could never happen now. thank you for joining us. >> live sunday, december 3rd on "in depth," author and uc berkeley law professor john you joins old tv to talk and take calls about the us supreme court. his support of presidential power at the bush and trump administration's and more. the books include crisis of command, defender and she, donald trump's fight for presidential power and recently published the publicly incorrect guide to the supreme court. join in the conversation with your phone calls, facebook comments and texts. "in depth" with john you live sunday december 3rd at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast which every saturday american history tv

documents america's story and on sunday, booktv brings the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including charter communications. >> charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers and we are just getting started. building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. >> charter communications along with these television company supports c-span2 as a public service. >> sara petersen, inside the maddening picture perfect world of influence and culture, she's 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 of clean countertops where she explores the cult of ideal motherhood. she lives in new hampshire.

adrienne gunn is a podcast are obsessed with pop culture, her news letter, on sub stack, find her podcast don't ruin this for me on your favorite podcast apps. she received an ms and creative writing from the university of oregon at her first novel is forthcoming from grand central publishing in summer of 2025, you can also purchase her book outside from the bookseller and we will be doing assigning after the event. take it away. >> hello. no we don't. they are ready, they are live. you are live. welcome to chicago. i am so excited to talk to you. i spent a lot of time with your book, you are everywhere right now. you are in the helen peterson sub stack. i saw you on unladylike. they put you out this week too so you are everywhere.

why don't we start with talking about what is a mom influencer? >> the simplest definition is somebody who has utilized their motherhood to monetize a social media platform. i focus primarily on instagram but could also be on youtube or tick-tock. but yes, that's the simplest definition. >> one thing i want to start with is if you could give us a sense how big this industry is. how much money is coming in and out of it. we think moms are on instagram posting mom stuff but this is a lot of money. >> it is a multibillion dollar industry. really largely taking the place of traditional advertising, glossy women's magazines, it is really where mothers are learning about new sleep sacks,

best ways to sleep train baby, maternity wear, rugs, homes or core, you can purchase anything, which is one of the reasons it is such a look of industry. >> how much would someone get paid for a post? someone with a huge -- >> there is different tiers, we can talk about some of the ones you get into in the book. if you're a top-tier mom influencer, how are you getting paid to post a sleep sack? >> it does vary widely. an academic estimated a couple years ago that only 9% of influencers primarily female influencers make enough to live on so it is a similar to -- i compare to mlms in terms of the structure, there are a few at the top that make a ton of money and make $50,000 for one real two stories and one post

about an amazon product for example. if you are partnering with amazon you are more likely to be in a top-tier. but if you have, i don't know, 30,000 followers and you partner with start up essential oil company, he will get paid $5000 for the same thing so it does vary widely. >> i've been asking my friends, which one do you follow. do you call oh ballerina farm? they don't. it is because their kids are just a little too old. it is like they went a little too early but tell us who ballerina farms is. >> does anyone here follow ballerina farms? anybody familiar? >> you can now. >> when i first started researching this industry a couple years ago, she had a

100,000 followers, she now has 6.3 million. she is a mormon, has 7 children, lives on a ranch in utah and is married to one of the children of the founder of jetblue, she comes from enormous wealth and privilege but this is not really a big part of her platform. her platform is really homesteader, her book, bootstraps, home school the kids, feed the kids, all homemade meals, make my own sourdough. she recently won the miss america beauty pageant, an interesting twist in the narrative but she has risen astronomically and it points to persistent expectation a good mother be rooted in the domestic sphere, that she be thin, nondisabled, adheres to conventional beauty standards so yes, i think the popularity

of ballerina farm shows we really still are living in a mid century maternal ideal era. >> they all do. can you tell also what a tread wife is, that's a whole genre of content. >> you could describe ballerina farm as a tread wife in that essentially that 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 making all of his meals or she could be somebody, i cover somebody in the book who really if you look at her photos they look like they could be taken in 1872. she wears floral dresses, espouses evangelical christian

