Ooh, my keyboard is on fire – I can hardly type quick enough to keep up with my thoughts on Liz Jones’ rant against Mumsnet bloggers.
I need to remind BBB readers that it was a chance meeting with Liz Jones that indirectly led to this blog even being in existence. We talked at an event and I told her I wanted to write the truth about beauty and the industry. She said to me, ‘you could make a fortune’ because nobody ever tells the truth about beauty. Buoyed by that, I phoned the Daily Mail commissioning desk to put my idea for a no-holds barred column on beauty products. I was told.. and I quote, “if anyone was interested in what you had to say it would be a good idea.. but they aren’t.” Cheers then, Daily Mail. A few weeks later and Elsa Mcalonan’s column, Beauty Confidential, promising to ‘tell the truth’ about beauty appeared. Of course, it does anything but.
It was genuinely the moment when I thought, I don’t want to do this anymore (write for papers) and started to search out ways to talk about beauty and the beauty industry with complete honesty. Finally, I heard about blogs and the rest is history. I keep one regular print job, but can quite honestly say that I have never pitched to any other paper for work since then.
So, in a way, I have to be grateful to Liz Jones, because while my fortune is most certainly not made, it was her enthusiasm for my idea that ended up as BBB. I’m really happy to leave the Daily Mail to talk endless nonsense about ‘miracle creams’ and breast enhancing/reducing lotions, but there is always the uneasy truth that millions of women read it as gospel and buy their ‘truth’. I can only do what I can do in some small way to counterbalance the baloney.
Liz Jones hits some unpalatable nails on the head when she describes mummy blogging as the new home-knitting and without knowing it, gets to the nub of the problem with mummy blogging… we are utterly swamped with millions of mums blogging and it is pretty much all the same – babies, sleeping and lack of, traveling with babies, cooking for babies and basically how to do everything motherly better than anyone else. It’s awash with moral highground and superiority complexes as a result of playing Beethoven in the womb and yoga retreats – a more competitive playground you will not find. However, what Liz has totally forgotten is the utter pleasure that having a baby can bring – the desire to share with the world the joy of your child. It’s what we are programmed to do – see our babies as the centre of our universe – that’s how it’s meant to be! Sharing it with like-minded mums – what on earth is wrong with that? Baking, cooking, making things etc – what instead would she have women filling their baby days with? Boil washing terry nappies while wearing a hair shirt to make it ‘worthwhile’ enough?
The issue seems to boil down to mums on maternity leave having what Liz calls a ‘holiday’. Well, yes, if you’re lucky enough to have blessed time with your child on a work break, then fabulous, but it’s not a holiday. Far from it. It’s the time in which you discover yourself as a mother and get to know your child properly and if that leads to happier children who forge through to useful adulthood balanced and loved, then you know what, it’s time well spent.
However, I do see the other side – how very, very annoying that while your colleague is blogging about her cupcakes, you are working extra hours to cover her workload. That, though, is an employer issue, not a mother issue. Before blogs, the issue of what mothers did while at home caring for their babies on maternity leave wasn’t really an issue at all. Now, because blogs are so public, I guess it does leave people wondering where exactly the time comes from to knit an entire nativity scene – maybe babies aren’t quite so hard after all.
Anyone who has a blog knows that it’s a labour of love – I call mine the child that constantly needs feeding! Liz has forgotten (or never realised) all the peripheral stuff around blogging such as hours spent researching and sourcing content, constant emails to and fro to acquire images, endless thought about stats analysis and trying to please an audience who now, if your blog is successful, have come to expect – and indeed, deserve, certain standards, to name but a few things. It is certainly not a question of sitting idly in front of the laptop and writing about pureed carrots and eyebags.
From what I can gather about Mumsnet, it is bitchy (so is beauty blogging, probably all blogging is) – she’s right – with a constant stream of out-mothering mothers – but it is not compulsory! Nobody makes you read that stuff. And, I’m pretty sure nobody made Liz turn up that day to sneer at something she really doesn’t understand – on both counts; parenting and blogging.
There is so much that’s good about blogging – I get very irritated with those who made their ‘fortune’ on the back of blogging but now don’t want to be called ‘bloggers’ – and it’s brought the genre of writing back to a generation who can barely be arsed to read a book, never mind write something themselves. Liz’s assertion that blogging is lucrative is misinformed – for all but a very few, it doesn’t pay a penny (head to YouTube for the bigger bucks). Blogging is a way to polarise your thoughts instead of letting the general muddle rule your head, it’s a way to communicate to people who have a choice about whether they want to hear you or not and ultimately, it’s a way to have a purpose when you may feel other things in your life aren’t that purposeful at all.
