Forums and outright lies

This is an extremely interesting article on a forum called mums net. The forum resembles a school playground full of gossiping and definitely a touch of bullying mums. The mums have recently become experts on the model industry and  attack agencies if they do not meet their sometimes warped demands. The mums are often telling blatant lies and forcing their beliefs upon anybody that will listen.

The article is taken from the Daily Mail

I hate Mumsnet: Why one mum thinks the parenting website is smug, patronising and vicious.

So Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both fallen foul of Mumsnet, the leading internet networking site for parents.

Presumably this must have caused outright panic for their spin doctors, as the one million middle-class women who use it are said to hold the key to the next election.

Gordon Brown stalled when asked to name his favourite biscuit. Heinous! David Cameron stands accused of not remembering how many nappies his disabled son Ivan used in a day. (Anyone know a man who does?)

No doubt such vitriol was not the response the politicians were expecting when asked to participate in an online chat session with the site, which bills itself as an information-sharing resource for mothers.

I imagine both were somewhat shocked by the outrage seemingly anodyne answers provoked. ‘Leave your hair alone and answer the damn questions,’ ordered one Mumsnet-user to David Cameron.

‘I still think he was rubbish,’ another scolded when Gordon Brown finally proffered his biscuit of choice. ( Anything chocolatey apparently.)

So as the party leaders lick their wounds, I have some words of consolation for them: not all of us who have children and hold the vote are enamoured by this cliquey, elitist website.

With a four-year-old son and two-year-old twins (a boy and a girl), I should have been one of their target audience. In fact, I logged onto Mumsnet on the advice of a friend, who told me it was a good place to find reviews for everything from baby bottles to control pants.

Maybe it is, but I never got round to checking. I meandered instead into the discussion forums and was so gobsmacked by what I read I wanted to run screaming from the site.

Logging on: Mothers on Mumsnet seem to have hours to spend being either smug or scathing towards other parents (posed by model)

No doubt such vitriol was not the response the politicians were expecting when asked to participate in an online chat session with the site, which bills itself as an information-sharing resource for mothers.

I imagine both were somewhat shocked by the outrage seemingly anodyne answers provoked. ‘Leave your hair alone and answer the damn questions,’ ordered one Mumsnet-user to David Cameron.

‘I still think he was rubbish,’ another scolded when Gordon Brown finally proffered his biscuit of choice. ( Anything chocolatey apparently.)

So as the party leaders lick their wounds, I have some words of consolation for them: not all of us who have children and hold the vote are enamoured by this cliquey, elitist website.

With a four-year-old son and two-year-old twins (a boy and a girl), I should have been one of their target audience. In fact, I logged onto Mumsnet on the advice of a friend, who told me it was a good place to find reviews for everything from baby bottles to control pants.

Maybe it is, but I never got round to checking. I meandered instead into the discussion forums and was so gobsmacked by what I read I wanted to run screaming from the site

Motherhood is bewildering enough without drifting into the parallel universe that is Mumsnet. There, everything you ever feared about becoming a parent comes to pass.

There really are women who spend hours having online conversations about their cracked nipples, the merits of cloth versus disposable nappies, and why little Tarquin won’t eat his organic carrot bake. I’ve never felt so patronised by such drivel.

Before you can even contribute to these online chats, you have to negotiate the terminology of the site and unravel its myriad codes.

There is a supposedly helpful nine page guide to the acronyms used, but for those of us with a life to lead – or at least a couple of snotty noses to wipe – I’ll explain the most popular ones.

There’s SAHM for Stay At Home Mother; DH for Darling Husband. DS refers to Darling Son, and DD is not, as I first supposed, a boast about bra cup size, but shorthand for Darling Daughter.

There’s also AIBU for Am I Being Unreasonable – the answer to which is almost always yes, but that won’t stop dozens of MNers (Mumsnetters) giving long-winded replies.

Then there’s my personal favourite, BD, or Baby Dancing. What’s that, I hear you ask? That’s the code for having sex. The mind boggles.

And not forgetting one of my own: PTSITIGTV – or Pass The Sickbag I Think I’m Going To Vomit.

Let’s just say the overall tone of the posts is somewhat smug. Then again, they are penned by grown women who have given themselves such online aliases as FizzyLiz, Jellybean, FlamingoBingo and RosiePosieFlump.

Unsurprisingly, many punctuate their witterings with smiley faces.

Which brings me to my main gripe. Like all social networking sites, Mumsnet is inherently childish. But what makes it stand out from its rivals is that it purports to be run by adults, and so tries to tackle grown-up issues. It is now branching out into issues like its recent campaign for improved miscarriage care.

Mumsnet also made a successful bid to have a Madeleine McCann appeal advert pulled from cinemas. Members thought the appeal would be too frightening for their children to see.

As I waded through reams of advice from other mothers on everything from which pram to buy to the neverending breast/bottle debate, I could not help wondering where they got the time to share such banality.

Time is a scarce commodity when you have young children, and on my rare off-duty moments the last thing I want to do is talk about weaning recipes with people I’ve never met, whose children I am uninterested in.

That’s probably another reason the site is so irritating. It turns parenthood into a competitive sport in which nothing you do is ever good enough.

Mumsnet was launched in 2000 by Carrie Longton, a TV producer, and Justine Roberts, a sports journalist and wife of The Guardian’s deputy editor, Ian Katz.

The two women met in an antental class and realised the best source of information was other parents. Hence the idea for a parents’ information-sharing website was born.

The site denies it has an ethos as such, but Justine admitted that members are feisty and tend to favour clothing from the middle-class catalogue of choice, Boden.

Typical members are women in their 30s with university degrees. This is exactly the type of woman who wants a guidebook for parenting – a bar against which she can measure herself (and, no doubt, declare herself and DH top-of-the-class!).

For this over-achieving obsessive, being a mother is not enough. She has to be the best mother. And so she procrastinates and over-analyses every single parenting action she takes.

 

Take the woman who begged for advice on the subject: ‘Impact of changing name of seven-month-old baby?’

She had changed her mind about her child’s name, and wanted to pick a new one – but worried whether it would be a problem for her baby in later years.

Incredibly, 17 people had the time to ruminate about this so-called problem.

I know people who won’t make a decision on anything – not even what to cook their children for lunch – without first consulting Mumsnet.

On the site, it trumpets positive reviews, including one which called it ‘the Daddy of parenting sites’. In some circles, it would be preferable to admit you feed your child cola in its bottle rather than admit to an uneasiness about Mumsnet.

In the interests of research, I ploughed through some more ‘ discussion threads’. I found reading the site’s content exhausting and depressing, as it seemed to bring out the worst in women: the dithering and indecision, interspersed with competition and downright aggression.

Some of the most venomous Mumsnet postings were made three years ago when a debate over the merits of child-care guru Gina Ford almost caused the site to close.

Ms Ford, author of The Contented Baby series, was flabbergasted by the venom with which women wrote about her, and in a letter to her lawyer listed 11 pages of insults.

Included amongst these was the charge that she was ‘unpleasant and unhygienic’ and ‘justifiably reviled’.

After a year of wrangling, the dispute was eventually settled out of court, but ought to have sounded warning bells for anyone who sought to enter a debate with the MNers. Sisterly they are not.

So treat yourself to another of those choccie-biscuits, Gordon, and go back to combing your hair, Dave. And be reassured – us mums aren’t all as pedantic and kiddie-obsessed as the Mumsnet crew.

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