Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - A More Perfect Mother

00:00:00.000 I want to tell you about my nightly routine.

00:00:17.940 My husband Nick is asleep next to me.

00:00:20.780 That man passes out every night like a bear fatted up on salmon.

00:00:24.660 My kids, a couple of tiny terrorists, are finally asleep

00:00:30.040 I always know better

00:00:32.820 But my hand reaches for my phone and I start scrolling and scrolling through pictures

00:00:38.160 Seconds later, I'm immersed in a completely different world

00:00:47.780 I can picture myself on an Australian beach with a bohemian tribe of mom friends

00:00:52.540 all of us wear matching earth tone linen dresses we're drinking out of stainless steel wine tumblers

00:00:59.080 our gang of feral but so chic children run barefoot on the sand

00:01:05.660 and our scruffy yet independently wealthy husbands surf the easygoing waves

00:01:10.580 next scroll

00:01:16.100 now i'm inside the house

00:01:22.540 The clean, white house with kids who don't seem at all like terrorists.

00:01:27.000 They're all dressed in adorable little striped long john pajamas that make them look like Keebler elves or suburban garden gnomes.

00:01:33.620 They snuggle together beneath pearly white sheets.

00:01:41.580 One last scroll.

00:01:44.680 We're in New York.

00:01:46.820 A pre-war loft apartment with the cheeriest yellow upright piano you've ever seen.

00:01:51.900 Kids are laughing and singing.

00:01:58.060 They're dyeing Easter eggs and crafting from found materials like empty toilet paper rolls.

00:02:03.280 There's a farmer's market.

00:02:05.820 So much arugula.

00:02:12.120 This is not my life.

00:02:15.100 It's not my friends' lives either.

00:02:16.540 these are the lives of mom influencers on instagram who i have never met but who i

00:02:22.380 followed on a random night exactly like this one when i couldn't sleep and yeah it is a little

00:02:28.420 creepy to watch someone you've never met in person snuggling in their bed with their

00:02:31.840 kibler elf children especially while you're in your own bed

00:02:35.680 how long you've been looking at instagram tonight

00:02:41.980 five minutes that's a lie yeah more like 55 according to the screen tracker app on my phone 0.74

00:02:51.560 i was on instagram for three hours last night uh-huh you are an addict what am i addicted to

00:03:02.680 kitchens instagram oh let me go shoot up some of this instagram that's my husband nick he doesn't

00:03:11.440 use Instagram. And he's not totally wrong. That is time that I could have been reading, sleeping,

00:03:17.960 having sex with my husband, or writing the great American novel, which is actually my job.

00:03:24.740 But I can't stop scrolling. And scrolling and looking at these picture-perfect images of 0.96

00:03:30.500 motherhood that could be me if I were just a little more organized, a little more creative,

00:03:36.460 a little less exhausted, if I had a little bit more money, if I were just a little bit better.

00:03:46.700 I like watching mom influencers. I like it because in my desperate moments holding a

00:03:52.560 screaming baby in the middle of the night, or when my toddler draws what looks exactly like 0.97

00:03:57.280 a penis on the wall in permanent marker, I can see another way to be a mom. A way that seems 0.98

00:04:03.480 beautiful. And if not beautiful, at least clean and penis-free. The pictures on these Instagram 0.98

00:04:10.160 accounts feel like both a path to, and the promise of, this kind of life.

00:04:17.080 One night about a year ago, I realized something. I had a toddler spread-eagled in the middle of my

00:04:22.780 bed, and a baby with her head nuzzled right in my armpit. I was covered in just a little bit of

00:04:28.280 breast milk, a fair amount of pee. And that's when I realized that I could, with just one click,

00:04:35.300 purchase what I needed to be like these women in the pictures. Through their tags and links and

00:04:41.240 the swipe ups, I could buy their lacy nursing bra, their long flowing dresses, their sustainable

00:04:46.260 cloth napkins and bamboo forks for toddlers that are very, very good for the earth. I realized that

00:04:53.020 All of these seemingly perfect mothers on social media,

00:04:56.480 they were all trying to sell me something. 0.98

00:04:59.480 I didn't need to create my own perfect life.

00:05:02.120 I could buy theirs.

