people in recent headlines. And just as a content warning, this stuff is pretty disturbing.

According to an article in The Cut by Bindu Bansanath called Mommy Vlogger Ruby Frankie Has Been Charged With Child Abuse, the story goes like this. Ruby and Jodi were arrested after Frankie's malnourished 12-year-old son escaped from a window at Jodi Hildebrandt's home.

and showed up at a neighbor's door asking for food and water. This story sort of reminds me of that House of Horrors Dateline expose that aired a year or two ago. Oh my god, devoured that. So scary. So Hildebrandt was supposed to be watching them at the time. The child escaped, begging for help. This neighbor called the police.

who later described in an affidavit that the boy was emaciated. Allegedly, the kid had open wounds on his body, duct tape wounds around his ankles and wrists. Investigators also found Frankie's 10-year-old daughter in Jodi's home, and she was in a similar state of malnourishment. So the children were taken to the hospital and...

Now they're under the care of Utah's Department of Child and Family Services. Their other two minor siblings are also there. Meanwhile, Ruby and Jodi were each charged with six counts of felony child abuse. Now, for as long as viewers had been pointing out that Jodi seemed clearly abusive toward her children...

she was still a momfluencer and she had this perfect facade and not everybody saw through it. I found a former follower of the 8 Passengers YouTube channel

share pretty intimately on reddit that he looked up to chad ruby's son for a long time he started listening to jody's podcast this person wrote i believed in the spewing bat shit she was saying mind you i was pretty young and it was pre-pandemic as mormon youtube family channels being in the center of my youth i kind of became mormon for a time period after i deconstructed mormonism and proved to myself that it was a cult i dissected the family channels

So in September, Ruby Frankie made her first court appearance. And the latest as far as I understand it is that she is remaining in jail for the time being because these child abuse charges are so extreme. According to a Rolling Stone article that came out on September 11th, if the two women are found guilty, they could face up to 15 years in prison and a $10,000 fine later.

This is really such a terrifying, uncanny cult story for so many reasons.

And I can't decide what's a scarier thought. The fact that this type of parenting cult has probably existed for a long time. You know, like oppressively religious parents having a ton of kids and treating them, treating it like a cult. And before the internet, these people just continued on with their abuses without swaths of people on the outside being able to see it and call attention to it. I can't decide whether that's scarier or

Or the fact that YouTube gives these people a bigger platform than they could ever have. The internet just consistently proves itself to be a double-edged sword. And here's a counter-argument that I think is also really important to make.

Ruby Frankie is a rare case. That's why it's alluring to read about. But in general, momfluencers, even those who've overall really done their best to handle their platforms the right way, are vilified for being cult leader-ish and exploiting their kids in a way that's

That actually seems pretty misogynistic a lot of the time. I mean, we do it in the rest of this episode. It's low-hanging fruit, and sometimes I think it's pretty valid, but I have to also acknowledge so much of the hateful language that's used to talk about moms, but not dads, online, no matter what they do. And also, I was talking about this recently with the tech reporter Taylor Lawrence, who writes about momfluencers in her new book, Extremely Online. These criticisms...

seem to kind of distract away from the true cult leaders in the situation who are the

the social media companies exploiting kids' privacy in a way that no one gets arrested for by surveilling and tracking and selling and encouraging kids to want to spend all their time online. Like, we focus so much on blaming moms for fucking with their kids' safety while the tech industry is fucking with everyone's privacy to make money without us even really noticing and creating these addictive platforms that encourage kids to exploit themselves

But that's like a complicated story about Silicon Valley. That's nowhere near as, you know, quote unquote fun as stories like the Cult of Ruby Frankie. Just saying. It's complex out there. Stay vigilant, y'all.

Only time will tell how the cult of momfluencers will be addressed by our legal system. But for now, I give you our re-aired episode on the cult of momfluencers featuring journalist and author of the book, Momfluenced, Sarah Peterson.

Remember before we started recording, we were asking what's creepier when an adult calls their parent mommy or daddy? Yeah. And both to me are creepy. I know. It's kind of a tie. I was like, well, daddy's creepy, of course, because it feels vaguely sexual. But mommy is creepy because it feels so desperate. Yeah. Mommy is like out of a horror movie. But do you know anyone who actually sincerely calls their parent mommy or daddy? I don't.

No, I do have a feeling I dated a guy who like called his mom mommy. And that might have been my gay ex from college. Oh, okay. The signs were there. The signs were there. Then I was thinking about the one person that I know who calls her dad daddy and she pulls it off because...

She says it in sort of like a half British way. Yeah, like a posh and rich. Yeah, posh and rich because wealth ultimately does infantilize you. Yeah, that's such a good point because you are taken care of your whole life and you always will be. I want to be a baby. I'm a baby. I love chicken nuggets. No.

I was just thinking like how nice would it be to be like an infant in the cradle of America? I think that's like the feeling I like will always aspire for for the rest of my life. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm Amanda Montel, author of the book Cultish, the Language of Fanaticism. I'm Issa Medina and I'm a comedian touring all over the country.

Every week on our show, we discuss a different fanatical group from the cultural zeitgeist, from Swifties to spiritual influencers, to try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? This is our episode on the cult of momfluencers. Oh my gosh, which actually goes perfectly because we're talking about being podcast mommies. Yeah, are we momfluencers? We are literally momfluencers. Our listeners are our daughters.

And even our male listeners are our daughters because like... Because it's a cult and we need conformity. Maybe that's what we can start calling people. Instead of culties, it's daughters. I love that. Yeah, the daughters of Sounds Like a Cult. We'll figure out how to merchandise that. Great. Glad we had this discussion. That's fun, but also like someone take care of us, you know? Yeah, but take care of us.

That is classic toxic parent-child dynamic. It's where, like, you're my daughter, but actually take care of me. Yes, exactly. But yeah, we are going to be talking about the cult of momfluencers. If you don't know...

Momfluencers are social media figures who grow a following. They are mothers. They give advice on parenting. They share highly curated, aspirational versions of their lives, featuring their kids extensively in their content. They review and give away products. There are also a lot of celebrity mom influencers like the Kardashians or Busy Phillips.

Who's your favorite one, Amanda? Or most notorious? My favorite? Okay. Well, my favorite momfluencer is you. It's probably our guest who we'll be talking to a little bit later today who critiques momfluencer culture. Her name is Sarah Peterson, so stick around for that. But actually, when I was in my intense...

