I Read That with Kate Kennedy
Nora sits down with author, podcaster, pop culture critic and friend, Kate Kennedy of Be There in Five, to talk about the politics of being a parent online, why we’re so quick to dismiss the work of influencers and why you don’t need to buy a baby wipe warmer, no matter what the internet tells you.
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You can listen to Kate’s podcast, Be There in 5, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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The books featured in today’s episode are:
One in a Millenial by Kate Kennedy
Swipe up for More by Stephanie McNeal
Got a book recommendation? Send it our way by emailing us at terriblereadingclub@feelingsand.co.
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The episode transcript can be found here.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
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Hello there, this is Nora McInerny and you're listening to The Terrible Reading Club.
This month on Terrible Thanks for Asking we explored the topic of sharenting -- not just the ways the internet has normalized sharing your children online, but the ways the internet has made it possible for parents to build entire careers out of monetizing their kids' likenesses and lives on the internet.
We met with a dad who -- after building a huge audience on TikTok around his family and his children -- decided to stop sharing his kids online.
Grant Khanbalinov: This was like an epiphany, like two o'clock in the morning. And this thought came to like, what the hell am I doing? Like, why am I making videos of my kids? Why am I exposing my children on the internet? Why am I treating them like employees and not like children?
This past summer saw a whole slate of books about and adjacent to this topic. Momfluenced by Sara Petersen. Swipe up for More by Stephanie McNeal. Hey Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson which is about MLMs but...the venn diagram between influencing and MLMs is, at times, quite overlapped.
This episode, I'm sitting down with Kate Kennedy from Be There In Five, a pop culture podcast. Offline, she and I have talked deeply about these topics and about these books, because it's very simple to dismiss the topic or the women at the center of the topic, as frivolous, meaningless, stupid, evil...
And Kate and I are both observers of and semi-participants of the influencer world, even if neither of us would describe ourselves as influencers.
When Kate and I sat down to talk about these books and more, it's been over 5 years since I stopped sharing my kids online...and Kate is majorly pregnant.
This is our first episode of this kind, one where we aren't talking to the authors of the books, but we're having an extended conversation inspired by these books.
Nora McInerny: Kate, we are going to talk about. A topic that you and I have connected on, on and offline for a lot of years, and the topic is essentially parenting. The era of the internet that we sort of came of age came of parenting age alongside where the process of becoming a parent also becomes the performance of it, and in some ways the profession of it.
Kate Kennedy: You had kids before you understood. The immortality of the internet. So you are kind of an early adopter of trying to navigate your online identity as a parent. I'm eight months pregnant and I'm kind of doing it in the era where we know a lot more about the risks and it's a vastly different time than it was, you know, eight or so yearsago.
Nora McInerny: The oldest child that I gave birth to is 10 years old, freshly 10 years old, which meant in 2012. Pinterest is ruling our lives. Prior to Pinterest, I would not have had any expectations for a baby shower. I would not have had expectations for how I should pack for the hospital, or,
Kate Kennedy: I, would've never, ever made a coffee table out of a shipping crate.It was at dark time for a lot of us.
Nora McInerny: My children were never the center of my online world. And when I started sharing, there was no one watching except my friends and family anyways. And I truly remember saying out loud, like, what would the big deal be? I remember hearing Minosh Samot, who had a podcast called Note to Self about the internet, saying how she would never share her kids on the internet and.
Truly was like, what a buzzkill. What do you think? Why do you think your kids are so no one cares about if you put your kids on the internet? No one cares if I put my kids on the internet. I didn't know what I was talking about, or at least I didn't know what I didn't know.
We did not know as a collective what we didn't know. Although obviously I've just proven to you that some people have, you are going to have a baby in about five minutes.
have you thought about the line between what you share and what you don't? I.
Kate Kennedy: I think I'm going to have to gauge it as I get there. One of the fascinating things about pregnancy is like, I haven't met this guy yet . A lot of the influencers and bloggers I really like and respect, they like kind of start to stop showing them when they stop looking like generic babies and are little people and they can talk and, you're not putting their, your conversations, their meltdowns, their moments. , part of my job is, has been letting people in and they, people have been on this path to motherhood with me for over two years now.It's been a long road and you wanna share elements of your life and I absolutely wanna share elements of motherhood, but elements of parenting is where I, I'm a little bit more gray.
Nora McInerny: Oh, tell me more about that. That's really interesting.
Kate Kennedy: I'm kind of obsessed with how it took me a while to figure out if I even wanted kids much less once we started trying and, and a big part of my holdup was this conversation around, I don't remember life before like you'll never have sex again. Your relationship changes.
You'll never sleep again. It was this threshold I felt like I was crossing. That was a fundamental shift in identity. And I'm very interested in how women I'll notice the conversation shifts where you predominantly introduce yourself as wife and mother, who you are to other people.