00:05:04.260 And I did. 1.00

00:05:05.520 I just got introduced to the Teeny Mix-It,

00:05:07.960 which is a portable binder.

00:05:09.440 I just wanted to thank OXO for sending me

00:05:12.760 the Fisher-Price range of toys.

00:05:15.880 Most of them aren't just toys, full stop.

00:05:18.700 God, oh, and a whisk, a whisk, a whisk.

00:05:21.460 Oh, my God.

00:05:22.320 This revelation, it changed everything about how I looked at Instagram.

00:05:28.880 I was no longer Dorothy, dazzled by Oz.

00:05:32.060 I'd pulled back the curtain.

00:05:32.960 And I began to see it for the business that it is.

00:05:38.560 Brands are going to bring in more than $10 billion from Instagram this year.

00:05:42.740 $15 billion by 2022.

00:05:45.800 It's a multi-billion dollar industry.

00:05:48.240 Advertisers and marketers are just increasing more and more of their budgets.

00:05:52.320 to the influencer space, to Instagram specifically.

00:05:56.660 Viral Nation gets 50 to 100 emails a week

00:05:59.880 from people who want to become influencers

00:06:01.820 and how they're willing to do anything in the world

00:06:04.260 necessary to become an influencer

00:06:05.880 and they'll dedicate 24 hours a day they won't sleep.

00:06:08.560 People got to hustle, right?

00:06:09.740 They're trying to be entrepreneurs on Instagram.

00:06:12.720 They're trying to build their brand.

00:06:13.980 They're trying to market to an audience

00:06:16.180 and they are showing you things

00:06:18.680 that they have been paid to show you.

00:06:20.200 Instagram. It's an influencer's world, and we're just scrolling through it.

00:06:27.880 This is an eight-part series about the multi-billion dollar mom-influencing industrial complex,

00:06:33.720 an industry dominated by women and consumed by women that's largely been ignored by the 0.74

00:06:38.020 mainstream media. Why? Well, it's a woman thing. If this were an industry run by men, 0.98

00:06:46.420 it would be covered over and over again in the business section, not the style section. 0.99

00:06:52.420 Who are these women? Why are they doing this? Are their lives really as perfect as they seem? 1.00

00:06:59.080 And how do they make money? We'll find out. I'm Jo Piazza, and you're Under the Influence.

00:07:07.040 welcome to chapter one a more perfect mother

00:07:19.620 i never thought that i would be making a podcast about instagram

00:07:24.880 for the past few years i've been trying to get off social media but then i got pregnant for the

00:07:30.860 second time in three years at a little girl named b and b did not sleep and wouldn't take a bottle

00:07:36.800 so I really didn't sleep. I got back on Instagram because I was lonely, and it was the one thing I

00:07:44.760 could do with one hand with a baby attached to my nipple. I stayed because it's addictive. 0.98

00:07:53.080 Before I had my adorable little terrorists, I pictured motherhood completely differently.

00:07:58.600 I imagined myself making baby food from scratch, delightful playdates with other new moms that

00:08:03.940 involved a lot of wine, wearing my baby to meetings with my book agent like a little capuchin monkey. 0.98

00:08:13.420 Yeah, those dreams were fucking cute. Most days, I feel like I'm failing at pretty much everything. 0.87

00:08:20.520 So maybe it's a good thing that there's an entire industry that makes us feel like we can just buy

00:08:24.880 our way out of our perceived failings as mothers. But who are these women making me feel both better 1.00

00:08:31.760 and worse about my own life, depending on the day. I think of an influencer as someone who 1.00

00:08:38.900 earns money from collaborating with brands to make social media content. And it's someone who

00:08:46.200 pays attention to their audience, you know, is working on carefully cultivating an audience on

00:08:50.780 social media to earn income. Meet Emily Hund. I'm a research fellow with the Center on Digital

00:08:58.380 Culture and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

00:09:04.300 And I study social media influencers. Emily was one of the first people I talked to when I was

00:09:10.240 trying to report out how influencing works. At first, I was kind of blown away that this is a

00:09:15.820 topic that academics are seriously tackling these days. There's a lot of disagreement, even among,

00:09:21.800 you know, the people involved about who counts as an influencer. A lot of marketers that I've

00:09:26.140 talked to describe it as a blend of art and science when they're trying to figure out who

00:09:31.140 an influencer is, like who counts. The word influencer in terms of social media was actually

00:09:37.040 made an official word in the English language in 2019. Merriam-Webster officially says it is a

00:09:42.940 quote, person who is able to generate interest in something such as a consumer product by posting it

00:09:48.420 on social media. Legally, according to an article from the American Bar Association, an influencer

00:09:54.860 is any person with credibility who can influence the opinions or purchase decisions of others.