YouTube consumption days back when I was in the cult of veganism. I did follow a sort of new agey woo woo hippie vegan momfluencer who lived in Hawaii, raised all of her children on papaya and pitaya. She was exhibiting

I'm not exhibiting all the signs of like a problematic anti-vaxxer, but it was 2016, 2015. And I didn't know to be on the lookout for those red flags yet. You showed me her Instagram. It is, oh Lord, it is the vision of fake perfection. I know. I know. It feels very passe now that sort of overly perfect thing.

islandy influencer aesthetic, but she fucking like gave birth to all of her children with no medication in a freaking marble bathtub on her front porch in Hawaii and like had an orgasm ostensibly every time she gave birth. Yeah.

That makes me think of like what Gen Z will be like when they have kids because millennials were definitely like, oh, life is perfect. Add a filter, add a filter. But Gen Z is going to do like blurry photo dumps of their baby's shits. You know what I mean?

If they even have children because Gen Z is so hopeless, they're just like, I can't do that to the next generation. Yeah. Oh my gosh. There's this comedian, Ariel Elias. She just made her late night debut and she has a really funny joke. She's like, millennials say, oh, I don't want to have kids because there's so much suffering in this world. And then she's like, but I believe that children should suffer. Yeah.

Which is so funny. So, I mean, momfluencers are famously problematic, good looking, aspirational. But what really like makes them the perfect cult leader, do you think? Well, I think momfluencers have become such a robust cultish category in our culture right now because of course,

essentially how vulnerable modern motherhood makes you. It's so lonely. It's so difficult. There are so many reasons to feel bad about your skills as a mother. I mean, just think about the ways that motherhood is talked about from the very start. Like if you get pregnant early

After the age of 35, you're termed a geriatric mother. If your uterus has some sort of issue, it's labeled an inhospitable womb. I mean, these are such emotionally charged, shame-ridden terms. And when you have a baby, you're supposed to be so happy. But postpartum depression is so common. Kylie, congratulations.

Jenner was saying it like this. She was like, oh, I just have the post baby blues. And I'm like, girly, you have postpartum depression. It's like the last animal experience that we have in this like technologically ruled society. Everything is so digitized and automated and optimized, except for

for pregnancy. Think of like these kids who grew up on their phones who are like, hmm, yeah, maybe I do want to be a mother. All of a sudden they're growing a fucking marsupial in their bodies and they're just like, wait, I'm alive? I'm not a cyborg? It's like one of the last human experiences left that there's like no shortcut around if you actually like want to birth the child yourself, you know? Totally. That's crazy. That's so true to me. It is very shocking and it is still very difficult

We're trying to like overly cutesify it and gloss over the like gruesome reality that is pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood. Like it has historically been a painful, rewarding survival based enterprise that now we're turning into this like pristine, sterile marketing moment.

I myself do hope to be a mother one day if I'm able to. And even though that still feels pretty far away, I feel like I've been preconditioned my whole life to harbor guilt about being, you know, an old mom or some kind of imperfect mom and thus a failure as a woman overall, you know? I completely agree. I mean, I have always just assumed I was going to have children. And so like now I'm just coming –

to terms with the fact that I'm like I don't know if I want to have kids I do want to have a like relationship like that but I don't I don't know you know

Let's talk a little bit about the history of the momfluencer landscape and how it became so culty. Before the social media influencer craze, there was a really big mommy blogger culture. Between 2005, 2010 was the first wave of mommy bloggers. They started writing confessional, raw accounts of their experiences. It was the time period like when Ray Dunn came out, really. It was that time period of when women were like allowed to be imperfect and it was...

and groundbreaking. And the pioneers in the arena included Heather Armstrong and Catherine Connors. There's a quote from the New York Times that said, Armstrong became renowned for turning the struggles of family life into an intimate form of comedy. So just this idea that like motherhood was a form of entertainment, really?

A form of entertainment, but also a form of solace. I mean, this is the beautiful part of it, right? The internet allowed mothers to connect with one another, to swap war tales, to commiserate, to advise one another so that they wouldn't feel so alone because early parenthood is famously isolating. I mean, you're just at home alone with everyone.

a tiny screaming infant. You're like basically stranded on a deserted island and before the internet, I mean, sure you had books written by authority figures and maybe you had other mothers in the neighborhood, but you probably also felt quite competitive with the other mothers in the neighborhood. Like who's the sort of super mom in

in the group. And it makes sense that a lot of the times war stories weren't exchanged because in order to commiserate, you had to like get ready, get dressed, look nice, leave your house and meet your friends out at brunch, portraying this idea of yourselves that was like perfect, put together. And so you weren't going to say the worst part of your day. But when you're in front of a screen in your

pajamas with like a little baby vom on your shirt you know you're gonna have your guard down and you're gonna be able to like tell those darker stories and exchange those truths.

For sure. Yeah, that's the sort of wholesome part of the mommy blogger origin story. But then around 2010 with Web 2.0, momfluencer content began to shift to be more aspirational. And that's in part because websites and platforms were able to host people

pictures and videos in really high quality. And so your visuals had to be perfect. They had to be gorgeous in order to get people to read your posts. Yeah, that's when the influencer vibe kind of started coming in. A lot of those pictures are similar to the perfect pictures that you see in My Child Was Just Born photos. People literally hire professional photographers for these moments.

And there's something so crazy about that because just take the picture of the baby on your iPhone. Like it's very good quality. Almost too good of quality. Like don't actually don't take a picture of your freshly born baby on your iPhone. They should hand out like disposable cameras. Yeah.

in like the birthing unit, take away phones and give disposable cameras so that the pictures are a little blurry like back in the day and they're not so high def with the like gooey baby. That does remind me of how like some people will literally Facetune themselves and their children in the birthing room right after they like squeezed a human being out of the birth canal and like everybody looks perfect and it's like this is deranged. But the advent of social media made people

for anybody to become a small-scale celebrity of sorts. The problem there is that your babies and your children are endemic to your brand. Yeah, they are your product. Yes, exactly. So that's extremely dehumanizing and really sketchy consent-wise because of the phenomenon of sharenting, which is a portmanteau of share, and parenting, share, S-H-A-R-E, not C-H-E-R, of

I will survive. Anyways, you share photos of your children without them explicitly being able to verbalize whether or not that's OK. And that can put them in an extremely vulnerable situation psychologically where not only are there identifying details, public information, but also they've been branded since birth.

I think most babies like look the same, right? When they're born to like maybe six, seven months. So I think it's really funny when moms put stickers on the faces of their babies and then when their baby becomes a toddler and is actually forming into like a real human, they take the sticker off. I'm like, this is when they're going to start to be recognizable. Like maybe add the sticker later when it's a real person and not when it's still baking. Oh,

Oh, oh, oh my god. So that relates to how zealous the momfluencer's followers can get. I just heard a story of this TikTok momfluencer who decided to stop sharing images of her baby's face for whatever reason. And the followers flipped the fuck out because they got so parasocially attached to this stranger's baby that they were like, why did you take my baby away from me? Oh my gosh.