It would not surprise me one little bit if Liz Jones ends up with a blog herself.. oh, wait.. Dispatches From Fashion’s Front Row: Liz Jones’ (paid for by the Daily Mail) blog.
There’s no point in hysterics over Liz’s views.. who cares what she thinks. You have the thing, in your blog, that most journalists would give their eye teeth for – a chance to air your views and be heard literally whenever you like, and if that’s 4am snuggled up to the most wonderful thing that ever happened to you, then you win.
NB: Sometime later, I checked the mumsnet forum on the subject – it seems that they too rather think that blogs are a load of drivel and agree with Liz on the subject of blogging. Who knew?
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15 comments
Liz Jones, the woman who wrote about eBay only a few weeks ago like it was a new found ‘thing’. She said she couldn’t believe what she found when she searched. One wonders where she has been whilst eBay has become one of the biggest shopping sites.
Not on blogs I take it?
And now she only just cottons on to mum blogs and pours out her frustrations. Mums blogs have been around for friggin years. Why now??? Why so people even listen?
For someone who writes for the Mail, you’d expect her to be up on these things. She has no real idea.
Who the F cares what people write about?? A mum, a beauty fanatic, a passionate fashion blogger, we all have something to say and there’s always a bit of jealousy here and a tad of ‘out doing’ each other there. It’s natural. It’s human.
Get over it Liz Jones. Write about other things, like how much you love something for a change??
Oh Liz Jones. You do it to yourself, you do, you and no one else. I truly do not know why people publish her articles. Perhaps the Mail enjoy how much she seems to irritate people?
I have met Liz Jones, and she seemed quite nice. She was actually very kind and encouraging to me. I can’t help but feel uncomfortable when I read her column. It is like when she writes, a very insecure side of her is exposed, and that side is not very nice at all.
I am a mother, but I am not a yummy mummy. I find that keeping my house resembling something like a home, and not falling asleep on the job are high enough goals for me. Baby yoga, crochet, baking… too much for me to even consider. And I have help from a cleaner and a nanny part time. (No, I’m not ashamed). But I do not resent women who do all these things. I marvel at their skills of multi tasking, and at times I envy them a little, but unlike Liz Jones, I am big enough to admit that rather than spilling out bile about women I don’t know. Ok, so they are different to you, but why do you care so much?
And as for the holiday issue, I took a year off with my son. When I got back people seemed to think I had been on a big year long jolly. Actually, I had a silent infection which lead me to get septicaemia a month after my son was born. All my friends were at work and I was incredibly lonely for a year. I was of course, too embarrassed to say. Perhaps Liz Jones would prefer to read blogs from mothers who feel left out and depressed? Or battered women perhaps? Maybe then she could read without the nagging feeling that perhaps she is the one who is missing out.
Liz Jones is hilarious, she’s so outdated narrow minded, clueless and misinformed in everything she writes!
Oh I love this! She is so controversial, we are the people that keep her going. Love to hate. However, I stupidly clicked onto mumsnet recently (as lots of clicks to my blog came from there) and boy, are they mean!! Flinging around personal insults about my glasses (yes I have bad eyesight, thanks for making me feel subconscious). Just as bad themselves…..
I cannot read the Mail, it makes me want to punch things and that isn’t very attractive. As a scientist, it makes me want to cry a lot of the time too.
I completely agree with what you wrote. I had a friend ask me why I spent so much time on my computer and told me that I was ‘wasting my life away’. Well, actually I’m developing my photography, writing, social networking, reviewing, time management etc etc etc skills. Just because my hobby happens to be blogging doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile or time consuming.
I feel really sorry for mums, they do such a good job when they take time off to actually bond with and help their child develop.
Liz is a clever woman, she knows exactly how to antagonise readers. Her readership would be significantly lower if she didn’t make us want to throw things by the end of her column.
Liz paints an idyllic view of parenting blogging that she has taken at face value. Blogs are a constructed reality, not a constant stream of a person’s waking hours. In the same way that a fashion/beauty/travel blogger’s life isn’t a series of fabulous moments, parenting bloggers want to show the best side of their lives. To think that it’s all cupcakes and angelic infants is crazy.
There’s really very little need for validation from magazines and newspapers – we understand why we blog and that is enough.
Liz Jones has the knack to irritate me. I think that’s what she’s all about. I don’t even think she thinks the things she writes. She just likes controversy and annoying everyone. No one who would want to put their opinion accross and have people on your side would write like that. My view is that she writes something, sleep over it and then thinks of things which she could add to rub people the wrong way: the last line about the burka, which totally came out of the blue is a perfect example of that, and, may I say is totally non sensical. I have got no idea where this comparison with burka comes from! But then it doesn’t prevent to choose this line, which has nothing to do with 99% of what she wrote to be the title of her article
Liz Jones, you rest happy: you managed, once again, to wind everybody up. Your writing is not art, you’ve just got the art of winding everybody up.