00:10:00.160 So the shoppable life on Instagram is this idea that we're presenting our lifestyles in images

00:10:05.860 and in Instagram stories, and that they can be merchandised and monetized pretty seamlessly.

00:10:12.600 Social media platforms, especially Instagram, have enabled shoppability to reach a new height

00:10:18.840 and, you know, sort of become what its proponents like always hoped it would be.

00:10:23.380 lifestyles that can be merchandised and monetized lives that can be monetized let's sit with that

00:10:32.280 for a minute none of this is actually new to me i was a celebrity journalist for the better part

00:10:41.220 of the 2000s and i wrote an entire book on how celebrities make money it's called celebrity inc

00:10:46.500 back in 2009 i reported on how charlie sheen got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to tweet for

00:10:52.700 internships.com, how Brad and Angelina made money off their baby pictures, and how Jessica Simpson

00:10:57.900 got paid to lose weight. I learned real early on in my career to follow the money. So let's

00:11:04.100 follow the influencer money for a minute. Let's do a little bit of math. There are plenty of

00:11:10.460 aspiring influencers who lose money. They spend more money trying to be an influencer than they

00:11:14.920 bring in. On the flip side of that, plenty of women have found themselves in the very comfortable 1.00

00:11:19.900 position of making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year by monetizing their Instagrams. That is more 1.00

00:11:27.260 than the average teacher's salary. Some women even make so much money that their husbands are 1.00

00:11:32.760 quitting their own jobs to manage their wives' Instagram brands. These are called Instagram 1.00

00:11:37.560 husbands, and we will meet them in a later episode. Now, there are also a small handful

00:11:44.220 of mom influencers who have become millionaires.

00:11:48.840 But it's more interesting if we break this down by post.

00:11:52.420 There is a baseline formula

00:11:54.120 for how much an influencer gets paid for a single post.

00:11:57.460 It's about $100 per 10,000 followers.

00:12:01.160 $100 per 10,000.

00:12:03.920 That means that top influencers,

00:12:06.360 influencers with a half a million followers,

00:12:08.640 can make $5,000 for a single Instagram post.

00:12:12.620 For one picture.

00:12:15.220 Most influencers post at a rate of once a day.

00:12:18.300 That's the recommended sweet spot.

00:12:20.780 So even if only half of those posts are sponsored,

00:12:23.360 that comes out to a salary of $910,000 a year,

00:12:27.860 just under a cool million.

00:12:30.580 Admittedly, those kinds of influencers are rare.

00:12:33.800 Much less rare are influencers

00:12:35.220 with about a quarter of a million followers, 250,000.

00:12:40.000 By the $100 per 10,000 follower metric,

00:12:42.800 they could stand to make about $450,000 a year.

00:12:46.880 That salary is very close to the top 1% of income earners in America.

00:12:52.640 The rest of us are just the bottom 99%.

00:12:55.500 My Instagram addiction and my mom-influencer consumption,

00:13:03.980 all of that is just feeding this beast.

00:13:07.840 I started talking about all of this with my fellow magazine writer, Glynis McNichol.

00:13:12.800 You're going to hear from her a lot in this podcast.

00:13:15.960 She's my most trusted editor and a sounding board for everything that I write.

00:13:20.080 But she's also an objective bystander to the mom-influencing world.

00:13:24.120 She doesn't have kids, and she doesn't follow any of these women on Instagram. 0.91

00:13:27.760 Because of that, she probably doesn't have the same kind of Stockholm Syndrome that I have.

00:13:32.320 We talk a couple nights a week, usually when I'm hiding in my bathroom trying to get very important things done, like shaving the bottom half of my legs.