It's also worth noting that this wave of aspirational momfluencers included a lot of religious mothers, too, especially Mormon moms. And we'll talk about that more with our guests. But I do feel like there is a Mormon momfluencer filter that you like spot from a mile away. Do you know what it looks like?

Yeah, no, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's just like shiny and white and white. Very blown out. Very high exposure. There's also an evangelical momfluencer filter, though, and that one is kind of like washed out, almost. Wash out. It definitely is a vibe. I mean, it's a whole vibe. Do I like it? I don't know.

Yeah. So momfluencers, they can be fun. They can be flirty. But let's talk about the darker aspects of why they're so culty.

Well, it can't be denied that over the past few years, momfluencer culture and multilevel marketing culture and the anti-vax community have really coalesced. There are so many momfluencers obviously concerned about the health of their children who internalize and then disseminate en masse really troubling anti-science rhetoric, anti-mask rhetoric, anti-sunscreen rhetoric.

And they do it in a way that's ultra palatable. It doesn't look conspiratorial. It's all in like beautiful fonts and millennial pink colors. But they're spreading a QAnon-y type message saying, you know, we should have freedom over fear and

And the solution is you. They encourage their followers to teach their bodies to heal themselves, chemical and toxic freedom, balance your vibrations. And it's a red flag that they are starting to be more preoccupied with brand deals and at the same time, shame and judgment, sending these...

messages while reeling in money and reeling in new followers. Absolutely. I think one of the most cultish and problematic things about many momfluencers is their eagerness to establish themselves as authority figures on every subject under the sun, from parenting to nutrition to mental health to physics,

And meanwhile, they are flattening these really complex subjects such that they can capitalize them by upselling their followers on a product or a course or an essential oil kit. And that cultishness really exploded during the pandemic.

Yeah. And now that you mentioned it, something that scares me a little bit about that is that we only see what they're posting on like their public Instagram. I cannot imagine how many people are in these momfluencers DMs and it kind of scares me to think about the kind of advice they're giving behind closed doors. I mean,

who knows if they even practice what they preach, right? That's the whole deception of momfluencer culture is that they are selling you this image that they are a super aspirational mother who lives on a farm and has six vegan children and no one ever gets sick because they use this perfect tincture that they created in-house and here you can come to the retreat and learn how to do it yourself. But behind the scenes, who knows? They could be feeding their kids Taco Bell and... Yeah. ...

like whenever one of them actually does get sick, they're definitely whisking them off to the hospital. - Yeah, it reminds me a lot of in high school when like everyone tried to play down how much they studied for a test and I was the idiot who fell for it. I was like, oh, have you guys started studying for this? And they were like, no, it's such an easy test. Like I'm barely even gonna, I'm just gonna like look over my notes from class. And then the next day I would be like, okay, that's what I'm gonna do too. And then we'd come in for the test

And they would turn it in in five seconds and pull out all their note cards, like super overprepared. And I was like, wait, I thought we were just going to look at our notes from the homework. Okay. I think there's a lot at play there. I think people are overly competitive. And there's this idea that like if you get an A on the test, I can't get an A on the test, which is sort of true when you're getting on a curve. But also I think there is a shame in really, really, really trying. Yeah.

Yeah. But what I'm saying is that like I was the one who fell for the facade the same way that these momfluencers are like, oh, being a mom is easy. Like it's not that hard. I barely looked at my notes and I got through it. Meanwhile, they are taking their kids to the doctor, but they're making it look like it was so easy. And I could easily be that person who thinks like, oh, maybe having a kid isn't that hard. I just need to like look over my homework and then have a baby tomorrow. You know, the homework.

Some work being that momfluencer's account, that momfluencer's MLM downline, that momfluencer's little starter pack that they're selling in the link in their bio. But the damage that momfluencer culture is having on society at large has been described by...

by people with actual formal accreditations in mental health. There's a board-certified pediatrician named Dr. Mona Amin who told InTheKnow.com that momfluencer culture is having a negative impact on maternal mental health. She said, when you follow momfluencers, you begin to think of this person as your friend, largely because they are allowing you into their life. They share mostly the good stuff, and you can be left feeling that your life is so hard or wonder why your child doesn't behave like this person

friend's child. Yeah. And that makes sense that there's more harmful advice out there because before social media, parenting advice was limited to parenting books and occasional TV spots. And so there was a lot more of a threshold of like, oh, this needs to be fact-checked or this needs to be a more formal experience. And as much as that's good for social media to give rise to voices who have

previously been locked out of those industries, it also leaves space for a lot of fake news to be circulated. Absolutely. This is how I feel about social media in general and the internet in general. It's wonderful to democratize information, but we also have to be more critically thinking about

Yeah, at Mark Zuckerberg. Well, I think the funny thing about momfluencers as a whole is that they're not always the same.

as a cult is that it is the ultimate cult because you literally have to have a child to be a part of it. You know, like it looks aspirational and then you're like, oh, that's so cute. I want to have one. And then you have one and then you're stuck with it for literally 18 years.

Okay, facts. And that also connects to really, really damaging cults because kids are often currency in really dangerous cults. To keep women inside, at the Rights and Religions Forum conference that I was at the other week, I learned that it's often money.

harder but also more desperate in high control cultish religions like the Amish for women to leave expressly because they are the child bearers and the caretakers and they're oftentimes coerced into having like 10 children which is first of all so time consuming and keeps them from even like having time. Famously takes nine months to pick one up.

And to raise them takes even longer. Yeah, 18 years. Yeah, so they don't have time to even learn about the outside world. But also the kids become their whole life. So it psychologically makes it harder for them than the husbands to leave. There's nothing more, I don't know, on a personal level, but it looks like from Handmaid's Tale that there's nothing more painful than like a mother being separated from her child. And so like how else would a cult keep someone in by being like, we control your child, therefore we control you.

I mean, think about the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-day Saints, Fundamentalist Mormons, a cultish community that couldn't possibly be more controlling of women and reproduction and domesticity. In a sense, the general limitations that are placed on childbearing and reproduction in the United States combined with capitalism and momfluencer culture,

It's all cultish in the same way, just to varying degrees. Yeah.

