place and still intact. i mean, he's got a different name. it operates differently, but the segregation exists, right? i think we'd all agree with that. and basically what's happening is it has intensified actually because the segregation has gotten so bad. the process the machinery has pushed hundreds of thousands of african-americans even out of the neighborhoods that they were segregated in. for instance, inglewood, where they stood the the the foundation of this story takes in inglewood during that time had a close to 100,000 african-americans living. now it's about 20,000 left. and so those the same thing in woodlawn. no one is there anymore. so the system continued to operate and intensify to the degree that these neighborhoods have been the popular.

by 70, 80% in some cases. so yeah don't i don't think it is change and i it doesn't appear to me that i don't see any policy that is attempting even try to reverse or try to sustain those who are left in any kind of healthy way. mm. yeah. lance williams thank you again so much for sitting down with us. thanks for having. thank you. sarah peterson is the author of mom influenced the maddening picture perfect of mommy influencer culture. she has written about motherhood and feminism for the new york times, harper's 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, don't 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 sarah's book right outside the bookseller, and we will be doing a brief signing after the event. so take it away. hello. now don't. they're ready. they're live. hi. hi hi. yeah, you're alive. your life. welcome to chicago. thank you. i'm so excited. i'm so excited to talk to you. i've spent a lot of time with your book. and by the way, you're everywhere, right? you are. you're in the anne helen peterson substack.

i saw you on the unladylike like they put you out this week to so you're everywhere. so why don't 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 that's 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 that's that it's no biggie. but actually this is like a lot of money. yeah, it's a multibillion dollar industry. it's really largely taking place of traditional advertising on both tv and in know glossy women's magazines. it's 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 somebody's motherhood, which is one of the reasons it's such a lucrative. yeah. so how much would someone get paid for a post like. someone with a huge i mean there's obviously tiers of influencers and can talk about some of the ones that you really get into the book. but so if you're 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. she's 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 you're if you're partnering with amazon, you're more likely to be in the top. but if you have, i don't know, 30,000 followers and you partner with like a startup essential oil company, maybe you're getting paid $5,000 for those same things. so it really does vary quite widely. yeah. why don't you give us a picture of well like i've been telling my friends, i've been asking them which mom or accounts do you follow? i'm like, do you follow ballerina farm? they don't. and they're moms. i think it's because their kids are just a little bit too old. you know, like, it's like had kids a little too early. yeah, but why don't 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 she's 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 mid-century you know, maternal ideal era. yeah. all these moms, for instance, really do right? can you tell also what a trad is? because that's 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. that's not a word. christianity. but again, they are people who often denounce feminism and argue that woman's 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 so-called 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 there's this really interesting dichotomy right, this women led industry making lots of money and motherhood. but then there's an aspect about maybe not shaming mothers, but there's an aspect that it's like aspirational, right? and if you're not like these things, then you're 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 don't 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 that's a symptom of the cultural pressures we put on mothers. yeah. as long as there's 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. there's 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, what's 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 i'll be able to sleep better at night. i mean it's intellectually when you tear it apart, it doesn't make any sense. but i think a lot of this operates on a more subconscious level. and i think, again, we're conditioned believe that ideal

motherhood is attainable when. of course it's not. and it's not real and it doesn't exist. and there is no such thing as an ideal mother. but we are culturally conditioned to believe that it's 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 weren't 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 that's where i was, you know, what's this disconnect?

i better on paper and yet i'm still feeling this pull. right. obviously, there's 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. she's then she adheres to traditional beauty standards. she's in a heterosexual marriage, but she's 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 woman's domestic space. so she really posited that because of this racist discomfort with a black woman in our nation's most visible domestic space, the the help a sort of release valve that racist you backlash against michelle obama. so that's 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 there's still all these like in the mom lawrence or space, it's 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 post-industrial 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 self-sacrificing. 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 didn't 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 we're deals with brands and

companies, brands and companies, if they're helmed by white people, are imagining the ideal customer as. and so there's several corners of the market that they're just not considering when they go to partner with them. on influencer. and yeah, there's no oversight in this industry. there's 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 don't 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, it's --. it's the quotes. the quotes.

first of all, there's like only a few specific quotes. one of them is something like, he's a homebody. she likes to party. they very different lifestyles. what does that mean? what does that mean? like it's, 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 she's a mother she's supposed to be home doting on her children, you know, completely self-sacrificial. yeah. i mean, like all the reactions are immediately all the headlines. i mean, obviously, his pr team is involved, but we're 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 she's filming a movie. he's on a tour. right. so caring for the children. right. but i don't know that it's joe right.

