In a mom blog heard around the world, former High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale recently wrote about flouncing out of her celebrity mom group because she didn’t feel included.
The essay, published in The Cut, is light on factual information and analysis, but heavy on the kind of mean-girl analysis that feeds into the cultural misogyny machine.
Tisdale writes obliquely, “I remember being left out of a couple of group hangs, and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it fed me every single photo and Instagram Story.” She goes on, “Another time, at one of the mom’s dinner parties, I realized where I sat with her — which was at the end of the table, far from the rest of the women. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.”
Tisdale’s essay launched a thousand tabloid articles that purported to suss out the members of the celebrity mom group, such as Hilary Duff, whose husband has made vague posts seemingly referencing Tisdale. Tisdale’s husband, too, is posting right back. It’s an exhausting cycle of petty drama that contrasts with the heavy political news of the day: the extrajudicial capture of Venezuela’s leader and the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. A real Kim-Theres-People-That-Are-Dying.Gif kind of moment.
Beyond which blonde star didn’t invite which blonde star to which kid’s birthday party, this story is striking a particular nerve in our culture. And no, it’s not about how women can be horrible. Listen, we have the ultimate mean girl running the Department of Homeland Security; we know how women are breaking the glass ceiling of evil in this America. (As an aside, I find it ironic that the storyline is about how catty women can be, while it’s Tisdale and Duff’s husbands who are adding vaguepost fuel to the tabloid flames.)
Rather, the story has resonance because right now in America, women are in crisis.
As a veteran of the mom blogs of the 2010s, and someone who spent years doing work for now-shuttered websites that fed off viral “mom drama,” I often wrote about the implosion of Facebook mom groups and Bump forums, where women were seemingly out to get one another. The Ashley Tisdale mom drama is just a wash-rinse-repeat of the tiresome cultural narrative that women are catty, manipulative, and cruel toward other women. And nothing says the misogyny of the early aughts is back like a screed that feeds into regressive tropes, published as a kind of blind item in the pages of New York Magazine.
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America loves this story. Everyone clicks, and it always goes viral, because it’s so much more fun than the real story, which is about the structural and systemic ways women are intentionally isolated and then turned against one another. Even celebrities.
As a result of unfavorable return-to-office policies, increasingly inflexible schedules, the pay gap, and the rising cost of living and child care, mothers are being pushed out of the workforce. Simultaneously, women across America are also being denied access to basic health care and reproductive choices, forcing them to become mothers before they’re ready or willing.
Statistically, married mothers have less free time than their single counterparts, and being a woman means spending more time on unpaid child care and housework, and enjoying less free time than a man.
This isn’t an accident. Every time in history that women have gained access to power and freedom, the demands of parenting have increased. In fact, mothers today spend more time parenting than they did in the 1970s, even though they are more likely to work full-time. This is because a woman, a mother, with leisure time is seen as dangerous, not just to male participation in the workforce, but for how it would cultivate our ability to organize and come together and see that it’s not other women who are isolating them, it’s actually the entire system of motherhood in America.
Ashley Tisdale, it’s not your mom group making you feel lonely; it’s America.
These systemic changes are also happening alongside an explosion in tradwife content, where women are going viral for modeling a conservative aesthetic of stay-at-home wifery and motherhood, where kids wear gingham dresses on a farmstead with chickens, and everyone is homeschooled and says grace before dinner. It’s a version of mothering where it’s not enough that your kids are wearing the right clothes, they have to avoid sugar, eat only homemade and whole-grain breads, get the Snoo. Or don’t get the Snoo because no robot is going to replace a mother’s love — no nannies, no help, free-range everything, and also you can’t yell because everyone has to gentle-parent now, but don’t make your kids too soft or they won’t be resilient.
It’s no wonder all moms, even the rich hot ones, are a little insane right now.
And it’s so much easier to turn on one another, to blame Hilary Duff, than to analyze the ways in which we are being politically and personally siloed, left on our own, and expected to do it all.
Mom groups have long been a DIY way of fighting against this loneliness. When my kids were little, my mom group had babysitting co-ops and scheduled nights out as a way to connect and find relief from the drudgery of the long days dealing with runny noses and toddler tantrums. I won’t say these groups were all snuggles and sleepovers and braiding each other’s hair — because the uncomfortable reality about community is that it is uncomfortable. It requires hard conversations and work. It requires hanging out with a mom who might not agree with you on sugar consumption or when to let your kid go face-first down the slide. It also involves being vulnerable and asking other moms out for coffee dates, playdates, and park dates.
Just like any other relationship, they don’t always work. I had a number of weird playdates with moms in the early years, before I found “the ones.” And as a mom with a kid now in high school, I am starting to experience it all over again. Do I fit in with the sports moms or the band moms? Whenever I feel that anxiety kick in, it’s good to remember that my motherhood doesn’t define who I am — that I have a life and a career and friendships outside of motherhood that make me a full human being.
Right now, Americans are also being systemically isolated. Cell phones, AI chatbots, television shows, social media, and the decline in communal spaces and walkable cities are all forcing Americans to the rage bait of our screens rather than toward one another.
Listen, Ashley Tisdale, Hilary Duff doesn’t like me either because she doesn’t know who I am. And even if she did, she still might not like me. But who cares? Drink a glass of wine and go have a laugh with a friend. Maybe a queer parent friend, someone who has older kids, younger kids, someone who’d rather die than look at a kid.
And perhaps, if I may add, one of the problems in the building of this particular type of community (and, relatedly, some ideas of America) is that the vision lacks diversity and perspective.
The idea that our friends need to mirror us and our life choices isn’t real friendship; it’s vanity. A community built on sameness is always going to fall apart.
Lastly, it’s not a crime for people not to like you. I once got kicked out of a Facebook mom group because I teased another mom for testing a series of eight lifevests on her six-month-old baby before a trip to a lake where the plan was to gently dip the baby’s toes in the water. I probably deserved it, but I have no regrets.
But people not liking you doesn’t require justice in the pages of a magazine. It’s just life. Eventually, your kids aren’t gonna like you either. And that’s not shade, that’s just a parenting reality. (I hear they come back around again in their twenties. I’ll let you know when I get there.)
From Rolling Stone US