00:13:41.000 And I recently confessed to her that Nick and I were at war over my Instagram habit.

00:13:45.460 I got chastised yet again for scrolling the Instagram.

00:13:48.860 Nick was just like, no, he's just like, Jesus Christ.

00:13:51.520 He's like, how much time have you spent on that, on that thing?

00:13:53.820 He, I think he actually genuinely believes I'm addicted to Instagram.

00:13:57.660 I think it's true.

00:13:58.640 I think we all are.

00:13:59.720 But I also feel like it's totally normal.

00:14:01.780 I feel like every woman that I know is just scrolling Instagram before they go to sleep

00:14:05.640 to try to do their broken soul.

00:14:08.020 Oh, completely.

00:14:09.080 I write down my goals for the week. And my number one goal is don't look at your computer before

00:14:14.340 bed. And every night I'm in bed, scrolling, watching The Office, trying not to watch The

00:14:20.600 Daily Show, looking at Twitter. Like it's terrible. No wonder I have insomnia.

00:14:24.480 I mean, not Nick, but most men are looking at their phones and they're just looking at porn.

00:14:29.640 We look at Instagram and most men are just looking at porn.

00:14:33.980 It's a pastime. And I also, I just want to give a shout out to the women who look at porn before

00:14:38.640 a bed. I think there's plenty of women who look at porn before a bed. What's interesting to me 1.00

00:14:43.200 though, is once you realize the numbers and you realize that so many people are doing it and that

00:14:49.200 so much money is being generated from it, then it's fascinating that we are leaving like such

00:14:58.360 a huge portion of media not discussed essentially, or that it sort of operates in the shadows.

00:15:06.220 Well, the question is, are you talking about Instagram right now or porn?

00:15:09.600 I think we have a shifting acceptance or grading system of what is acceptable to whom at what time.

00:15:20.160 And it's not a surprise that the things that appeal to women and bring them comfort or relief or satisfaction are largely considered a waste of time. 0.95

00:15:33.760 And a frivolous addiction.

00:15:36.220 i can't and nor i shouldn't be able to sit there on the couch and just thumb through porn and be

00:15:43.120 like hey honey i'm just looking at porn but you can do that with the with the lifestyle porn

00:15:48.580 right there's zero negative stigma around it around its consumption and i wanted to just

00:15:53.840 lend a little bit of that stigma from porn onto this lifestyle porn i wanted people to just think

00:15:59.540 about it differently. That is Mike Thayer. Mike's a blogger and an author who lives in Utah.

00:16:07.760 In 2017, he wrote a blog post that compared mom-influencing posts on Instagram to porn.

00:16:15.540 And like porn, this industry generates billions of dollars in profits.

00:16:20.680 And like porn, the question of who's earning that money feels a little shady and secretive.

00:16:26.680 And a lot of the time, I feel like some of the women with these influencer accounts are performing motherhood for their audience.

00:16:35.460 I came up with this article that I published called Utah Lifestyle Porn Capital of the World.

00:16:40.220 I thought it would hit a nerve, and it definitely did.

00:16:43.760 One of the things I thought was interesting was not just the presence of people from my religion and my community.

00:16:52.840 And when I say community, I mean like my high school.

00:16:54.800 but the prevalence.

00:16:57.500 When Mike talks about his community,

00:16:59.340 he's talking about his Mormon community,

00:17:01.960 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

00:17:05.040 They weren't just present in the mommy blogging community,

00:17:07.220 but they like dominated it.

00:17:08.760 They were like some of the most successful people

00:17:10.220 and there are a lot of them.

00:17:11.580 So I thought that was weird.

00:17:13.640 You know, I come from a religion

00:17:15.060 that espouses the importance of charity

00:17:17.720 and humility and to avoid vanity.

00:17:20.960 And so all of this stuff came together.

00:17:22.220 I was like, okay, it's curated for maximum allure.

00:17:24.800 addiction. It gives people feelings of inadequacy. I was like, where have I heard all this stuff

00:17:29.380 before? Oh, yeah, I've heard it in church about porn. I was like, this is porn.

