Smug Muthuhs on the InterWeb

Boy are there a lot of smug muthuhs on the InterWeb. I know this isn’t news to anyone even vaguely familiar with muthuh-focused online forums, but I didn’t realize what I was in for when I started browsing through “Holy shit, the test is positive” threads. It’s hard to believe that less than 20 years ago, know-it-all mothers had no choice but to limit their audience to newspaper and magazine letter-to-the-editor readers and the occasional unfortunate person  on the receiving end of a parking lot finger-wag or supermarket checkout line eye-roll. The most aggressive mothers may have used a megaphone to tell parents at the park to get their kids off the see-saw—don’t they know it’s dangerous?! Nowadays, the Internet is positively infected with indignant mothers, many of them completely batshit and intent on telling you—uncaring, idiotic, selfish, ignorant, unthinking mother—everything you’re doing wrong, why your kid is going to grow up to be a failure (if he or she manages to grow up at all), and why you should be more like she is.

For a good long while, I thought that the comment sections following online news articles, as well as pretty much any forum with an Off Topic section, constituted the epicenter of self-satisfied screeds. Often these comments have a political flavor; common contributors are the “personal responsibility” fuckwits and the “I bought my first house at 22 with no help from my parents” assholes. We also have the frugal types: “If you buy a car newer than five years old, you’re the world’s biggest idiot and may as well wipe your ass with $100 bills and chuck them down the toilet” and “When we were kids, we were happy playing with wooden spoons in the yard, and now kids need iPads! What is this world coming to?!!?” But none of these people hold a candle to the multitude of Queen Mother Smuggy McSmuggersons on BabyLoony.*

This blog could easily consist entirely of descriptions of the unbelievable stuff being discussed by mothers. In fact, it very well may! I clearly need a narrower focus, and maybe that’s it. I’ll showcase my own form of smugness by exposing the smugness of others. Why not?

*BabyLoony is my catch-all term for the popular message boards for mothers. They vary a bit from one to another, but their similarities put them in the same loony category. The major players are: CafeMom, JustMommies, The Bump, iVillage Pregnancy & Parenting, What to Expect, and the heavyweight, BabyCenter. Obviously not everyone who reads and contributes to these sites is a wack job, but who tends to stand out: the helpful person who provides a clear, dispassionate answer to a question, or the loony-tune who refers to her mother-in-law as a cum guzzler because she gave little Tommy a popsicle before dinner?