Mumsnet

[Reeyo]

Ok I am a BBC radio addict and this topic amused me this week. Enjoy.

 

Amanda Holden, the Britain’s Got Talent panellist, thought going back to work only three weeks after having a baby was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Wrong. Far, far harder was hearing what they said about her decision on the Mumsnet forum.

 

The anonymous mothers piled in with comments that, Amanda bleated, were “negative” and “judgmental”. They ridiculed her show, questioned her parenting and filled her with guilt. Simon Cowell is a sugarplum by comparison.

 

Poor little Amanda. She didn’t know the nature of the Mumsnet beast. She dreamed of “a support network for mums”, a country kitchen where she’d be spoon-fed coochy-coo comments about her baby’s dimples and tips on maternity nurses.

 

What she stumbled into, instead, was a north London Starbucks where angry women sit among laptops and prams, venting their frustration. In their Ugg boots and baggy sweatshirts, the haggard-faced mothers attack their keyboards, tapping out their angry message to the world. It boils down to Lauren Cooper’s catchphrase: “You disrespecting me?!”

 

Amanda Holden is right about Mumsnet. Its 600,000 registered users are more judgmental than a Fifties suburban housewife, more negative than a BBC commentator discussing Tory cuts.

 

Ironically, the one thing they had in common, the mummy label, was the one thing they did not rate. Most sounded as if they'd been raised in a Left-leaning, “a woman’s place is in the boardroom”, world. They’d learnt to equate work outside the home with satisfaction and work within, with drudgery. When they slipped from a proper salaried job to a limbo without kudos or pay, they burned with resentment.

Others would have loved to obsess about their “DD” and “DH” (darling daughter and darling husband, as per the site’s acronyms); but sensed that outsiders held their non-job in contempt. They felt frustrated by the huge gap between their faith in the family and the official line.

Mumsnet brings together these angry women. They love it because it gives them a fig leaf of professional respectability: unlike gossiping by the swings in the park, Mumsnet requires a professional prop, in the shape of a laptop, smartphone or computer. And unlike swapping cracked nipple tales over tea and digestives, the site connects mothers to the outside world (by golly, even to politicians) as well as to one another.

[NGONGE]

I used to be a member of Mumsnet when they first started. I can't remember what my username was. Heh.

[Reeyo]

What type of mum were you then? Were you the type that wore Ugg boots and dirac sheeds with haggard-face bashed away crushing the little emotions of poor rich cadaan women like Amanda Holden?

 

I think I might make an account, just imagine the number of emotional mums on there waiting to be comforted as they complain but instead get stampeded on. Might be fun. lol

[NGONGE]

^^ It wasn't just Mums back then, fathers were allowed in too.