00:17:36.000 Is it strange and a little uncomfortable for a man to have an opinion about sites run by women

00:17:41.120 and mostly targeted to women? Is it fair? Well, Mike says his main concern was the effect these 0.91

00:17:48.920 Instagram accounts would have on the women in his family. The thought that my daughters or my wife

00:17:54.780 or my 20-some-odd nieces, I come from Utah,

00:17:57.860 would feel inadequate about their beauty 1.00

00:18:01.220 or their style or their future spouses for a second

00:18:06.000 because of something they saw

00:18:07.800 on some influencer's Instagram post,

00:18:10.860 it makes me physically ill.

00:18:12.760 Now that I say my daughter is 13

00:18:14.280 and a lot more influenced than she was, you know,

00:18:16.880 back when I wrote this article,

00:18:18.380 I'm terrified of it, absolutely terrified.

00:18:21.480 Dads being terrified for their daughters is nothing new.

00:18:24.780 60 years ago, dads were terrified that just watching Elvis on TV would get their daughters

00:18:29.440 pregnant. But given how popular this content is, I understand his concern. And he's got a point.

00:18:36.100 I clearly have a different life than Mike. But when I started to examine my Instagram feed like

00:18:42.260 a journalist instead of a fan, I realized that more than half of the mom influencers that I

00:18:46.900 follow on Instagram are Mormon women or are former members of the LDS church. These include Love

00:18:53.100 Tazza, Hey Natalie Jean, and Design Mom. When we come back, we're going to explore how the

00:19:00.600 Mormon moms became patient zero of the mom-influencing industrial complex. 1.00

00:19:13.340 So more mommy bloggers were actually among the first mommy bloggers. They preceded 0.99

00:19:17.980 almost everybody else. That's Catherine Jeezer Morton. She's a PhD candidate in sociology at

00:19:23.920 Concordia University, and she studies, of all things, mom influencers. So Mormon moms are 0.99

00:19:30.880 encouraged to keep a lot of records of their family's growth and, you know, just milestones

00:19:37.160 and all that scrapbooking type thing. So there was always a practice within Mormon domesticity

00:19:42.860 of like taking pictures and making these special documents.

00:19:46.940 So blogging was really like a natural next step

00:19:50.100 when blogs became accessible. 0.98

00:19:52.640 Like Mormon moms were like, sweet, we're going to blog now.

00:19:55.200 So that's how they started.

00:19:56.480 It was an outgrowth of existing practices that the community had.

00:20:00.300 Certain corners of the internet refer to the Mormon mom blogging

00:20:02.960 and influencing community by the nickname the blogger knackle. 0.88

00:20:06.900 And it has been encouraged from on high.

00:20:09.200 let's rewind a little bit to april 6th 1830 this is when members of the church of jesus christ of

00:20:19.220 latter-day saints believed that the lord gave a command to one of their founders joseph smith

00:20:24.580 behold there shall be a record kept among you now fast forward a 2007 commencement address to

00:20:33.740 the graduating class of Brigham Young's Hawaii campus. It's by Church Elder M. Russell Ballard.

00:20:39.900 He's the acting president of the Mormon Church's Quorum of Twelve Apostles.

00:20:44.120 May I ask you to join the conversation by participating on the internet,

00:20:50.380 particularly the new media, to share the gospel. Most of you already know that if you have access

00:20:56.680 to the internet, you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true.

00:21:03.740 I think a lot of these moms are like, okay, well, I'll just tone down the religious dimension so that, you know, I appeal to more people.

00:21:11.440 Because people were there for the aesthetic. They loved the kind of, I guess, the cuteness.

00:21:18.400 Mormon mom influencers look better than me.

00:21:21.420 They look way happier and brighter and more energetic than I do.

00:21:25.700 They don't look exhausted.

00:21:26.580 maybe it's because they had their kids so young and did not suffer from the same decades of

00:21:32.500 drinking and smoking before having their children their hair is bouncy their skin shiny my pores are

00:21:39.360 still clogged with the nicotine from all the cigarettes that i smoked from age 19 to 29

00:21:43.680 i will never ever ever look as perfect as a mormon mom influencer it helps to be a young mom right

00:21:53.380 in terms of the visuals.

