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If you were a Martian who landed on earth lately and you read the mainstream media, and even to a large degree the blogosphere, you might think that here on earth all women who blog are all "mommy bloggers." Martian-you might also come to believe that mommy bloggers are unethical blots on humanity.
The negative portrayals are not only painful for and damaging to women who blog about parenting but also those women who do not. That women are diminished in a way that men are not is nothing new. Many women bloggers, moms and non-moms alike, are aggravated by the dominant focus on women who blog about their children, and the seemingly related lack of interest of marketers or PR representatives in anyone but those bloggers.
There are several reasons why this stereotyping of women bloggers is frustrating. But there is good that can and has come from recognizing and rejecting the stereotypes.
It's Lazy
The mainstream media, marketers and even women bloggers are too often guilty of reducing women to just mothers. For example, though it is no longer surprising, it remains annoying that as the years go by the coverage of the annual BlogHer conference as a mommy blogger gathering has grown exponentially and spread to outlets like NPR and Ad Age. Erroneous reporting of the proposed FTC guidelines for bloggers as somehow pertaining only to mommy bloggers -- utterly inaccurate -- has exacerbated this trend. And to these examples the current obsession with the sexy story de jour wondering if all mommy bloggers (i.e. all women bloggers) are (desperate greedy) swag/sponsor/paid review/freebie seekers and we begin to see some of the ways in which the image of woman (bloggers) = mommy (bloggers) = not to be taken seriously or respectfully is developed and propagated.
In a recent segment on the NPR show Tell Me More hosted by Michel Martin, Ms. Martin acknowledged that we are not all mommy bloggers:
MARTIN: Well, good because we're getting a little bit far afield from the question kind of in front of us, which is this whole sponsorship advertising piece. At the BlogHer conference, at the annual conference in Chicago, I think there was something like 1,500 women bloggers... They're not all parenting blogs or mom blogs.
Great, right? Not so fast. The title of the segment was "Are Marketers Ruining The 'Mommy Blogosphere'?" and featured three fabulous bloggers each of whom would appear to be a "mommy" blogger (I don't know if they each identify as such but clearly it is the impression the NPR producers hoped to convey). Thus the fact of the breadth of the bloggers interviewed and the BlogHer conference is buried in the interview by the weight of the portrait the producers seemed to want to draw of the female blogosphere as solely "mommies."
It's Sexist
Susan Getgood writing at Snapshot Chronicles nails why this media reductionism is sexist in her recent post Does mainstream media have mommy issues?
But that doesn’t explain why food, travel, tech and style/fashion bloggers haven’t been subject to the same media scrutiny. It’s not because they aren’t getting free products or trips. They are. It’s not because they don’t face the same ethical dilemmas, or are somehow more ethical than moms....
Why is it better to create a negative perception of the mom blogger, instead of focusing on the many interesting ways women are using online and social media to make money outside the 9 -to-5 corporate space? Opportunities that would not have existed prior to social media....Is all of this just a form of subtle sexism that makes it easier to keep women down on the farm, and out of Paris? Is it somehow easier to marginalize women bloggers if they are generally identified as mothers, even though many are not? Are we perpetuating a society where men run the front office, and women are out back and/or keeping the home fires burning? Sure, we can be corporate execs. Some of us can run companies. Big ones even.
But it often seems that the cultural belief is we achieved success in spite of the fact that we are women and sometimes mothers. Not because of it.
Let's look at this example in the coverage in Forbes of Heather Armstrong, who writes the blog Dooce, and her recent airing of her frustration with Maytag on Twitter. Forbes writes of mob warfare in the mommy blogosphere when I'd be
