On social media, you can drive engagement if you post your mum and she’s considered a MILF. There’s an entire content category that exists purely for the purpose of praising mothers who look like they “could be the sister” to their (also extremely beautiful) daughters. Your peers will comment to ask about her secret. What face cream does she use? What does she have for lunch? And does she do pilates?

On the other end, mums who post anything without a flat stomach become a projection of all of the worst fears of those young and childless. It’s why when you open the comments on a post-partum video, you’ll see comments like, “This is why I don’t want kids”. To be a “good” mum online usually means “bouncing back” immediately and being fun enough to keep up with the trends, without being so fun that you forget your place as nurturer and homemaker. It’s about riding the thin line – attractive but not provocative, outgoing but not abrasive – so as not to be deemed a “bad mum”. This can be applied to women of any age, really. It’s also what Ej Dickson explores in her new book, One Bad Mother.

Dickson writes about the “bad” mums people love to hate online. She unpacks how we relate to mums online – everyone from stage mums and MILFS to Mormon mumfluencers and Hannah Neelman (of Ballerina Farm), who’s the unofficial queen of tradwife content – through the lens of pop culture and American history. To some, being a bad mum looks like EmRata when she posted a photo holding her baby like a bag. Or the ‘doughnut mum’ who dared to post a video of her feeding her one-year-old three mini powdered doughnuts for breakfast. But the ‘bad mum’ title is also how America’s right defended why Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month. In the US, motherhood has become a cultural battleground – a quiet war that takes place between sourdough recipes and babies with emojis covering their faces online. 

The internet clearly has mummy issues. To understand why, we spoke to Dickson about what we project onto mumfluencers, or other women who exist online, and how motherhood is being weaponised across the country.

What made you want to write about bad mums? 

Ej Dickson: I don’t think of the book as about motherhood, but more about being a woman in the United States and all of the insane expectations that people put on you as a result. It’s impossible to be a “good mother” and, in this country, it’s this way because of design. The more inadequate, frustrated and helpless women feel, the less likely they are to complain about how unsupported and isolated they are. I was interested in how the culture applies the ‘bad mother’ label to any woman who deviates from societal expectations of them, or dares to view motherhood less as a calling and more as a form of labour, in relation to influencers. Also, I just wanted to write about MILFS. 

What role does social media play in reinforcing these expectations of women? 

Ej Dickson: Social media makes parents feel like they’re parenting in a panopticon. You’re constantly being watched, and you're constantly watching others. Since starting this book, I’ve heard of so many instances of women who have been reported to CPS because their commenters saw their videos and thought their houses weren’t clean, or they didn't like the way their child held a pencil, or they didn't like what they were serving their child for breakfast. There are dire consequences to being shamed on the internet, and it’s even worse if you’re a woman of colour or come from a marginalised background.

It’s as if, as soon as anyone posts their child, they are no longer a human, but part of the general mumfluencer content category.

Ej Dickson: People who grew up on the internet are used to the flattening of identity, where we see people on the internet as narratives rather than fully fledged people. This isn’t specific to mothers, but we’re also already trained not to think of mothers as people with individual identities.

I want to go through a few more divisive motherhood debates online with you, if you’ll let me. What do you think about the childless people who post complaining about the babies next to them on the planes versus those in the comments informing them that being around children, in fact, is part of living within a community? 

Ej Dickson: I don’t even think that’s about children specifically at all. The word community is key to that one, because the internet has transformed us all into thinking about ourselves as individual brands who are driven by self-interest. Because children have higher needs than other adults, I think children are kind of the sacrificial lamb for that conversation, when actually the internet has made us all less empathetic. That’s my working theory. 

I think that tracks. So what about the babies that are posted with the emojis over their faces? 

Ej Dickson: In the book, I write about Maya Knight, who is the mother of two twin daughters. She started posting when they were really little, but she was constantly getting scrutinised for anything she posted. One day, she decided to stop posting her kids’ faces, and everyone jumped down her throat immediately. They hated her for posting her kids, and hated her for not. You really can’t win. I don’t think that one has even really been broached in an intelligent, thoughtful way at all yet. 

If everyone is too hard on mothers online in general, is all mum criticism equal, then?

