The dominant gender on social photo-sharing site Instagram is female. On both Facebook and Twitter, it’s male. A layman’s analysis would suggest that women are into visual communication.
What’s striking about this is how it relates to the reputation of the three social media networks: Twitter has a political edge and leads the conversation, Facebook is a must if you want to convince anyone at all that you do indeed exist, not to mention if you want to make sure to be invited to all the cool parties and events, but Instagram – it’s just an add-on, often sidelined as the annoying platform overflowing with babies (and a heap of women posting selfies, deemed equally annoying).
In the Irish Times yesterday, Una Mullally writes about parents’ tendency to embarrass themselves and their children by oversharing photos of their kids. They’re bragging, she says, and it’s all performance. They’re contributing to a culture of performance, sharing nothing but well-staged photos of cute kids in clean uniforms. Worse: they’re denying their children their right to privacy.
I don’t know where Mullally has looked, but I don’t think she’s looked hard enough. Of course, criticising mothers for sharing photos of their children is nothing new – I often hear that Instagram is boring because it’s all women and mothers and babies, and told that the odd photo of my cute kids on Facebook is fine but that there has to be a limit to the whole motherhood experience thing (followed by 100-plus likes of a photo of my children and two measely reactions to a political article I share moments later). But did anyone ever stop to consider that perhaps these mothers never asked for anyone’s opinion?
“The next time you reach to upload a photo of your kid, ask yourself why are you doing it, and who are you really doing it for?” writes Mullally. Here’s the thing: motherhood can be really, really lonely. And social media can be the ticket to a whole new kind of community and support: to advice on how to survive on three hours of broken sleep, available in realtime on your phone while you’re stuck on the couch cluster feeding your way through a developmental leap for three hours; to reassurance that hearing imaginary screaming babies during your 30-second weekly shower is normal. Who I’m doing it for? Myself. The clue is in the word ‘social.’ Shocking as it may sound, mothers need socialising too.
Behind every photo of a child in a school uniform and a baby’s first smile are conversations upon conversations between people who have never met face to face but who share the journey with all its highs and lows. Often times, a photo of a cuddle comes with a long-winded caption about the worst day ever and the depths of madness and exhaustion only a toddler hug at the end of the night will cure. And actually, the photos of puke down parents’ backs are there – as are those of scribbles on wallpaper, hair covered in mushy carrot and seemingly neverending bags under eyes. And the people who see them, who read the full captions and leave comments full of emojis reaching “ridiculous hyperbole”, are not friends and family you find in private WhatsApp groups; they’re completely random people who are going through the same madness and happen to end up saving your life, or at least your sanity, sometimes on a daily basis.
If this was a conversation about privacy security in a digital age, I’d be all ears. But it sounds too much like the judgement of mothers every time a child acts up, the judgement of mothers in conversations around the nation’s ill health, and the judgement of mothers who don’t want to be mothers. What’s expected of us is to have kids (whether we want to or not), hide away at home or at mother-and-baby coffee mornings somewhere in the suburbs, get fit, go back to work, and revert to behaving like normal childless adults again. We’re not meant to identify as mothers – that would be the definition of sad, a vivacious life wasted.
Cover it up in concern for the children all you like, but in a world where the work of looking after children is not just unpaid but silenced, it sounds hypocritical at best. What next, an empty promise to love them both?
And here they are, all over Facebook and Instagram, talking openly about how incomprehensibly difficult it is to be a mother and how amazingly strong that love for the children can be, even after fourteen wakings in a night – owning the conversation, refusing to hide, being mothers publically and voicing their frustrations, desires and dreams. It’s a radical act in a capitalist society. Long may it live.
Linnea Dunne is a writer, editor, and activist who writes about women’s rights, media representation, reproductive rights and parenting. Catch up with her musings at www.linneadunne.com.