00:21:55.220 And so it really requires this discipline,

00:21:59.380 this kind of incredibly rigorous discipline,

00:22:03.260 this kind of social discipline

00:22:04.520 that I think is like,

00:22:06.520 I just, it blows my mind.

00:22:08.320 Part of me freaking loves 1.00

00:22:09.320 the Mormon mommy escapism. 1.00

00:22:11.480 The picture-perfect lives 0.96

00:22:12.780 filled with DIY crafts

00:22:14.320 and nut-free pastries.

00:22:16.700 True story,

00:22:17.720 my son's school took a picture

00:22:18.920 of a chocolate bar

00:22:19.600 in his lunch the other day

00:22:20.620 with the caption,

00:22:22.120 is this a nut?

00:22:23.380 It was a nut, it's a nut-free school, and I failed at lunch. 0.95

00:22:30.860 The Mormon moms' lives look so much less messy and complicated than mine.

00:22:36.220 They seem to have the one thing that I want more of.

00:22:40.600 Time.

00:22:42.200 They seem to be able to enjoy motherhood with three times the kids that I have.

00:22:47.480 And maybe that's because the Mormon church places a value on motherhood.

00:22:51.140 a value on motherhood and the domestic arts that does not exist at all within my social circle,

00:22:58.180 my peer group. They've told me that my career and professional success

00:23:03.080 are way more important than anything I'd ever do in my home.

00:23:09.000 Being a mom and being a good mom are like an underappreciated side hustle in my world. 0.99

00:23:15.380 Maybe that's why I'm so attracted to the Mormon mom accounts. 0.99

00:23:18.800 And I am not the only one.

00:23:22.500 Women who were raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we come from a long line of homemakers and women who are brilliant and creative and intuitive.

00:23:32.720 And so many of us grew up as the children of stay-at-home moms who did things really well.

00:23:38.380 They used all of the intelligence that many other women were putting into the workforce and all the creativity and did it in their home and created some really incredible traditions and systems that really are successful and inspirational.

00:23:52.640 That's Brooke Romney. She is not related to the other Mormon Romney. She's a mom, a blogger, and an influencer. 0.76

00:24:00.760 The kinds of images that Brooke and her friends post are inspirational to me and also to the millions of other women who follow their accounts.

00:24:08.380 I can't turn away from women with five, six, seven, eight children.

00:24:13.420 I want to know everything about them. 1.00

00:24:15.460 Their life hacks for keeping a clean house. 0.97

00:24:17.200 And who made your bed?

00:24:19.620 Yeah, can you show me how?

00:24:22.080 Taking long trips with a basketball team of kids,

00:24:24.860 cooking dinner for three different stages of toddlers.

00:24:27.720 Chocolate bean, peanut butter cup oatmeal.

00:24:29.600 I eat this almost every day.

00:24:30.680 It's from the winter meal plan.

00:24:32.500 Looking at their perfection can be inspiring.

00:24:35.960 Because if they can do it with eight kids,

00:24:37.840 then I could definitely do it with two. Today, I am talking to you about summertime is more

00:24:43.980 than screens, finding a happy balance with your tweens and teens. I thought that I could share

00:24:48.700 how our family composts. I thought it could be helpful. I always want to be helpful.

00:24:54.260 I think it started as, you know, these are some things that really work well for our family.

00:24:59.960 And then like any smart capitalist, they use that as a springboard for making money. And they had

00:25:07.740 a great idea and a following and then turned it into a profit. I think we should be celebrating

00:25:13.100 the fact that these women are creating incredible content with hundreds of thousands of followers 1.00

00:25:17.500 and they're being paid for doing a job well done. Content creation is serious business and you know 1.00

00:25:25.100 that. To create something that's worthy of people coming back to or even stopping their scroll

00:25:30.660 takes a lot of talent. And so I do think that women should be paid for doing things that add 1.00

00:25:36.200 value to other people's lives. They're essentially benefiting, profiting off the unpaid labor of 1.00

00:25:43.160 motherhood. It's fucking brilliant. But that idea, that is where we start to get to the really 0.99

00:25:49.740 interesting part of this world. Yes, consumers like me are being manipulated by ads that prey

00:25:56.160 on my insecurities as a crappy mother. But this is also an industry that allows women to thrive, 1.00