-- christianity. but again, they are people who often denounce feminism and argue a woman's natural place is in the home being led by her husband. >> do you have a sense of how these accounts grew so quickly and so big? >> 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 how unfairly the system is stacked against mothers. some of us protected us from seeing the holes in the infrastructure. a lot of mothers became radicalized, became angry and outspoken about the systemic lack of support for mothers and

while that was happening we saw backlash. a lot of these argued there is a so-called attack on the nuclear family, and attack on traditional values and so i do think anytime we see progressive steps forward particularly when it comes to feminism we will see those steps backward. >> there's this interesting dichotomy about women let industry making lots of money monetizing motherhood but there is an aspect about not shaming other mothers but it is aspirational. if you are not like these things, you are not doing motherhood right. the way people interact can you talk about that, how it affects our ideas about what being a mother is? >> i first started researching this because of my own personal

relationships to the culture, i used to follow naomi davis, don't know if anybody remembers her. she had a blog called love plaza. she lived in the upper west side of new york. all of her photos were bright, vibrant colors, she really performed a fun type of motherhood, joyful type of motherhood that i at the time was failing to find within myself. and i do think many of us glom onto mom influencers who are succeeding in ways we perceive ourselves to be failing. that is a symptom of the cultural pressures we put on mothers specifically. as long as there is any notion of an ideal way to be as a mother, mom influencers and the mom influencer industry and marketing towards mothers in general will prosper.

>> there is this weird thing that is about masochism, moms searching out content that will make them feel bad about themselves, what is that about? >> you could call it maca suckers him. it comes from a sense of hope, i know for myself i was consuming that kind of looking for a way to embody motherhood that made me feel better, like maybe if i buy the products she recommends for toddlers i will be checking some sort of good mom box and be able to sleep better at night. it is not, intellectually when you tear it apart it doesn't make any sense but a lot of this operates on a more subconscious level. we are conditioned to believe that ideal motherhood is attainable. one of course it is not and it is not real and it doesn't exist and there's no such thing

as an ideal mother but we are culturally conditioned to believe it is possible and we should aspire to it. >> when did you realize, when looking at these accounts as a new mother that they were affecting you and weren't making you feel better or giving you solutions to your mom problems? >> once i had a second kid and was thoroughly disabused of any notion that motherhood could be this magical identity that completely transformed me, once i had my second kid i knew intellectually that that was not the case. i also carried a lot of rage about the state of institutional motherhood in this country and yet i found myself gravitating towards these archaic notions steeped in traditional femininity and that is where i was like what is the disconnect? i know better on paper and yet i still feel this pool.

>> there's a lot of racial issues at hand here. can you talk a little bit about, you talk about michelle obama in your book and the way she presented herself and the way she was received was different. talk about that a little bit. >> i all of that to carita mitchell who wrote from slave cabins to the white house and in that book, she analyzes how the public received michelle obama. she should -- he checked most boxes of ideal motherhood, she's thin, adheres to traditional beauty standards, she's in heterosexual marriage, but she's black. motherhood in america has been defined by whiteness for hundreds of years. teresa in her book points

talked about the movie the help which came out when michelle obama was first lady and posits that many americans, white americans, because of racism were uncomfortable with the idea of a black first lady raining over the domestic sphere and in the help, the black women in that movie are upholding a white woman's domestic duty. she posited that because of this racist discomfort with a black woman in our nation's most visible domestic space the help provided a sort of release valve for the racist backlash against michelle obama. that is all her analysis and i included it. >> i thought it was interesting, the way that michelle called herself a mom in chief and still, the culture was not as accepting as it should have been and there's still all these, the biggest

accounts are dominated by white women and you talk a lot about the cult of domesticity. can you talk about that and tell me what that is? >> in the late 19th century after the postindustrial revolution, pre-industrial revolution, women and men worked inside the home and outside the home but once there was a move toward factory work there was a sort of moral panic. we really wanted to preserve the moral center within the home so as the construct of the ideal woman was created, the ideal woman was pious, domestic, self-sacrificing and of course this ideal was only attainable for mostly wealthy white women, enslaved women being sexually assaulted and raped, they were not pious so they were not ideal women. they were working outside the