Something else that's also double culty about it is that not only are you having this kid to become a part of the group, then that kid is affected by the group for the rest of their life. There's so much exploitation of children in this momfluencer culture. There are specific examples of momfluencers exploiting their children for clout and money. Children who are used for social media content and are leading to profit are technically

technically working children, but they aren't classified as such and therefore don't have the legal protections in the way that child actors do. So social media currently functions sort of like Hollywood pre-Cougin law. There was a quote from The Hollywood Reporter that was saying, at the moment, a child influencer's only form of legal recourse is to sue his or her parents at the age of 18. It's so sad these children work

so much that then the parents kind of move up in quality of life. And then let's say they buy a new house. And so then like the responsibility is on the kid to maintain that quality of life. So they're really strapped in forever. We should provide a

few worst case scenarios to really demonstrate how destructive the cult of momfluencers can really be. There was an instance where a YouTube family, Family 05, was sentenced to five years of probation for child abuse after they inflicted cruel pranks on their children. Some of the incidents include telling one of their children to slap the other in the face and they filmed it. They had videos showing them shoving and screaming at their kids and

And they were just doing it for the likes and the virality that was inflicting like pain and harm on those children and trauma.

The fucking internet. There's just such a breakdown of empathy. And you'd think that breakdown of empathy would only exist between followers and an influencer. But now it's existing between parents and their own children. Aren't you supposed to keep child abuse private, like a secret? Yeah, that reminds me of when I was on a road trip with my parents as a kid. I think I was like 10 years old and it was like a seven hour drive. And for fun, my parents and my sister told me that I was adopted and

and I cried for like three hours. But all there is to show is a picture of me, like one picture of me bawling my eyes out, which is like in hindsight funny at the time. Yeah, making children cry is so funny. That is the definition of humor. I'm just kidding. So there is one more worst case scenario that we want to talk about. There was this YouTuber, Micah Stauffer, who adopted an autistic child from China and

to make content with him for years. And then they placed him in a new family. She had positioned herself as an advocate for international adoption. She even went on national news outlets to talk about it. She produced 27 videos about the adoption journey and plugged a fundraiser for it. And every person who donated $5 would unlock a different piece of a 1000 piece puzzle, which would at the end be a photo of Huxley, the child that she would reveal to the world. And then return to the world,

returned him. Diabolical! As if it was like a puppy who like she couldn't train or something. Oh my god and the cult of dog owners because rehoming is like even more controversial than sending a human child back among dog lovers. It's problematically even more controversial. It's problematically even more controversial. I know. Yeah I mean this was

to be frank, an instance of a momfluencer literally purchasing a child from all the way across the world, exploiting him for content, and then tossing him aside once they realized they didn't actually want to take care of these special needs anymore. Yeah, I mean, this just goes to show that like,

Having kids, if you didn't know already, having kids is a lifelong commitment. Yeah. And it's really something that you don't have to just be financially and physically ready for. It should be something that you want to do because –

I don't know. I guess, why do people want to have kids? Well, I was about to say, like, the reasons to family plan, as they say, are so personal and so individual. And there is so much pressure on women in particular to procreate. Like, you've done life wrong. You've betrayed your purpose as a woman if you decide not to have children. And then, of course, like...

I mean, a lot of kids were not, quote unquote, planned and still grow up happy and deserve to exist. And, you know, it's just it's such a fraught, loaded subject that our culture at large has really tried to control and police. And momfluencers are not helping that. They're not. They're not helping.

So up next, we're going to talk to Sarah Peterson, a real life mother, because we aren't. And so we wanted to talk to one. She's also a reporter on feminism and motherhood and has an amazing newsletter called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops and a book coming out called Momfluenced. Here's Sarah.

Could you start by introducing yourself to our listeners and tell us how you started critiquing momfluencers in your work? I'm Sarah Peterson. I write about feminism and motherhood. And I started thinking about momfluencer culture when I had a toddler and a newborn at home. And I was frankly kind of bored, kind of existentially despairing about my life. And I started seeing all these beautiful mothers, their beautiful children and their beautiful lives.

And mostly they were looking like they were having a great time as mothers and they made motherhood as an identity look really aspirational. And so I just started to try to explore the disconnect between what I was feeling engaged in the labor of mothering versus what they were presenting online and

Just trying to tease out that disconnect. And I have a book about it all coming out in April called Momfluenced, Inside the Maddening Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. What are the origins of momfluencer content and how was it developed from something potentially helpful into something cultish?

So the OG mommy bloggers, their bread and butter was sort of like snark and like real talk about motherhood. So there was a lot of profanity. There was a lot of increased awareness about like postpartum depression. They would talk about their leaking nipples and,

And it was a really refreshing change of pace. It was very inclusive. It sort of brought people in to talk about the not so great sides of motherhood. That was like early 2000s. Like right when Ray Dunn started. It's the imperfect vibe of like women are people too. Yes, yes. Which was so radical at the time.

And the internet was severely imperfect at that time as well. So I'm sure those blogs, if you go onto the Wayback Machine and look at what they were in the early 2000s, I'm sure you would get a chuckle out of that. Yes. And yeah, it was totally not aesthetically driven the way it is now. That was another huge shift.

And then once Instagram sort of became the more monetizable platform for these mommy bloggers, they all kind of moved over. And then the vibe really changed to a more aspirational imagery was everything versus before these women were personal essayists.

And then they started partnering with big companies to sell Tide laundry detergent, $300 strollers, bamboo diapers. And then the era of SponCon was sort of born. What does SponCon mean? Sponsored content. Sponsored content. Oh my gosh. I feel like I should have known that. We have a podcast. It is a totally disgusting term that makes me think of sperm.

Yeah. I think of like... S-P-A-W-N. Exactly. SpawnCon, which is, you know, by no coincidence, pretty appropriate for the topic at hand. And I feel like that also makes sense that SpawnCon...

allowed for there to be a shift because you were having these organic platforms where people were genuinely giving advice and like telling people to use products that they found useful. And now that there's like so much sponsored content, you don't know what's real versus what's not real. How do you think religion has played a role in shaping the momfluencer landscape? Yeah. So I mean, Mormonism is huge. Some of the OG mommy bloggers were Mormon. Many of the most

most financially lucrative mom-flencers are still Mormon.

And there's a long history. So, okay. Yes. Mormons have a long history of recording life's milestones. So they're big on scrapbooking. They're big on diaries. They're big on recording everything. They're scrapbooking for the Lord. For women who are raised in Mormon culture, their sphere is the domestic sphere. So it was only natural that these primarily stay-at-home mothers, you know, stuck at home with their kids all day,

with beautiful houses and beautiful clothing are going to turn to outward facing expression. They were already journaling. They were already scrapbooking. So taking it onto blogs or an Instagram was just a way to make it public facing and to maybe make money. Yeah. Sometimes I have this fantasy of just letting it all go and like moving to Utah and...