but still, she was really vilified for having a cocktail. i mean, yeah, it's it's a bummer, obviously. it's a it's a big bummer. i mean, i'm a bad mom. i had a cocktail last night. you did? wow. and from your book, i understand you don't traveling and not being with your children, do you feel bad? also, not my children right now. yeah. bad, bad bad. yeah. i'm not either. oh, my gosh. i know. it's 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, i'm getting very and it's because i'm like i feel that these are my friends, but can you talk a little bit about relationships and also that mirror neurons thing because that's 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 don't these people so we can form, you know, emotional attachments to planters or celebrities. i know i've dreamt about mom for answers before as if they're, you know, occupy my real life, which they don't. but of course, it's 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 we're 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, i'm more like a 6 a.m. purchaser before. i've been fully caffeinated. i bought a wooden marble run my children because fruity had won. julie d o'rourke. i cover in the book she's yeah she's really got me but i bought like a $72 marble run. i mean, i've 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 don't want a plastic one? no, of course. right. that wouldn't again. bad mom. right. that wouldn't 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 i'm smarter than instagram, but then in reality i'm not necessarily at all right, oh god, i wish i could say that felt more of a i shouldn't have done this. i also do think that's just the way we shop. it's 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 we're not into it now. well, speaking of magic, so i don't think we did the mirror. oh, yeah let's do it, because it's really interesting talking about like consuming other people's magical moments versus sure, we're 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 stranger's 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 didn't 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, you're a good mom because bought this thing

even though the kids play with it, you didn't see them play with you, didn't like laugh with them while they played it, you didn't 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 somebody's newborn photos or looking at a photo of a mother curled up reading to her children by candlelight or whatever it is, there's something that happens in the brain that convinces us that we're 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 didn't experience it. so when you recognize that like consuming other people's 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 don't think i ever thought like, oh, i'm nailing motherhood because i bought or run. i do think more holistically after researching the book. i'm 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, it's hard to continue to romanticize that ideal and just doesn't feel it doesn't feel fine. me it doesn't it's. 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. i'm thinking of people like casey her account is basically people through the the slog of everyday in the home. so you know if you're in dishes or laundry and something within it, you can't 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. it's like really useful framework. but she's just one of the many mom sponsors. but yeah, there's 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, it's it's a pretty fraught topic. yeah i didn't 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, that's it, they don't 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. there's bills in other or there's laws in other countries. it's 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 doesn't know what that means and what the ramifications it's could be. so i think it's a really ethically murky area for sure yeah my kid is 14 and he's only

now like don't 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 we're performing, you know, every facet of our identity all the time for various audiences. you know, i a version of myself at preschool pickup that's very different from the version of myself that had cocktails last night, for example. but i think when we're immersed in influencer culture, we're absorbing so many esthetic images about, how to look and present as mother that it's impossible not replicate that on our own feeds. and i think particularly for millennial mothers, we've 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 you'll 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 you're doing interviews like moms are hiding the bathroom to get on the phone with you. you're 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 it's it's difficult. yeah. mean i always defer to kate bare. she's a poet and she's asked this question a lot and she's always she always has same thing which is child care. i mean it's the same way anybody does any work. but during the pandemic, the book, you know, there wasn't child care. so when i was writing it. i couldn't 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 it's easier for you to carve out your times. do you have like a schedule where you're writing or do you how do you manage it? oh, yeah. i'm like, i don't have a system. i'm kind of a chaotic worker, but like, like i can only like actually write and use brain when kids are running around me. i'm i just i so it has be when they're at school or yeah or a babysitter. it's 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. it's awful. yeah. cringe okay. do we do we have questions about mom fluency that we've 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 there's 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 it's what consumers think or it's what marketers think is the prototypical mother. it's 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 post-pandemic i think, you know it doesn't feel like escapist fun in a way that maybe it did pre-pandemic so yeah, for sure. i think there's fatigue and there's just so many great accounts you can follow that don't make you feel as you're failing. so yeah i do think maybe the bubble burst a little as a follow up to that. like there is a whole there's a comedy genre. yeah. one of i don't know if you talk this in the book because i haven't read it, but sad beige book. yes. she's so great and like totally making fun of that. yes static. and i don't 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, there's a ton of satirical, earthy, crunchy by influencers. there's a whole thing with mouth tape like in the earthy, crunchy

community, like it's supposedly to breathe through your mouth at night, i don't know, but yeah, there's tons of hysterical parody accounts to follow that are satisfying and validating. why don't you tell us about nap dress now that you've 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. it's 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 it's 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 didn't buy one. i have it. yeah. and i'm shocked. this is for a much taller person than you can hear me. this is very i have to say, i didn't really get out of this. oh, entirely. but the earthy, crunchy. are they getting corporate support, too? they're 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 there's a type of more influencer or for almost every type of product so

yeah for sure. hi i'm going be a grandmother in three months, so. so i'm 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 c-section i didn't 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, she's nesting right now and all this. so i'm 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. i'm. i'm going to be the best. i want to be good. and that my god, i failed. and yeah, it's 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 else's. 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? i'm thinking of like the trope of the utah mom being like perfect, like millions kids like and they're all doing great. yeah. do you about that at all? yeah, i don't 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, they're more likely to look a certain of them way. and they're 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 that's one of the main reasons that so many mormons populate this space and of course, the fact that they have a lot of kids doesn't 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 i'm, currently reading a book about the history j.crew i'm i'm

obsessed with john giants like obsessed. and i just read a book about, the cultural legacy of the american girl. i'm 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 that's 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 children. our presenters this afternoon, our critic and journalist marine