home which was unseemly so they were not ideal women in the construction of this ideal also served to vilify anyone who didn't fit it. as much as it upheld a certain white woman it also was created just as much to marginalize that. >> do you feel like mom influencer culture has a strong parallel? >> i see the most popular lucrative accounts rooted in domesticity, rooted in whiteness, rooted in traditional tenets of femininity. i talk to several black mom sponsors who specifically said when making deals with grants and companies, they are helmed by white people imagining the

ideal customer as white. several corners of the market, they are not considering when they go to partner with a mom influencer. and there is no oversight in this industry, no human resources department, so pay disparity and inequity is a huge issue. >> on our walk over here we were talking about joe jonas and sophie turner who are getting divorced, all the headlines immediately were about sophie turner having a cocktail in london and what a terrible mother she was. tell me your reaction to that? >> someone from the washington post two days ago asked me the same question, and i was like it is bull, first of all there's only a few specific quotes, one of them is something like he is a homebody, she likes to party,

they have very different lifestyles. what does that mean? what does that mean? it is completely ludicrous, that idea somebody is socializing with friends would prevent them from making their children feel loved and respected and supported and cared for, they have nothing to do with each other but because she's a mother she is supposed to be home doting on her children and completely self sacrificial. >> all the reactions are immediately, in all the headlines, specifically about that she was a bad mom, she likes to party and he's at home taking care of his children when in reality, he is on a tour. someone is caring for the children. don't know that it is joe. but still she was really vilified for having a cocktail.

it is a bummer. obviously. >> i'm a bad mom. i had a cocktail last night. from your book i understand you don't mind traveling and not being with your children. bad bad bad. unseemly. another thing that's interesting about your book and the work that you do is the paris social relationship which i noted i was in a very intense para-social relationship with the girls from sex and the city. every time i watch, i get very upset because i'm like i feel these are my friends but can you talk a little bit about para-social relationships and the mirrored thing, that's fascinating. >> i thought so too. para social relationship mimics, psychologically, how we

feel with our people that we know in our real lives, except we don't know these people so we can form emotional attachments to celebrities, i know i've dreamed about that before as they occupy my life which they don't but it is a 1-sided relationship but it does have a powerful effect on our consumer habits. if we follow a mom influencer for seven years and we saw her wedding video and saw her give birth in a tub at her health, we have all these vulnerable pictures of her life and it makes us feel like we know her so when she recommends the best way to wean babies we are more likely to trust her and to purchase that or whatever it is. it does have a real impact on how we spend money. >> host: you put in the book some of the things you bought.

can you tell us the things you felt like you got it. and go back to sleep for an hour. >> i'm more like a 6 a.m. purchaser before i am fully caffeinated. i bought a wooden marble run for my children because rudy jude had one, she's really got me. i bought a $72 marble run. i bought so many beauty products and skincare products but i think the marble run, is the most ridiculous. >> you don't want a plastic one. >> of course not. bad mom. >> that wouldn't be good. >> when you were receiving product in the mail where you having conflicted emotions about it? >> when i received product i bought on instagram a lot of

times this is not great. that was a mistake. and then i feel i go to my life thinking i'm smarter than instagram but in reality i am not necessarily at all. >> i wish i could say i felt more of a i shouldn't have done this but that is the way we shop now. it is so in mashed in how we shop. i think the marble run is like, i sent it out for my kids, magic. played with them maybe once. >> speaking of magic. we didn't do the mirror. let's do it because it is an interesting thing talking about consuming other people's magical moments versus making sure we are on the floor doing the marble run having our own magic.