Becoming a mom, you know? I don't know. I'm just kind of wondering. Issa has this thing where she wishes she could live her 20s an infinite number of times. This is like an unpopular viewpoint. I think it should be more popular. My understanding of momfluencers...

to Mormonism is similar to Mormon's connection to the multi-level marketing industry, which is that it's sort of implied in certain Mormon communities that they're

mothers and wives aren't really supposed to work in the same way that husbands do. And MLMs are sort of this loophole that gives them something to do and allows them to feel somewhat empowered. And momfluencing is the same thing. It's not the sort of job where you like put on your top hat and your coat and go to work. It's something you can do from home without ever having to leave your children. In fact, your children are a part of it. So it's like serving the Lord and the Mormon mission in that way. Right.

Totally. Yeah. Because you're making Mormonism look cool in many cases. Yeah. Cool. In scare quotes. Well, and you're, yeah, you're making it look aspirational again, in some cases, not all. Yeah. Oh my gosh. When I worked in the beauty industry, I remember there was this huge influx of Mormon beauty bloggers. Most of them did hair. They were amazing braiders. Oh my gosh.

Yes. Amber Fillerup Clark is like a huge, huge momfluencer. She has like a thriving hair extension business and like a hair care business. Yeah. Before she had kids, she had braids. The thing about these influencers is that like they're so good at making things look aspirational that even though I don't aspire to do those things, they make you question yourself.

whether you want to do them. I feel like sororities are really good at doing that. It's like the in-group mentality of like, we're a clique, we're together, we run this town. And then you're like, do I want to be a part of your crew? Because I just have FOMO. Totally. You have to really check yourself in those moments and be like, no, I don't.

Yes. I think the insidiousness of momfluencers, though, is that they all seem a little bit competitive with each other, if not explicitly, then implicitly. And I think that's so very American where like your kids are supposed to be the quarterback and get into the Ivy League school. And it's the zero sum game that we discuss on the podcast all the time where like if your kid is the quarterback, then mine.

my kid can't be the quarterback. And if, you know, your momfluencer Instagram account is super gorgeous, then mine can't be gorgeous. So I need to work so hard to make it look like I have the best life possible. Yeah. It also taps into so many other cults. I mean, there's the cult of prosperity. There's the cult of the nuclear family. There's the cult of whiteness. We talk about, you know, very GTFO level cults. They make you do something that

is going to stay with you forever, branding or something like that. And like, what is the ultimate branding if not a literal child that you have to birth and then like take care of for 18 years? It's true. And sometimes you really do wonder because, I mean, it's proven that like new baby content and pregnancy content raises engagement and, you know, brings in more money. You really do wonder sometimes like,

are some of them having more babies for content purposes or at least partially. Oh my god, I also just realized some synchronicity with the two meanings of the word brand. You know, in NXIVM, they were literally branded on their skin and on Instagram, you're branding yourself in a different sort of way. It's true. But

But they're both permanent and insidious. So there seem to be different categories of momfluencers. Could you describe the main ones and what their content looks like? Totally. So, I mean, there's the McMansion momfluencer with her beachy blonde extensions, her all white everything, her kids in like preppy tailored outfits. Yeah.

She maybe does a lot of like charcuterie boards. Maybe her sponsored content is like Amazon or like the big box stores. So she's sort of like...

I don't know, I guess a mainstream momfluencer. And then there's like the trad wife momfluencers, which is a subset that I am just eternally fascinated with. But they're the ones like roaming in wildflower fields. They're knitting their kids clothing and shades. Cottagecore. Yes, exactly. They're moving to Hawaii. Totally. I mean, that's or you could say that's like a tiny different subset. The like hippie mom, the hippie mom, the earthy, crunchy mom in Hawaii.

There's beach and there's mountains. Exactly. You have to distinguish. And then there's also like a ton of really cool radical moms that use their platforms for social justice and for raising awareness about all sorts of different issues. And often those accounts are not monetized, but they're still really making an impact in different ways.

And you're like, and that's the category of mom sensor I fall into. Totally. Yeah. I feel like there's also, I mean, you might have touched on it a little bit, but there's that category of like, everything is so unorganized. They're like, oh, I'm running out of the door. It's the hot mess express mom. Like, yes. Like talking about poop, talking about

body stuff and yeah it's like they're like yeah I'm feeding my baby on the train with my boob out so what and I'm like well I'm like okay nobody nobody was calling you out for it like

Totally. I know. Social media just encourages everyone to be so self-referential. It's like when you take an Instagram break for five days and literally nobody's noticed. And then when you come back, you post and you're like, I'm back. That's me. That's everyone. That's me too. Sarah, I feel like that's also you. Oh, 100%. 100%.

Yeah, everyone's like, did you miss me? And nobody missed us. And also, we didn't miss Instagram. Yeah, I didn't miss it. There was no longing in the equation. And, you know, unfortunately, I'm sure there is still so much shaming for public breastfeeding. But the nature of Instagram does encourage all of us to market these vulnerable life moments as viral opportunities. And of course, not everyone is rewarded for sharing those equally.

Yeah. Like if you have nice tits, gonna get a lot of likes. If you don't... Stop bragging about your tits again. I'm not bragging. I'm just, you know, you know that did sound like a bragging. I'm sorry for that. They are nice. They are nice.

So what do you think are the cultiest things about momfluencers in both good and bad ways? I mean, the QAnon slash evangelical Christian slash MLM slash like free birthers. That category gets real culty and can become really dangerous and harmful because a lot of times these usually white, usually conventionally attractive mothers are

They're not selling these problematic messages in a way that like, you know, a guy yelling on YouTube would. They're making beautiful infographics and they're sort of resting upon their maternal authority to be like, you know, I'm just a concerned mother. Like, these are just my thoughts.

