She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers” | Hacker News Reader

She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers”

vox.com

53 pointsmooreds24 comments

It's tough because you have to acknowledge that the hate comes from other women, in part because the mommy bloggers are selling an idealized identity of women; the charmingly neurotic upper class woman with a loving but quirky husband, a picture-perfect house, beautiful kids, and plenty of instagrammable emotional moments and experiences.

I don't think us guys generally have that same pressure about being males, because we know a lot of it is just impossible. You can admire Elon Musk, but we know its near impossible to be him. But the mommy blogger is a lot closer to women, yet in many ways is as unrealistic to be.

Dooce aka Heather Armstrong - has been down quite a long path and it's hard to believe she's been at it over 10 years.

The law of large numbers stipulates that given sufficient volume of data points, there is always a mean value that generaly gets converged upon, with a standard deviation of course.

I fear that public online presence is subject to a similar law of social interaction wear the audience is more prone to malicious tone and judgement in an online environment.

Every forum i know has a favorite hate child to harp on, from the safety of ones chair. Any one willing to let their online presence affect their mental health is in for a bad time

"Armstrong no doubt had privilege — she was white, straight, wealthy, beautiful" Yeah check your privilege. Reading this makes me feel nauseous.

Would you please not post unsubstantive comments and especially flamebait to HN? It leads to low-quality threads, and we're trying for better than that here.

Lots of the site guidelines are about this. If you'd review them, and take the spirit of this site more to heart when commenting here, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I can't figure out how to read this comment. Do you think she actually needs to check her privilege? Or are you disgusted by privilege being brought up in a context where it shouldn't be?

> Yeah check your privilege. Reading this makes me feel

> nauseous.

Is this sarcasm? I feel like this could be read from either side of the fence.

Personally I think that the properties she has ("white, straight, wealthy, beautiful") have played some role in her path, but I don't see any problem with her reaching out to some particular demographic. It might not be one I can relate to, but the content just isn't for me.

> Armstrong no doubt had privilege

I think that bringing up "privilege" should only be done when it has some actual relation to the content. There are people from less "privileged" backgrounds who are successful parent bloggers [1], so in this case I don't think it's really relevant to her success. She made content for a while that people enjoyed and the money train run out.

[1] https://www.ladbaby.com/#!

> Yeah check your privilege. Reading this makes me feel nauseous.

Why? What are you really trying to say? I've not read the posts beyond what's linked in the articles, but it sounds like she was writing about her experiences rather than selling advice. I'm not sure why her privilege matters in that case.

Huh? Not sure what you’re trying to say, but privilege isn’t something to shame someone over.

In my mind, understanding my privilege simply means that if I want to live in accordance with my own values, I have to recognize the biases that come with my privilege and try to move past them.

Social justice shouldn’t be enforced by the law — it should be a personal, moral imperative rather than a legally enforced one. That doesn’t mean there are no social consequences for being a selfish jerk, but anyone calling for the “pronoun police” is in a very small minority.

What's wrong with pointing out that someone is wealthy and beautiful, and that this might make them more likely to succeed? Halo-effect is a thing.

Would you feel the same if 'white' was replaced with 'Jewish'? It correlates even more with success, e.g. they are over-represented at Harvard by a factor of ~5 [1].

[1] https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-uni...

I hear people say that being Christian gives you an advantage with American authorities, like with police or immigration. Is that true? Jews have a long history of being marginalized by majority powers, which is why this kind of discussion is viewed in a different light than saying that wealthy people have privilege.

Would you respond to a discussion about Christian privilege with a counter about the privileged Muslim people you’ve met in your life? Do you feel like that’s a fitting response?

I think it is appropriate to point out that we are only allowed to notice some forms of privilege and not others, yes.

That article doesn't try to force such constraints, and should be in line with your thinking then.

And what forms of privilege vs others are we talking about? The article mentioned (1) race (2) sexuality (3) beauty.

So are you bothered the article discusses white privilege without discussing latino, black, or asian privilege? Are you bothered the article didn't mention enough about bisexual or gay privilege? Or that the article didn't mention privilege of ugly people?

Or was it the Jews, since you brought them up, and it looks like you want to engage seriously on Jewish privilege. Did you really just want to talk about Jewish privilege?

If you think we shouldn't talk about ethnic privilege, why did you only take issue with my post, and not 0815test's, who first defended it?

Only allowing talk of it when it concerns white people is hypocritical - it's either all fair game, or none of it.

You asked what I wanted to talk about - that's pretty much it.

What’s wrong with it is that it’s seemingly mandatory to include a “privilege disclaimer” in some publications. It’s often irrelevant, always boring, and indicative of an identity politics perspective that colours much of modern discourse. It’s irritating boilerplate that writers include to signal their political allegiance and inoculate themselves from criticism when writing about groups that are disfavoured in their politics: in this case middle-class white women.

What's your evidence that it's mandatory? It seems discretionary to me.

Here's another article on Vox right now about white Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer, which doesn't mention his race or privilege: https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/5/4/18529311/jeopardy-...

So, at least at Vox there's no such standard like the one you're describing.

You seem to have misunderstood what the word “seemingly” means.

To help you out, it means ”so as to give the impression of having a certain quality; apparently.”

That's not the issue here. It seemed true to you, and I pointed out you were wrong.

Why in the hell is this posted--and upvoted--on HN? Come on, people.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? They ask you not to post like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The submission is on topic because it's intellectually interesting. Indeed, we put it in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380) for that reason.

What's wrong with a lifestyle piece on a Saturday?

If it were about a twitch streamer rather than a mommy blogger would you say the same?

A coder broke into a new genre of website and very successfully monetized it. Yes, why indeed would HN be interested in this /female/ part of Internet culture and commerce?

Please don't start a gender flamewar, or any flamewar. Also, be kind and not snarky. These are important parts of the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN readers are interested in lots of different things. That's actually the point of this site. Not everyone is interested in the same things, though, and sometimes people complain about what appears here, even though the guidelines ask them not to. Even if someone does that, please don't respond by breaking the guidelines worse yourself.

Edit: I also feel like someone should defend the HN community against the implied slight in what you posted here. It isn't good to make such misleading insinuations, because (a) they worsen the problem you're complaining about, and (b) they're not true. To see the latter, look no further than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19822123, which has a similar topic to this one and is currently at #3 on HN's front page. This quite interesting thread, which spent most of yesterday on the front page, is another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804772. Edit: and now we have Ethiopian midwives at #10: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837216.

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