>> i talked to a psychologist about why it was i was so eager to consume a stranger's tender moments rather than create those tender moments in my own life, she talked about mirror neurons which harkens back to missing limb syndrome. when they were studying missing limb syndrome, when i didn't have this arm but felt tingling or itching so essentially they found out if they held a mirror and had the patient itched this arm but looks like that, the itching would go away. she posited may be when you are on the marble run you psychologically are saying to yourself you are a good mom because you bought this thing even though the kids didn't play with it, you didn't see them play with it, didn't laugh

with them while they played, you didn't experience a moment in your real life, but the act of purchasing that marble run told your subconscious you did something good for your kids or you and acted the role of good mother for a moment. and the same could go for looking at somebody's newborn photos or photo of a mother curled up reading to her children by candlelight or whatever it is. something happens in the brain that convinces us we are looking at this image, that this is a good image and it checks the box for us in our own lives even though we didn't experience it. >> when you recognize consuming other people joyful moments was giving you the sense that fulfilling the you in a way did you pervert? did you make adjustments to make those moments with your kids instead? >> i don't think i ever consciously thought i'm nailing

motherhood because i bought something like that. i do think more holistically after researching the book i'm not as attracted to other performances of motherhood it doesn't hold the same emotional power as it once did. when you know sort of the dirty roots of maternal ideal in this country it is hard to romanticize that ideal and it doesn't feel fun to me. it doesn't, it's not something i aspire to anymore, that was the piece that loosened its grip on me. >> maybe you can tell me a little about this, there are spaces on the social media and instagram that are really serving women in marginalized communities. >> yes. i have a whole chapter in the

book about many incredible accounts that are featuring maternal advocacy, activism that are speaking to mothers real needs, thinking of people like casey davis, her whole account is basically getting people through the slog of every day in the home so if you are drowning in dishes or laundry and something you can't get through that, she has practical step-by-step ideas, she talks about things like creating a beautiful laundry room as not an act of good motherhood but an aesthetic hobby, making the connection between aesthetic hobbies and actual mothering is a really useful framework. but she is just one of many mom influencers but so many providing resources where otherwise they would be hard to come by.

mia o'malley is crowd sourced, hundreds of positive healthcare providers which is a huge problem especially when it comes to fertility treatments and birth trauma so these are like real concrete ways to make mothers lives better. >> i love that. talk about the ethics of, modifying your children on the internet? it is a pretty broad topic. >> guest: i didn't cover a ton in the book because i was more interested in the maternal experience but i do interview, i talked to every mom influencer in the book how they felt about it. every single one of them has thought about it quite deeply. many explicitly asked their kids is this still fun for you

and when their kids say no, they don't include their kids anymore. i was heartened to see illinois passed one of the first bills to protect children of influencers to legally require the parents to put certain amount of money into savings accounts. there are laws in other countries called the right to be forgotten. if the kid grows up and wants everything deleted, they can legally request that. consent is almost impossible. how can a 5-year-old consents to having her likeness broadcast to 2 million people on youtube, she doesn't know what the ramifications could be. it's an ethically murky area for sure. >> mike it is 14 and is only now like don't post that. you talk about how any mom on

instagram as a mom influencer and performing motherhood. what do you mean by that? >> we are performing every facet of our identity all the time for various audiences. i perform a version of myself at preschool pickup that's very different from the version of myself that had cocktails last night. but i think when we are immersed in influencer culture we are absorbing so many aesthetic images about how to look and present as a mother that it is impossible not to replicate that on our own speed. i think particularly for millennial mothers who have been taught to equate our value with our ability to aesthetically carry a life, that becomes complicated too when it comes to motherhood. >> i want to save time for questions that you will be able to come to the mic but i have

one pretty important question i need to ask you which is, i loved in this book how you contextualized the ways that you are doing these interviews like moms are hiding in the bathroom to get on the phone with you, you are driving to play dates like people trying to get their kids to watch a show, so how are you managing your own writing life and time to do this, you have three kids, it's difficult. >> i always defer to kate baer, she's a poet and she asked the question a lot and always the same thing which is childcare. it is the same way anybody does any work but during the pandemic, writing the book, there wasn't childcare so when i was writing it i couldn't conceive of writing it without just i guess providing that transparency because every mother i talked to for the book, we were all doing our own

version of aiding our children trying to work while also raising our kids so it became a clear through line as i was writing it. >> now that the pandemic is sort of waning do you find it is easier for you to carve out your time? do you have a schedule where you are writing, how do you manage it? >> i don't have a system. i'm kind of a chaotic worker but it is like i can only actually right and use my brain when kids are -- i just -- it has to be when they are at school or with the babysitter. >> writing a book during the pandemic, zoom class was happening, it was a nightmare. it was awful. cringe. do we have questions about mom influencing? we've got to have some moms in here? elizabeth amadou you have a question?

