- This is an adapted excerpt from Sara Petersen's "Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture."
- Her essays on feminism and motherhood have appeared in The New York Times and Harper's Bazaar.
Momfluencers sell me a lot of things. They sell a lot of us a lot of things! In selling motherhood and a particular version of womanhood, momfluencer content has largely taken the place of celebrity endorsements, glossy women's magazines, and traditional advertising.
And because we can voluntarily access them all the time, anytime, momfluencers exercise an outsized impact on the consumer habits of the women who scroll. Even discerning, anti-consumerist, feminist mothers — like me — follow momfluencers and are liable to become avid customers.
By creating distinct, recognizable brands, momfluencers can more effectively reach their target audiences to sell baby slings, vitamin C serums, workshops, life-coaching sessions, parenting manuals, anti-vaccine propaganda, white supremacy, or social justice. Many also sell their own photo filters, called "presets," which allow consumers to color their own lives so that they look just like those of their favorite momfluencers. These presets are literal rose-tinted lenses.
How momfluencers and advertising are closely tied
But before momfluencers can sell us anything, they must first sell us on motherhood itself, and often, on Instagram and within the culture at large, motherhood is made beautiful and aspirational through a domestic lens. Of course, motherhood and domesticity have long been entangled in the consumer market, and advertisers have always sold mothers the idea that their ultimate panacea is domestic bliss.
In an Aeon article about mid-century advertising powerhouse Jean Wade Rindlaub, Ellen Wayland-Smith writes, "Rindlaub's Betty Crocker ads hammered home this message of sentimental domesticity, promising that if women felt 'troubled' by the world outside their front doors, relief was just a cake away." It only takes a few minutes of Instagram scrolling to determine that this message from 1954 is alive and well.
Even liberal Instagram moms tend to tout devotion to children and home as a type of resistance, when in fact this aligns them with advertising that has historically deliberately portrayed the labor of caregiving and housework as a combination of joy and feminine moral duty.
By convincing a mom that she can cure her hopelessness by cooking and tidying up — consider the title of Marie Kondo's book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" — momfluencers are able to gain new customers for a powder-pink always pan or artisanal laundry basket. In other words, momfluencers promoting a domestic-goddess version of motherhood online help to create a particular class of new mamas to whom they can then continue to sell products.
We're not just consuming social media, we're shopping
Momfluencers have made the domestic fantasy more visible and more "shoppable" than ever before. Meanwhile, the effect of momfluencing on the way we spend our money (and time) remains mostly unexamined and not very well understood. Emily Hund, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, has been studying influencer marketing, particularly on Instagram.
Along with her colleague, Lee McGuigan, assistant professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, she coined the term "shoppability" to define how the "integration of commerce and personal technologies has become a central pivot of lived experience in the early 21st century." When we scroll through momfluencers' feeds, we are consuming their performances of motherhood, sure, but we're also just as likely to be shopping, and Instagram is no longer a platform solely devoted to sharing doctored-up photos with family and friends, but a platform from which billions of dollars are spent and made and most of these dollars are being spent by women, many of them mothers.
Parasociality makes us more trusting of momfluencers' opinions
In their paper "A Shoppable Life: Performance, Selfhood, and Influence in the Social Media Storefront," Hund and McGuigan explain that shoppability has its roots in catalogs and infomercials. Whereas I could project very little onto a nameless model in a J.Crew catalog wearing a rollneck sweater — I don't know her name, I don't know how many kids she has, I can't commiserate with her about teary preschool drop-offs — I can do all that and more when shopping from my favorite momfluencers' pages.
When they give me an ad or affiliate link, I feel like my shopping choices have been vetted by someone I kind of (feel like I) know, and it is parasociality that makes this possible. "Parasociality" refers to the psychological phenomenon of forming bonds with celebrities, public figures, or, in this case, momfluencers, that fulfill similar roles to IRL friendships. These parasocial relationships make shoppability so much more powerful, because they enforce the idea that we're buying something via someone we trust or feel like we know. Parasociality helps distinguish the modern era of shoppability from traditional magazine or TV ads targeted toward women and mothers.
What hasn't changed, however, is the clear understanding among advertisers and marketers that, to effectively sell a product to mothers, one first must define the parameters of what makes a "good mother." These, of course, depend on cultural mores and expectations, which have changed quite a bit throughout modern consumer history but, in many critical ways, have remained stubbornly the same.
Excerpted from "Momfluenced" (Beacon Press, April 25, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.