But they're spreading misinformation in really widespread ways. Some of these people have like hundreds of thousands of followers. Yeah, I've heard this category of QAnon are described as pastel QAnon. It's more passive and polite and gender normative for women and palatable such that you would never think, oh, this looks or sounds like me.

a cult, even though the rhetoric they're communicating can send you down a QAnon-y rabbit hole. It's just nuts to me that having a child, which is something that people can just choose to do, and actually the government is like forcing some people to do, all of a sudden becomes a credit as if you got a master's degree or something. It's like Jim Jones had a

a family full of adopted children that he called the rainbow family, as if that walking the walk of anti-racism, so to speak, was proof that he could not end up an abusive cult leader. It's really, it's insidious, actually, when you use that anecdotal, personal, quote unquote, evidence as, you know, a credit of authority, exactly like you were saying. I also find the

aspect of it so sinister because we were talking about the sort of crunchy granola Hawaii mom, the free birther type who, you know, like rejects big

Big Pharma, which like fair enough, Big Pharma is problematic, but they will not give birth in a hospital and they like will not ascribe to Western medicine. Some of them do have lip filler though. Meanwhile, like maternal death in childbirth is still actually such a serious problem in black communities. And so for them to be like, no, don't give birth in a hospital is just so at best ignorant and at worst dangerous. Right.

Well, and a lot of times they co-opt these very real issues for marginalized communities. Like, you know, you were talking about the black mortality rate, like black women going into childbirth have very real reason to fear mainstream medicine and medical racism.

And the privileged white lady, like, filming her, like, beautiful birth in the middle of, like, a rose bush or whatever. I can't think of, like, the appropriately absurd image. And then also saying that anyone who has a C-section is doomed to have a weak attachment with her baby. Oh, my God. Like, it's just really, it's, I mean, it's icky. It's icky. Yeah. Yeah.

Especially when talking about, yeah, like these things that a lot of times aren't up to choice. You know, like it's just like most of the times a C-section is an emergency C-section and it's a very dangerous operation. And then like on top of having that person go through the trauma of going through a C-section, you're also going to tell them that they aren't going to have a connection with their child. Yeah, it's so much about that relationship.

Really grinds my gears. The toxic individualism aspect to this idea that like if something is wrong in your life, it's not systemic. It's your fault and your fault alone. You should have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps or your whatever fucking fancy slippers. Boots don't even have straps anymore. Can we stop saying that? Seriously, we need a new metaphor for the footwear of today. But also...

The sort of, you know, bastardization of therapy speak that we've talked about on this podcast. Like, what do they know about attachment therapy? Like, you're not a psychotherapist and yet you're speaking with authority on everything from childbirth to, you know, to psychiatry to sunscreen. Vaccine schedules. Yes. Yeah.

It's madness. What do you think are the most ridiculous baseless claims that you've ever seen a momfluencer make? Oh my God. I mean, Amanda just mentioned the sunscreen one. There are so many anti-sunscreen momfluencers, like so, so, so many. We know sun damage causes skin cancer. So that's a big one. And all the anti-max, anti-vax stuff,

They will proclaim their anti-vax, anti-mask sentiments and then run down all the things that will strengthen your immune system and prevent you from getting COVID and ultimately strengthen your child. You know, the herbal remedies. There's a lot of stuff about mold. Mouth cleansers are really big on mold. Yeah. Oh my God. And we do talk about extremes a lot on this podcast and little truths. Like they're not wrong that, you know,

Eating vegetables and drinking smoothies or doing things like that will strengthen your immune system. But it's the idea that it will prevent you from getting COVID that is dangerous to spread. Also, all of that stuff is common knowledge. Like, we don't need a mom influencer to tell us that vegetables are good for you. Right.

Right. And these are not accredited professionals or experts either. That's the other thing. They're just self-made experts. It is so troubling to me that a lot of populist leaders, and I would consider momfluencers populist leaders, appeal to a certain slice of the population who feels disillusioned with and intimidated by and sort of radicalized to mistrust scientists. Yeah.

And whatever they don't understand is frightening to them. It's the same reason why a lot of people connected with Donald Trump, because they mistook his face.

filterlessness and shamelessness and brazenness with honesty and relatability. But if you're like perfectly willing to claim authority on every topic, that's not a sign that people should follow you just because of confidence alone. It's a red flag. The most insidious thing about this to me is that mothers as like a demographic are really in need of answers and are

are really disenfranchised in so many ways. So like we have several reasons to distrust big pharma. We have several reasons to distrust maternal healthcare. We have several reasons to distrust the fucking government and capitalism. So there are really very real issues that mothers are dealing with and mom influencers are swooping in and declaring themselves sort of saviors in any number of these ways and

And it makes total sense that an exhausted mother working three jobs, like trying to feed her kids well and raise them well, is going to be looking for anybody that makes it easy and incorporates binary thinking, right? Yeah. Totally. And also like I'm just thinking about it from a perspective of like I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. Let's say one night I'm sick and I'm tired and I don't have anyone to take care of me. So I Google like why does my head hurt?

And that's how moms feel, but about their children. Like, why is my baby crying? Why won't it stop crying? And they're in this panic. Issa calls all babies it. It's this charming little quirk. I love that so much. It's very gender newt. Yeah, why is it crying? And it's just, and then you're freaking out as a mom. And so of course you're going to go to like a place where you're going to get an immediate answer or you're going to get the answer that you want. Yeah, for free. Right. Right.

What do you think specifically about the vulnerabilities of mothers in 2022 make people susceptible to momfluencers' cultish influence? I mean, it's a nightmare. It is a nightmare being a mother in 2022. We are still coping with PTSD from school closures and keeping the entire economy afloat on our unpaid labor.

And nothing is changing. I shouldn't say nothing. There are so many incredible advocacy groups that are working tirelessly for systemic reform regarding maternal policy. But it's really slow moving. I mean, Roe v. fucking Wade. Like, it's just blow after blow after blow. And it's really demoralizing and exhausting. And we are consistently burnt out.

So, you know, it's so it's it makes I just have all the empathy in the world for a consumer of mom influencer culture who finds whatever mom influencer for whatever reason and just really wants and needs that person to be there, be all and all.

Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned Roe v. Wade as a mother because it's like that a lot of people think immediately, is it only affecting like young folks who don't want a child yet? But it's so important for people who already are mothers because –

adding another just because you have a child doesn't mean you can just take care of more children it's a financial burden it's an emotional burden it's a physical burden and so the fact that like there are mothers out there who still just like have to have another child because they like got off birth control and they thought they weren't going to get pregnant anymore that happens so often most of the people who have abortions already have kids yeah yeah and that's so important for like

like building generational wealth or like building like a family that you can raise properly is important to have the right number of kids that you can deal with, you know, deal with. I love the ways that Issa organically talks about. No, Issa is right. It is a deal with situation.