>> do you think what you are looking at, that seems possible or, god, in montréal? >> there's a bubble about looking at a rich white woman, has the bubble burst yes or whatever? >> i think there will always be an audience for that because the rich white thin header row mom is still what consumers think, what marketers think is the prototypical mother, what media thinks is the prototypical mother. there will always be an audience for that fantasy, that being said i do think there is so much fatigue with 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 it did pre-pandemic, so i think there is fatigue and so many great accounts you can follow that don't make you feel as though you are failing. i do think maybe the bubble has burst a little. >> there's a comedy genre, don't know if you talk about this in the book but said beige clothing. totally making fun of that aesthetic, don't know if you have anything else to say about it. >> i interviewed haley for my newsletter, not for the book but there are so many satirical accounts, a ton of crunchy mom influencers and the whole thing, the earthy crunchy community, supposedly bad for your mouth and i don't know. there's tons of hysterical

parody accounts to follow that are very satisfying. >> tell us about the nap dress now that you brought up the beige. people wonder what is the nap dress? >> looks like a less structured dress you would see on bridger to nora jane austen novel, elastic smocking here. it taps into last algia for a time when gender roles were sharply delineated, taps into the fantasy of domestic earth goddess flowing, easy motherhood. >> where did the nap part come from, you could nap and it? >> it started as a nightgown. they tried to sell pajamas and then it took off as a dress.

it does look comfortable. i am shocked. >> for much taller person than you. very illuminating. really out of this whole thing. the earthy crunchy people, are they getting corporate support? >> yes. yes. any type of mother can partner with a brand and make money. maybe a company selling linen baby slings wants to partner with a mom influencer who lives in the foothills of california, and only wears shades of oatmeal. there's a type of mom influencer for almost every type of product so for sure. >> hi. i'm going to be a grandmother

in three months so i'm here for my daughter and i remember when i was first a mom, things you feel bad, i had a c-section, didn't breast-feed perfectly and in a way i was horrible. now she has these standards and i know she cared, a good job, nesting right now and all that so i am hoping may be reading a book like this that makes you think about it from different angles will relieve her but inevitably everybody has to go through that, i will be the best and then be good and then i failed, it is a human thing but maybe this will give her a little -- >> i really did want to write the book for that purpose, so people would feel freed from these unrealistic standards and feel free to create their own maternal values according to themselves and not somebody

else's idea of perfect. that was my goal in the book. >> when talking about ballerina farm in the beginning, the book explore the role of religion particularly the mormon church, the trope of the utah mom being perfect, blonde, millions of kids, they are all doing great, did you talk about that at all? >> guest: i don't talk about it a ton. mormonism sort of sets the perfect stage for this culture, they really prioritize family, motherhood, wifehood, they prioritize their bodies being a reflection of god so they are more likely to look a certain

way and they are taught in their religion to record keep. that's a big part of their faith, taught to journal, scrapbooks, bloging became a natural offshoot of that so that's one of the main reasons so many mormons populate this space and the fact they have a lot of kids doesn't hurt because every pregnancy and newborn engagement goes way up. i do talk a bit about evangelical christianity. >> do we have any other questions? i have one last question. i have to ask you, what are you reading? what are you excited about? nobody should follow ballerina farmer. what should they follow? what are you liking right now? >> guest: i am reading about the history of jay carew. and i just read a book about

the cultural legacy of american dolls and how pearlhood was marketed towards millennials and what is a book i really loved recently, maggie ship's head, the circle, the great circle, loved it so much. really loved. >> host: thank you for being here. right over there, signing books for you. enjoy the rest of your time in chicago, away from your children. [applause] ..