00:26:02.340 that allows mothers to thrive, 1.00

00:26:05.220 that allows mothers to make money, 0.57

00:26:07.160 to support their families, 0.98

00:26:08.740 to empower themselves 0.97

00:26:10.360 in a world that doesn't do a goddamn thing 0.98

00:26:12.940 to help women do that. 0.97

00:26:14.960 I didn't coin that idea. 0.99

00:26:17.660 The expectations on women 1.00

00:26:20.240 are just out of control. 1.00

00:26:23.780 We're doing three hours more childcare

00:26:26.180 a week in our lives

00:26:28.740 and we're also working more

00:26:30.940 and we're also working full-time.

00:26:33.280 That very passionate woman, that is Liz Lenz.

00:26:37.360 She is one of the most astute social commentators

00:26:40.040 and writers on motherhood of our time.

00:26:42.520 I'm giving her that title.

00:26:44.080 She also started out as a mommy blogger 1.00

00:26:45.880 because it was the only media job she could get

00:26:48.120 while raising her kids in Iowa.

00:26:50.140 Now she does a lot of other things,

00:26:52.080 including writing articles for very fancy magazines

00:26:54.480 and writing books. 1.00

00:26:55.920 But Liz did write a piece about mommy bloggers 0.79

00:26:57.900 for Topic Magazine where she said,

00:26:59.520 quote, finding your brand has become a punchline, but it's also a way to profit off the exhausting 1.00

00:27:05.780 unpaid labor of motherhood. I called her to talk about that, about how hard most mothers are 0.98

00:27:11.880 working and not getting paid for it. So no wonder women break and say, you know what? Peace out on 1.00

00:27:18.720 this. I'm going to take my kids to the park, take a couple pictures of it and earn some money that

00:27:24.420 way. A woman who can make money, who can innovate and find a way to make money gets power and gets 1.00

00:27:32.680 freedom in a way that is so primal and so necessary. Studies show women are working 1.00

00:27:40.600 more than they ever have before, earning, well, until the pandemic, earning more than they had

00:27:47.160 before and doing more child care than women did in the 70s. And so you create a system built on 0.83

00:27:57.560 the unpaid labor of women because that's what it boils down to. We rely on the unpaid labor of 1.00

00:28:03.760 women to fill in the gaps when we won't pay for parental leave after a woman has a baby, 1.00

00:28:09.240 where we won't help with child care, where companies will not invest in that on any sort 1.00

00:28:16.220 of level. And now we strip women down to their bare parts. We're realizing that we built our 1.00

00:28:22.860 society on this unpaid labor. And then when they scream and snap and say, fuck you, I'm gonna make 1.00

00:28:31.060 money by getting sponsored by Huggies and snuggle my baby on the couch. And that's also doing it 1.00

00:28:37.840 wrong too. We are women and everything we do is wrong. You're fucked either way. That's what I 1.00

00:28:44.800 keep telling people like the reality is have a baby don't have a baby give me or don't give me 1.00

00:28:50.540 do whatever you want like you're fucked anyway so decide which way you want to get fucked 1.00

00:28:54.420 we just figured out a way to make this podcast go viral where it will get no advertisers 0.99

00:29:00.820 i feel like advertisers will at first be nervous totally nervous yeah but then once they see

00:29:12.800 the impact will be totally on board

00:29:16.280 and then exploit you for all your worth.

00:29:18.840 That's how capitalism works.

00:29:20.180 Oh, and that's all I want.

00:29:21.140 I just want to be exploited for all that I'm worth.

00:29:30.320 Even amidst a global pandemic,

00:29:32.940 the influencing industry is only expected

00:29:34.900 to grow more lucrative.

00:29:36.380 There's 100% growth in the mom influencing category

00:29:39.240 year over year.

00:29:40.720 As my college career counselor would have told me a lot of years ago, it's a good job in a growth industry.

00:29:50.740 I would like a good job just about now.

00:29:55.700 Steady jobs feel way harder to come by these days, even when you have a really successful career behind you.

00:30:03.160 I used to make magazines and websites.

00:30:05.920 Then I used to write for magazines and websites.

00:30:08.980 That kind of content has been decimated in the past 10 years.