Especially how you mentioned like the PTSD of the pandemic. Postpartum depression is like a version of depression, but I feel like it's like post-pandemic depression. Of course you love your child, but if you had to deal with it 24-7, I can't even fully put myself in your shoes, but a lot of people aren't even talking about that of like re-loving your child again after you had to deal with it for

for two years. Yeah, it was, I mean, all of my mom friends and I will still text each other like our virtual learning schedules like taped on the fridge or whatever and like just all the shiver and fear, like death emojis. It was bad. It was bad. You know, what's occurring to me is that I know that like motherhood has always been traumatic and difficult. In many ways, it's better sometimes

the best now than it has ever been in terms of, you know, surviving childbirth and having, you know, access to resources and things. And yet it is still so hard and still so imperfect. And I would almost argue that the, uh,

cultish influence of momfluencers is able to thrive so much because of the sense of optimism that has emerged from, you know, it kind of is possible to like, quote unquote, have it all. Not for everybody, but like,

We're getting there. And, you know, to your point, progress is happening really slowly. And momfluencers make it seem like it can happen overnight. It can happen to you. And that aspiration is really, you know, feeding into the larger cult of momfluencers in general.

Also, I just feel like we're coming from a long period of birthing being a choice. And so I feel like that was the rise of the early 2000s of like all these moms of being like, oh, I did choose to do this. So I am happy to be here. And now we're in this era of going back to like, it might not have been a choice, even if I do have the resources at hand. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it's possible to participate in the cult of monfluencers in a net positive way?

Ooh, net positive. God, because the cult of Instagram is implicated in participating in the cult of momfluencers, I cannot say net positive. No. No.

Sorry. I mean, I think if Instagram was less culty and social media was less culty, maybe. But because all of these things are deliberately designed to be addictive and to suck away like

our wild and beautiful lives. I don't think it can be that positive. I think you can participate thoughtfully and gain positive things from it, but I think you always have to kind of be checking yourself and having critical conversations with yourself. I long for the days that Instagram will go back to chronological posting. I'm like, that would change our lives. Yeah.

If it didn't go away, but if the algorithm was a little less scary. If the feed was just chronological. Right. Anyway, that's what I dream about at night since I don't have kids. Dream big. Who are some momfluencers you like and who are some people that we should definitely be wary of? Oh, man. Some that are definitely watch your back are Rose Uncharted.

Her feet is beautiful. She has dabbled in Trumpism, in QAnon stuff, in anti-vax, anti-mask, all the things. And also sells like beautiful hand-dyed tea towels.

She's so she's I'm a sucker for all this is this whole cottagecore aesthetic like I eat that shit. I know. I really do. Another one who I just have a complicated relationship with who I talk about a lot in my book is Ballerina Farm. Do you guys know her? Oh, but I'm looking. Oh, Ballerina Farm. Oh, man. I mean, Ballerina.

ballet is a cult of its own. Oh, yeah. Oh, we're going to do that in the future. A cult of ballet. Yeah. She 1.7 million followers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's big. She's this like rancher. She's Mormon. She has seven kids. She's married to one of the heirs of Jet Blue, but that's not part of their brand day because it wouldn't go with like

the down-home aesthetic. The quaintness. Yeah, obviously, yeah. But she's just really selling the nuclear family ideal and, like, rural Eden type of stuff. Oh, my gosh. I mean, I'm watching a video of hers right now, and she's dressed like a 1800s... What?

wife like I mean she's wearing like an apron with like a flowery what are those like a colonial outfit well she sells she sells the aprons so you can buy one yourself oh my god that glorification of a time that was objectively hell for women everywhere is just something I cannot get behind other people too yes yeah oh my god for literally everyone except

Well, even for the most privileged people because everyone was dying right and left of fucking tuberculosis. Totally. It was bad for everyone. I feel like the ballerina one, if she did like a week-long camp for adults, for her to be like their adult mommy, like I would go to the camp, put my phone away and be like, cook for me, clean for me, you know? But that's a cult. She shouldn't do that. No, but

But I always say this. I feel like that would be a healthier mode of engagement than the Instagram shit. That's true. Yeah, because it would be direct and explicit. It wouldn't be. Says Amanda as she plans her retreats. Literally, though, I'm trying. I am hosting a retreat next year for aspiring writers. One that I love, Casey Davis, her handle is at Struggle Care. Her platform is just all about how care work and domestic work

is a part of adult life, but creating, for example, like a beautiful bespoke laundry room is a hobby and is like a gendered thing that women are taught to take on as something that they should quote unquote naturally do. You know, I was chatting with a medieval historian, one of the sources for the book that I'm currently writing, who was talking about how one of the myths of the middle ages was that women didn't work.

And that like women were just like cooped up in their little peasant cottages. But actually women in the Middle Ages worked a great deal just as much as men. That's one of the reasons men wanted to get married so their wives could help them with the work. And it wasn't until the Protestant Reformation and then the Enlightenment when people started attributing pushing women into the home as like science. They were like the domestic sphere is naturally science.

what women are made for. This is, you know, this is empirical here. The claim that women have never worked is historically just inaccurate because every human person comes out of a vagina. You know what I mean? So like we have literally worked so hard that we have created a society. I mean, it's called labor. It's called labor. Labor!

Yeah. I love that darn chat. She does a ton on egalitarian partnerships within the home. And she's hilarious. She's huge on TikTok too. You know when people will like see a dad changing a diaper and be like, oh my God, he's such a great dad. Yeah. For doing the bare men. Yes. Yes. So she just excoriates that bullshit. And it's delightful. Love that.

The Envy Mama is queer non-binary. They've got some great posts. Just sort of going through certain experiences that have been coded feminine and experiencing sort of

the gendered complication of that. Okay. One more, I want to shout out sitting underscore pretty. Her name is Rebecca. She's an author and she writes about disabled motherhood and is great for representation, but she's also just a stunning, stunning, stunning writer and is able to put the indescribable parts of motherhood into words in a way that sort of floors me every time. So I adore her as well.

Wonderful. Okay. Thank you so much for answering our questions and engaging in this tete-a-tete. Now we would like to play a game. We're going to play a game of What's Cult Here? Momfluencer Edition. We're going to give you two momfluencer scenarios and you're going to tell us what's cult here. Cool. So scenario number one, a YouTube momfluencer or an Instagram momfluencer? Momfluencer.

I'm going Instagram momfluencer. I think the YouTube momfluencers can be a little more inclusive. They can be a little more fun sometimes. You can get to know them a little better on YouTube as well. It's less filtered comparatively. Yeah. Okay. Witches Cultier, momfluencer edition. Momfluencers who sell MLM products or momfluencers who sell their own DIY wellness workshops.

Oh, this one's so hard. I mean, I'm going to say the DIY workshops because I legit just saw like an anti-feminism pro-femininity workshop. What? Talked by one of these mom sponsors. So I'm going to say it. Basically, I just think if it's a DIY workshop,

there's just no holds barred. So I'm going to go with that. It can be like so fringe because a mainstream MLM would not want to identify as anti-feminist for fear of the fact that people would not sign up. Right. Exactly.