I am not into kids myself and will never be a parent. I don’t have it in me to be a mother. This is a not a problem, as there are enough unhappy kids in this world for me to raise one. Therefore, I am not the right audience for a parenting blogging, but people are entitled to blog about what they want and if they make a few pennies from it, they have all my respect. Bottom line, Liz cannot stand bloggers or likes to claim over the rooftops that she doesn’t so that she can irritate every blogger out there.
You had no idea that blogging could be so lucrative and that people are interested to read other things that the daily mail and press? Well, darling, you’d better get used to it because it only just got started.
Comparing maternity leave to a holiday? How very insulting of you, especially for a first time mother.
Great piece BBB. Oh, and Liz Jones referring to herself as ‘an artist’ has had me sniggering all day. I really must regain focus and get back to baking cupcakes to display on my Mummy blog…XXX
If Liz Jones could write half as lucidly and eloquently as you I might not be quite as irate at her.
I was grimly impressed that she managed to wheedle her Islamophobia into a completely unrelated article in the headline “Free? You might as well wear burkhas.” I wonder if the Daily Mail pays her a bonus for that.
Both Liz Jones and Mumsnet make me despair for the modern state of feminism. Can’t we be civil and respectful to one another? No? Oh, ok then.
I’m intrigued by this suggestion this suggestion that caring for a baby is so easy that we have time to make cupcakes whilst on maternity leave – and more intrigued by the defence that it isn’t. Because in general… yes it is. Babies are easy. They are well behaved and spend most of their time sitting there watching you make cupcakes/do yoga/play Xbox. Colic-cy babies, unsettled babies, anxious babies not so much, but most are easy as pie. Two year olds are not so easy. Four year olds harder still. By the time you get to seven, and it’s one class after another, rejection of parents when mates are around (beautiful homecooked meals or no), constant birthday parties and present buying, homework, reading, spelling, football, swimming and they want to go to bed about the same time you do – then it is very tricky indeed. And of course and off-the-rails teenager is harder still. Not as many blogs about that phase. Wonder why? 🙂 x
who gives a shit what that woman thinks really? Thankfully, in my life I don’t know a soul who would read, never mind agree with, a thing she wrote.
As for what a mum does at home, after having a baby, who’s business is it? Absolutely no one’s outside of the immediate family. (unless harmful or neglectful obv).
Unfortunately everyone is so wrapped up in their own little world and babies that they manage to (conveniently) forget the other side of the coin and Liz does speak for a lot of women without children and as an uncomfortable as some people find it there is no mistaking that it is an unpalatable truth. But I would also argue we as women are our own worst enemies and that the fight for parental rights has swung so far in favour of parents that its alienated many women without children. That she writes for the Daily Mail is an irrelevant and unwelcome distraction from distraction from the very real issues she puts forward.
Wow! After seeing this I hoped over the the mail and read it and was actually shocked.
I am young and don’t have any children but I have big respect for woman who choose to come back to work and they should not be criticised for having a year off to bond with their child before they go back to working weeks and missing out on major steps in a child’s life. I will admit, I work with a man who insisits thst he needs to leave work early everyday for child related issues which considering his wife is on full year maternity is not necessary. I should not have to pick up the workload for that but I am happy to pick up the slack for someone who is on full maternity leave man or women which I think people forget can affect men. I have a man in the office on full maternity leave as he is taking on the role because his wife is the main breadwinner which is admirable. I also admire woman who can find a way to stay at home with their children and still make a small income. Look at the blog ‘Sprinkle of Glitter’ for example. She’s at home with her baby yet makes a small income through advertising. Is that really a bad thing? She doesn’t obsess about all things baby. Her blog is mainly beauty with a few baby bits thrown in, and she has found a way to make it work round a 2 year old.
Liz’s views are so outdated she should be embracing this new generation of independent woman where we have stepped away from just being a housewife but instead make some money and enjoy time with their child.
I will agree with one thing though, mumsnet may be the bitchiest thing on the net…
Brilliant post Jane.
Can I just add that the time I spent on maternity leave was the most physically, mentally and emotionally challenging year of my life. Everything I did in my previously (very demanding) career was an absolute doddle in comparison. Many other mums I know agree with me. Not all women find adapting to motherhood easy & it’s impossible to imagine just how much it turns your world upside down until it’s happening to you.
Sadly, many women don’t like to see others succeed or receive public acknowledgement for their achievements, whatever they may be. A child, a career, a blog – or, God forbid, all 3.
Nic