00:30:13.040 In order for me to make what a mid-tier influencer makes on a single post,

00:30:17.220 I'd have to write about a half dozen thousand-word articles for a website of a magazine.

00:30:23.500 90% of writers that I know are scrambling to figure out what the hell they should do next.

00:30:29.100 Some of them are becoming doulas or Uber drivers.

00:30:32.820 This right here is the very definition of precarity.

00:30:37.100 Here's Emily Hund again.

00:30:39.660 In this time where jobs and careers are less certain than they once were,

00:30:45.840 personal branding has emerged as an answer to that.

00:30:49.300 If you can cultivate this public brand and sort of sell yourself to the world, you'll be okay.

00:30:57.780 In a country that's stripped away nearly all of our safety nets,

00:31:01.040 even as jobs are lost by the millions, most people are trying to figure out how to survive.

00:31:06.140 especially working mothers and especially right now according to a study from pew trusts women

00:31:13.320 are three times as likely to lose their jobs than men because of the pandemic

00:31:16.400 hearing that reminds me how throughout history women have consistently been set up for failure 0.85

00:31:21.740 as i dug into the research for this podcast i started to think that maybe i could also do this

00:31:34.500 not in the maybe i could be a jeopardy champion or a marathon runner or a contestant on the british

00:31:40.640 bake-off kind of way but a serious maybe this could be my job kind of way to be honest i'm

00:31:48.220 starting to feel a little irrelevant in a world where relevance is increasingly determined by

00:31:53.440 likes and the world of influencing is more than a little dazzling i keep thinking about something 0.54

00:32:00.960 Brooke Romney said to me about why the Mormon mommy bloggers deserve to make all the money 0.99

00:32:05.680 that they make. Content creation is serious business, and you know that. And so I do think 1.00

00:32:10.420 that women should be paid. Women's work's been devalued since the beginning of women. 1.00

00:32:15.980 And I absolutely do think that these women should be paid for doing things that add value to 1.00

00:32:20.780 people's lives. But what's the value they're adding? And why can't we turn away from them? 1.00

00:32:27.300 who are these women really behind their filters? What are their lives actually like? 1.00

00:32:34.400 And if this is the future of content, the natural progression of glossy magazines,

00:32:39.940 is it possible that this is exactly what I should be trying to do next?

00:32:44.920 So is this the end of the story? Do you feel like your curiosity has been satisfied?

00:32:49.840 No, Glynis, not even a little bit. This is just the beginning. I'm going to report the hell out

00:32:55.520 it. I find that very shocking, Joe Piazza, author of many books, editor of many magazines, host of

00:33:05.480 many podcasts. And I'm good at making content. I can report this and I can also try it out because

00:33:11.700 to me, being an influencer seems like a pretty low bar for content creation. I don't need to

00:33:17.700 research a 10,000 word article. I don't need to do 10 interviews. I'm just going to take a picture

00:33:22.920 and write a caption famous last words I think anytime we think something is easy money it's

00:33:28.080 the answer is think again but we're gonna find out because you have very cute kids you influence me

00:33:33.980 every day you influence me too as I attempt to cross over from purchaser to seller we'll find

00:33:44.020 out if I can be paid to try to be a more perfect mother

00:33:52.920 Under the Influence is reported and hosted by me, Joe Piazza.

00:34:01.640 Our story editor is Glynis McNichol.

00:34:04.440 Emily Marinoff is our producer.

00:34:06.340 We had production assistance from Mary Du

00:34:08.560 and sound design from Emily Marinoff, Jessica Kreinchich, and Julian Weller.

00:34:13.900 Our theme and additional music was composed by Jessica Kreinchich.

00:34:17.720 Additional research conducted by Jocelyn Sears.

00:34:21.640 Julian Weller is also our consulting producer.

00:34:24.520 And Manga Shetikador is our executive producer.

00:34:27.560 Huge, huge special thanks to Morgan Jones of the Deseret News

00:34:31.120 for all of her insights into the Mormon mom blogging community.

00:34:34.720 And to Hamilton Lighthouser, who is the voice of Joseph Smith in this episode.

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - February 04, 2021

A More Perfect Mother

Episode Stats

Transcript