Okay, which is cultier? Mormon momfluencers or evangelical momfluencers? This one is tough too, but I'm going to go evangelical. Oh, plot twist. I just, I don't see overtly incendiary stuff from the Mormons as much as I do from the evangelicals. Evangelicals are so much more politically powerful in this country. I mean, George W. Bush was an evangelical Christian. We've never had a Mormon in the White House.

Right. Well, no. Oh, no, he didn't. Oh, my God. Yeah, I was going to say Mitt Romney, but he was never president.

He's never president. Oh, I forgot he was a Mormon. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, evangelicals have their fingers in so many different mainstream American pies. I mean, the cult of the family who puts on the national prayer breakfast every year. I could, I mean, Hollywood is like so obsessed with making Mormon docuseries right now. I'm like, where are the evangelicals do? Yeah. It's harder to make that content because since they have their hand in so many pies, they're

you know, they prevent it from happening. Yeah. Can I shout out a book I just read about evangelical stuff? It was incredible. Jana Kadlec's Heretic. It comes out in like a week. Oh my God.

Yes, heretic. So, so, so good. And I learned so much about evangelicalism from it. So I highly recommend. Yeah, she's an ex-evangelical. She's a queer writer. She's amazing. I did an event with her for Cultish. Yeah. Okay, two more. Which is cultier? Posting photos and identifying details about your kids without their consent, otherwise known as sharenting, or raising your white kids on stolen land and claiming indigenous practices as your own? Yes.

Oh, these are hard. I think I'm going with the second one. Because arguably you could do the first one, quote unquote, responsibly. Like if you put the money in a trust for the kids later. I'm creating all these loopholes. I'm going to go with the second one, I think.

Fair. Yeah. I feel like that one has like more societal repercussions whereas the first one is more individual repercussions. Right, right. Totally. Yeah. Okay. Last one. Which is cultier? Momfluencers who post photos of their family but they only Facetune themselves or

Or momfluencers who post photos of their family and also Facetune their children. This one feels impossible. Okay, I'm going with the Facetuned kids because that's just creepy. That's just creepy. It's so creepy. I mean, objectively, like, seeing a Facetuned child is scary. Okay, I will say this, though. A friend of mine showed me a photo of a friend of hers who'd just given birth, and it was one of those, like, I've just given birth.

even buried photos in like the hospital bed and she had facetuned the living shit out of herself and it was so obvious because the baby looked like a little goblin as all babies do yeah i don't get the goblin picture i actually like will die on this cross i don't think newborns should be posted no they need to bake you know like let them let that stay out of the oven yeah they need to let them cool yes

And then in a week or two, you can post the baby. I know. She's got like poreless skin and there's still placenta on the fucking baby. Oh my God. It's so rude. It is. Yeah.

Sarah, thank you so much for joining us for this discussion of the cult of momfluencers. If folks want to keep up with you and your cult, where can they do that? Thank you for having me. I guess the cultiest place you can find me is my newsletter, which is called In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. And it's all things momfluencer and all things like cult of the ideal mother. And I'm on Instagram and Twitter at S Louise Peterson with an E.

And my book. My book. Yes. Right? Yeah. And my book comes out in April and that's called Momfluenced Inside the Maddening Picture Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture. So Amanda, momfluencers, what do you think? Do you think that they're a live your life, a watch your back, or a get the fuck out level? Sorry, I'm really... This is a pregnant pause, so to speak. Because I'm really torn here. I mean...

Sarah did tell us that there's like no truly healthy way to engage with momfluencer content, which leads me to believe it's teetering up against to get the fuck out. But I think ultimately it is a watch your back. Yeah, I would 100% agree. It's a watch your back because it's like there's no safe way to engage with the content. But as long as you're watching your back, as long as you're aware of the games that it plays, then...

It can be like a fun outlet for mothers. A

A fun outlet and also a nourishing outlet. At the end of the day, it's like, what's the alternative? Do we just want mothers not to seek community online? Like, do we want them to be as alone as they once were? I don't think that's reasonable. It's just about finding certain momfluencers who are not trying to push an agenda, who are not trying to isolate you from your in-person support systems. Yeah.

It makes me think about how moms really should get into like watching sports more. And this all goes back to basketball because like maybe moms could have like an excuse of being like, oh, we're going to go watch the game the way that dads do. And they can have like an outlet to discuss their problems that's like not serious. You know, it's just a game. Go watch a game. I don't think it has to be sports because that will never be me. But I do think that –

variegating and diversifying your sites of community is really important. Like, sure, you can have a couple momfluencers that you follow on Instagram, take it all with a damn grain of salt as much as you possibly can. Cults are unavoidable. That's the whole idea behind our podcast. It's just about being a follower of the right ones. But I love that, like,

basketball is the like dumb activity that you won't stop talking about and line dancing is my new equivalent. They're both exciting. I mean basketball is obviously better but no I'm just kidding. Oh my god we never even got to talk about gender reveals or sex reveals or whatever. That's like a whole topic for another day like the cult of gender and sex reveals. They're so cringy. They're so dangerous. They've literally caused wildfires so. Wildfires, gender trauma, like there are

and psychological repercussions to gender reveals. Yeah. Watch your back, babies, and for your babies. Babies and moms. Yes. Well, that is our show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back with a new cult next week. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. ♪

Sounds Like a Cult is created, hosted, and produced by Issa Medina and Amanda Montell. Our research and social media assistant is Noemi Griffin. Our theme music is by Casey Fold. This episode was mixed by Adam Haar. Issa here. You can follow me on Instagram at IssaMedina, I-S-A-A, M-E-D-I-N-A-A to check out tickets to all my live shows and tell me where I can perform.

And Amanda here. I'm on Instagram at Amanda underscore Montel. And feel free to check out my books, Cultish, The Language of Fanaticism, and Word Slut, A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. We also have a Patreon, and we would really appreciate your support there at patreon.com slash soundslikeacult. And if you like our show, feel free to leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And if you don't like our show, rate other podcasts the way you'd rate us.

My whole thing about wanting to have kids is like, I just want to have one little gay son. Yeah. I know you can't control it. And if he's not gay, he's not in the family. No, he'll be disowned. I'm excited for it. I mean, if you have kids, then I don't have to have kids. I don't know. That's how that works. No, but in cults, everyone raises everyone's kids. And it sounds like a cult is a cult at this point. Yeah.

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