Ej Dickson: No, obviously not. I think Ruby Franke is a good example, where people on the internet were seeing this woman post really terrifying content and were raising red flags for years and years until the authorities finally did something about it. That’s obviously a person who merited the criticism that she was receiving. And, even for less extreme examples, I think there are ways to post children that absolutely violate their consent or privacy and warrant criticism. 

We’re witnessing the laundering of evil through mothers, and we’re also seeing it the other way around

I think a lot of young people are also rightfully concerned about tradwifes growing as a content category under this right-wing swing. How can we differentiate between those who enjoy posting their lives at home and those with more sinister intentions?

Ej Dickson: It’s difficult. Tradwives are something I have complicated feelings about, and, again, it’s something where the conversation merits more nuance. A lot of these women, like Ballerina Farm, were raised in very conservative environments. It’s a woman who is clearly ambitious and educated, but was also taught her entire life to live within these very limited circumstances. So, figuring out a way to carve a space for herself within that and monetise it to tremendous effect is a pretty impressive achievement, regardless of whether or not you think her content is good or not. Or whether you think her content is helpful to society, which I don’t. What scares me more than her as a person is that there’s such an audience for her content. 

I definitely see the appetite for the content against a backdrop of a general questioning of what the ‘you can have it all’ brand of feminism really did for young women. To some, it’s led them to lean more towards conservative gender roles and tradition. How have mumfluencers become a vehicle for this?

Ej Dickson: I think that’s played a huge role in why you see tradwives become so successful, and it’s a huge part of the reason why you see the womanosphere on the rise today. Women like Alex Clark and Candace Owens are espousing these very traditional values of femininity and discouraging women from buying into the ‘have it all’ myth. And I say myth because I think it is a myth. I came of age during a time when that’s exactly what I was told: that everything would be like Miranda from Sex and the City. People are taking up and realising that having a child has become a privilege, and it’s basically impossible in the  United States to own a house. They’re revolting against that, and I understand it, but, unfortunately, the pendulum has swung so quickly and so dramatically in the other direction. They are seeing how women like me are burnt out and tearing their hair out all the time, and they’re like, ‘We don’t want that. I’d rather get married at 23 and pick my own produce.’ 

When writing the book, did you find yourself empathising with these women in unexpected ways?

Ej Dickson: Definitely. I think it’s the journalist’s job to have empathy. There was no way to write this book without some degree of empathy for the women I was writing about, even when that was difficult, as it was in my chapter about the anti-vax and MAHA mothers. I  have interviewed a lot of those women throughout my career, and I find basically every single one of their beliefs abhorrent. I consider them in a lot of ways predatory, but I also consider them victims. In a lot of cases, they are parents of children who are chronically ill, and the medical system has failed or disregarded them. They’re looking for answers, and that’s something we should all be incredibly sympathetic to, even if we are horrified by how they’re channelling that pain.  

Why do you think motherhood as an identity has become this cultural battleground right now in America, specifically?

Ej Dickson: It’s really scary to watch, honestly. So much of what we’re seeing now reminds me of the stuff I was researching that was happening in the country years ago. The Right is framing women, specifically white women, as the guardians of future generations and the preservation of traditional family values. It’s something the Klan was doing at the turn of the century. Women were pivotal in the Klan. They were basically the ones doing the fundraising, organising the community and putting a friendly face on the vicious hatred that their husbands were spouting. And that’s kind of what you see happening again right now with someone like Katie Miller and her podcast. Here’s a white, millennial mother who is talking about fitness and eating clean, while she’s married to one of the most evil men in the country, who's responsible for what's going on in Minneapolis. We’re witnessing the laundering of evil through mothers, and we’re also seeing it the other way around. 

How does this ‘laundering of evil’ apply to who the far-right consider bad mums?

Ej Dickson: I don’t know if you’ve seen the ‘wine mum’ discourse, but a lot of mothers in Minneapolis who were radicalised by the death of Alex Pretti and Renee Good have been on the front lines and putting their bodies on the line. These aren’t necessarily all liberal women, but they’re just rightfully absolutely horrified by what's happening. The Right is noticing, and they’ve started smearing these mums as drunk wine mums or as part of an antifa gang, using these women’s motherhood against them in really obviously misogynistic and belittling ways. So, we see motherhood become a symbol on both sides, really. It’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the weaponisation of motherhood against women in this country.