14Raging against “Mommywood”
For the first 23 years of my life, I was a celebrity gossip junkie.
Growing up, there was always some kind of celebrity-focused reading material floating around my household, though it was a progression from publications such as Vanity Fair (a magazine I continue to respect and enjoy) and People (which was respectable in that it occasionally featured non-celebrities on the front cover) to gossip rags such as In Touch, Life & Style and Us Weekly, which I noticed being left around more often as I got older.
I used to hunger for these like a drug addict, so easily distracted by the sordid goings-on of people I would never meet, who meant nothing to me, but whose lives provided me an escape from my own stresses and, in some twisted way, seemed to give me something to aspire to (money, public recognition, apparent success).
The more my life has been anchored by philosophy, self-awareness and the development of meaningful relationships, however, the less I have been inclined to dip back into the world of mindless celebrity gossip.
I haven’t followed it much since moving overseas in early 2010, though I do confess to following the BeyonceJayFetus twitter account, simply because whoever writes it is quite the clever soul and I get a good laugh out of it. I tried keeping up on the Hollywood happenings a couple couple of times, skimming mindless paparazzo-type articles about the Kardashians, but I just wasn’t into it anymore. (Chalk that up as a win for self-knowledge.)
However, while perusing posts on the parenting blog Mommyish earlier today, I found myself reading post after post about celebrity mothers, becoming increasingly angry as I read about these women and the mention of the public’s obsession with “Mommywood.”
I feel revolted even writing that word, as though bile is actually climbing up my esophagus, ready to explode all over the images of these “mothers” (I use this term only in the biological sense since I have a hard time assigning any positivity to people who pimp their newborns out to the paparazzi for some cash and a hit of the attention they so desperately and shamelessly crave), such as Kourtney Kardashian, Kendra Wilkinson, Nicole Richie and the other horde of slimy creatures who are surely abusing and destroying their children one miserable day at a time.
These women (and their husbands and low-rent male celebrities who have children with terrible women) and their ilk make me sick because it is so painfully, tragically clear that they are bad parents and have been ruining the lives of their children from the day they were born.
But I feel far angrier and far more contempt for the people who make these wretches famous by buying up these trash magazines and feeding into this obsession with celebrity mothers. These D-List reality TV stars are only famous, and only have incentive to have multiple babies and drag them out shamelessly for the public to see, because they have an audience. People pay to consume this trash, condoning this weird, gross explosion of publicity-stunt pregnancies.
Maybe I sound like a killjoy because some people just enjoy escaping for a bit into the world of celebrity trash, and look, I understand it. I’ve been there. I’ll be honest, sometimes there’s nothing I enjoy more than a night of ordering take-out and watching a marathon of “Jersey Shore.” I’m cool with indulging in a little bit of a bad reality television, however horrid the people on the show are, and even keeping up a passing interest in their crazed off-camera antics.
What I find to be infuriating, however, is the obsession that seems to be rampant, particularly in America, with trashy, no-talent fame whores having babies. To me, encouraging them to have children is like encouraging child abuse.
It’s difficult for me to imagine anyone saying, “Oh yeah, I think Nicole Richie is probably a really excellent, attentive, enlightened and emotionally available mother.” Or “You know who seems like a really great mom? Kourtney Kardashian. She really prepared for and put a lot of thought into bringing her son into a stable, supportive, healthy home, and chose a quality man to be her partner in bringing a new life into the world.”
Here’s the thing. If these people want to sleep with deplorable men, do drugs, booze all day and night, have eating disorders, act out to get people’s attention, that’s fine. It’s sad and pathetic and quite twisted, but they’re adults and if that’s what they feel they need to do to feel good, it’s misguided but that’s their’s to work out.
When you’re adding children into the mix, however, it’s not just about them anymore. It isn’t interesting or amusing to imagine the warped lives of Nicole Richie’s babies, or the traumatic sexual issues and insecurities Kendra Wilkinson will pass on to her children.
I understand that it sounds extreme to link following low-rent celebs’ pregnancies to encouraging child abuse, but that’s kind of how I see it. I’m all about pointing out abusive, bad parenting, whether it’s the woman down the street yelling at her kids or some high-profile fame seeker whose deeply troubled personal life has been documented for the world to see, and is more or less guaranteed to pass those issues on to her own children.
There was a time in my life when I probably would have dismissed my discomfort around this issue, because it was all “just in fun,” but I just can’t now. There is no way for me to read about women such as the ones of mentioned, or the scores of others like them, having children, without thinking sadly, “Well, there’s another lost, defenseless soul being brought into the world.”
