This just went up at Street Carnage. Go read it there.
Remember when you were a kid and your parents would have friends or family over and break out the old baby photos? “Here’s little Arvind pooping on the couch. Here’s little baby Gavin getting his first little baby boner. Look at that precious cutie Benjamin making his first Jew joke. Awww.” Embarrassing right?
Now imagine that a thousand or more people were looking at them and instead of it being some awkward Thanksgiving post-fart nap bonding ritual, it went on forever in front of everyone you know. That’s what it’s like being a kid now that mommy and daddy are on Facebook.
Parents have always been oblivious narcissists –- that’s pretty much the reason d’etre of parenthood in the first place -– but like everything else now, our awful behavior has mutated into something monstrous. Think about what makes a monster for a second. It’s a matter of scale. Normal sized mosquito? Not scary. 6-foot tall dude? Yawn. Multiply their size ten fold and you are fucking dead of a heart attack because the world is filled with Cthulhus fighting ogres. That’s a pretty good analogy for what’s going on over at , your new favorite blog for placenta pics, mommy talk, parents who write in the voice of their newborns on their very own Facebook pages and ripping your eyes out in shame.
I emailed B., the 28-year-old woman from Brooklyn (no shit?) who runs the blog to see what’s wrong with people.
STREET CARNAGE: Everyone is vapid and self involved on Facebook, why do you think people get so annoyed by parents in particular? Talking about what your brat kid did with his poo poo isn’t that much different than posting pics from the amazing loft party you got your tits out at last night, is it?
B.: Obviously everyone on Facebook sucks. I barely even use it anymore except to maintain because everyone sounds lame on Facebook (probably myself included). Even my best friends sound lame and it makes me secretly hate them.
But that said, I do believe oversharing parents are a particularly bad breed — if you don’t mind the pun — of Facebook user. Sometimes it’s because the person has “changed” since having a baby; other times I think the person was probably annoying to begin with, but having a baby made their personality 1000 times worse. For me, overshare is the key. I DO want to see my friend’s new baby and hear about her kid’s first steps. I DON’T want to hear about how her baby was constipated so she used her pinky to get him to poop. There’s a huge disparity there.
Everyone can relate to the basic idea behind the blog –- parents are insufferable –- but was there something that pushed you over the edge and you were like “Fuck it, this is on.”
Eh, nothing too dramatic. Really what happened was my friend, who’s a mom of two, started sending me screen caps of her annoying parent friends on Facebook just to vent and be like, “Check out this annoying girl I knew in college who’s always talking about her kids.” I had similarly annoying friends in my feed, so I figured it must be a universal trend and started the site.
I wanted a place to talk shit, laugh and generally commiserate about this happenstance, and people started reading the site pretty much immediately for the same reasons. But I’ve never had a friend who posted a picture of her baby’s diaper blow out. I just had annoying friends who updated every time their sick baby’s fever went up or down. I had no idea the kind of shit (literally) that existed out there until the submissions came rolling in.
Oh my god. That one with the parents posing in front of the, uh, what’s it called when you shoot radars at the fetus? That might be the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.
I’m hoping that catches on and becomes a trend. In the commentary, I outline the unlimited possibilities! It’s taking ultrasound memorabilia to the next level.
What are some of the most popular or most controversial posts you’ve done? What tends to really get people’s ire?
To check out some of the best-worst posts on the site, I recommend going to and that outline my favorites.
Everyone loves a term I coined called , which is when a parent hijacks your post to talk about their kid in an unrelated fashion. Those are always good. Then there are the posts, the posts, the posts about how being a stay-at-home-mom is a woman can have. The list goes on and on. Readers get pretty riled up about self-righteous parents who complain about .
Is it mostly people who are annoyed with parents who comment or parents who come to defend themselves, and tell you you are a miserable piece of shit?
I’m happy to say there’s a wide demographic reading the site. Men, women, parents, non-parents, people who identify with being child free, people who are infertile… it’s a mixed bag. The comments section can be a bit intense though. There are some parents in there, but there’s a strong contingent of child-free people who can get a little heated at times. I try to moderate without using much censorship, but I’ve been known to block trolls.
Like I said above, sometimes people come in to defend themselves and rant, but I’ve seen the opposite situation as well. Fortunately there are a lot of people out there with a sense of humor and several parents who have found themselves on the site just laughed it off which is great. I never call out a person by their full name, and the site isn’t about hating on specific people or parents in general. It’s about hating and mocking the culture of overshare.
A while back someone sent me a nasty email, so I . But I’ve barely gotten any hate mail which is a pleasant surprise.
Do you plan on having kids? You’re going to be a totally chill parent, right? Just like I will some day, and not like every single other person ever who thinks they want succumb to Parental Retardation Syndrome.
Oh, OF COURSE I’m going to be the coolest parent ever! I’m going to dress my kids like little miniature versions of me and give them super unique names and teach them to like awesome music JUST LIKE ME. Because I’m awesome!
Naww, to answer your question seriously, I do want to have kids. I just don’t want to be an asshole parent who pushes a double-wide stroller and acts like the world revolves around my precious angel.
Poop skating. Holeeeee shit. I think one of the main reasons I am not looking forward to having kids of my own is exactly this type of thing. That is not cute in the slightest. Ok, it’s a little cute, but I can’t smell through my computer.
Some people think the “poop” is actually pudding in that post. Which begs the question: What’s more fucked up, a mom who posts a picture of her kid dancing on his own shit or a mom who posts a staged picture of her kid dancing on pudding and then calling it shit for funsies?
What do you think all these kids 20 years from now are going to think about all these pictures of them taking a dump on the internet?
Well, that’s one of the big questions the site proposes. I think any rational person would probably not like it too much, but the parents who post the images have convinced themselves that the kids won’t mind or that it’s irrelevant if they will because they can’t do anything about it right now.
Another question that comes out of that is, would our parents have done this to us if digital photography and Facebook existed back in the day? I know my parents wouldn’t have taken pictures of my first poop in the potty and plastered it online, but maybe others would have.
How about all these allergies kids have now? That’s got to be either some sci-fi apocalypse plague shit in the early stages where we’re all gonna get to the point where we can’t process food anymore because of the space steroids we’ve been injecting into pigs and cows and shit, or else it’s completely made up because everyone wants to think their special little snowflakes too delicate to deal with all this brutish peanut butter. I feel like the kids with allergies thing is a pretty good metaphor for your site.
One of the most commented posts on the blog is about peanuts on a Continental flight. That’s a two-fold post. First, yeah, I tend to agree that some allergies have been born out of the “allergy fad.” But then beyond that, the mom is complaining that they’re going to serve peanuts on the flight when she easily could have pre-arranged for them to not do so, as stipulated on the airline website. So it’s like, “Hey, you people with your peanuts are going to KILL my poor baby!” but in reality if she’d bothered to make a quick call prior to the flight it wouldn’t have been an issue. Just typical “me, me, me” drama.
After I posted that submission I got a fair number of emails from people assuring me that you CAN die from peanut dust if your allergy is extreme enough, but I think that’s beside the point. The point is, why the fuck do so many kids have these allergies and are they even real? There have been a lot of articles published about how helicopter parents today are so scared of their kids getting sick, they shield them from basic things like playing outside and then the kid’s immune system isn’t as strong during development. But now we’re getting into some scientific shit, and I’m no scientist. I just report on what I observe.
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2 comments:
There should be an infertility test every time you log on to Facebook.
There should be a literacy test too.
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