Recently, I took down a random picture of myself and replaced it with a picture of my daughter on my Facebook profile page. It was an innocent gesture prompted simply by boredom and the fact that an update seemed fitting.
But if you ask Katie Rolphe, author of a feminist missive in Slate’s new doubleX, Get Your Kid Off Your Facebook Page there was nothing innocent about the switch. By choosing to represent my online persona with my kid’s picture instead of my own, I was revealing something very unsettling about myself and the state of modern womanhood at large: I was subjugating my personal identity as a woman by putting my mommy face front and center. That means, says Katie, that I feel “I am only my children.” She didn’t stop there. She also went on to claim that I was one of many women “hiding behind my kid” by having her picture represent me, signaling something ominous for the modern woman that would leave Betty Friedan rolling in her Feminine Mystique-lined grave. My photo selection apparently was a way to appear “dowdy and invisible” reinforcing that “we are a mommy culture in which it’s almost a point of pride how little remains of the healthy, worldly, engaged, and preening self.”
Despite Rolphe’s interesting and well-written thesis she offers a very flimsy, myopic argument. It’s built on the far-reaching initial presumption that Facebook is the pinnacle of online identity, neglecting the myriad reasons why, how, when and where we choose to create our digital social persona. But, Katie, give a girl some credit: A facebook profile does not a women make. I read (see Goodreads). I work (see LinkedIn). I shop for myself (see ThisNext). I talk about my work (see Twitter). I am civic-minded (see MomsRising or Huffington Post). And if you want to read some of my secret thoughts about what motherhood really means, visit truuMOMconfessions.
Furthermore, Rolphe’s description of the role of “mother” is framed through a dusty “feminist” lens in which she depicts it as a wholly undermining job that is mutually exclusive to being smart, engaged, productive and satisfying. Because, you know, if you don’t put your own picture up that means you’re essentially saying: Better you, you cute little coiffed child of mine, than me, who is standing in the background with unwashed hair, mom jeans and a shirt stained with pureed baby food.