And those can be really profound roles and I'm interested to see how I take that on. But I wanna talk about how I feel about my own identity moving into this role as a mother. And if it really is that big of a shift where
I would say something to somebody at a cocktail party like nothing, you'll realize nothing else matters. Because me, up until this point, I'm like, well, what if I want it to matter? Does my entire life. But a but a pregame to pop out a kid,
Nora McInerny: I feel like I'm just meeting all of them every single day. I'm like, wow, who knew you had this in you? Both of us, I feel are accidental, public, accidental, semi-public figures, accidental, semi influencers, you kind of can't help it If you make something that you care about that includes bits and pieces of you, people are going to ask what lipstick you're wearing.
People are going to ask what kind of stroller you're going to buy. People are going to ask where you got the garbage can behind you, even on a video where you're talking about. An ectopic pregnancy
Kate Kennedy: True.
Nora McInerny: and almost dying. People will be like, oh my God, girl. So sad to hear that. Where did you, where's your couch from?Link. And I think it's, the internet world that we live in is one where primarily women have carved out this space for themselves that allows them and other people to feel seen and heard and known and allows them to make an income. Some people make a very, very sizeable income on doing what women have kind of always been doing to and for each other. Comparison.
Kate Kennedy: Mm-hmm.
Nora McInerny: And genuine friendship, genuine connection, and genuine recommendation.
Kate Kennedy: I think with the when it comes to motherhood and kids and kids stuff, I think that, There's something quite special about the internet because those conversations can be very touchy interpersonally with people in your life. I've found throughout this process, there are endless things I want to know more about that are conversations I don't know necessarily wanna engage in with people I know.
And there are kind of is a benefit to strangers providing their one-sided recommendations where we're not really in conversation. We don't have to exchange hot takes or even, you know, experiencing pregnancy loss. Like a lot of times there's a lot of secrecy around these things where people in your life don't know and you like need to share in a moment with somebody.
You can find people online who have talked about it and feel less alone. So it's kind of this thing that I always feel two ways about, like as a clueless soon to be mother. I benefit so much from the women on the internet sharing their lives and experiences, but I also am like, holy consumerism, do I really need a wipes warmer?
Nora McInerny: I think the sooner a baby learns that life is full of cold butt wipes, the better. I drew the line there myself. That is the boomer inside me. I was like, oh, no, absolutely. You kidding me? Are you kidding me? Honestly, the best thing I ever did was I was just exhausted one day and I pulled a bottle of breast milk out of the fridge, threw a nipple on it and gave it to Ralph, and he drank it down cold, a refreshing glass of milk. I didn't warm it, and I was like, if he'll drink cold milk, I'll give him cold milk.
Kate Kennedy: I was interviewing Sarah from Mom Influenza. I was doing an intro and I compared it to, Going back to school shopping with my mom and she like leaves me in the aisle to myself. And I have a list and it's like number two, pencils, ballpoint pens, college ruled paper wide ruled paper. And I don't know why I can't use a number one pencil or a non ballpoint pen or a college ruled, you know, loose leaf. I'm just following the direction so precisely to combat my own cluelessness. And I see the vulnerability there too, and how I'm being baited left and right by people making commission. And you know, companies that, cuz first time mothers are so lucrative. It, an interesting mixture of feelings.
Nora McInerny: What were some of the first. Mommy influencers or mom influencers or influencers who then became moms that you were really into?
Kate Kennedy: I was into what they used to refer to back in the day as the blogger, knackle Mormon bloggers that were my age. So in the early 2010s, they were in their early twenties. They were already married, they had FU new construction. They had kids and husbands and income in a way that seemed to defy all other millennial economic situations and milestone pacing.
And I was fascinated by them because I was quite literally a decade away from even wanting kids. And here they were 21 years old, swimmingly bringing them into the world. And those women for me were like, Had aspirational. It was kinda a voyeuristic thing because I didn't relate to them and I don't know that it impacted me that profoundly other than I found it very entertaining to think that I, a recent college grad who was just trying to get by building Pinterest drift, would coffee tables that like I, I, you know, to be ready to have a kid much less buy a house. I was fascinated by
Nora McInerny: That was the era when I was mostly concerned with did I need a bar cart? I was being told I really needed a bar cart. I wasn't thinking about babies either. I, wasn't thinking about babies, but I, was observing people and reaching those milestones at an earlier age than me.
And for me also, it was just fascinating to look at another woman's life who is so, so different than mine and have the simultaneous feeling of there are parts of that that maybe I do want, and maybe even parts of it that I envy. Right. I live in a third floor walk-up apartment. It does have a cloth foot tub that is filled with centipedes.
It does have. Beautiful built-ins that smell like the cigarette smoke of the decades of humans who have lived here before. I have a dream job. I fall asleep every night with panic attacks and by fall asleep, I mean, my body gives up at about three in the morning and I wake up at six and go back to work and do it all over again.
And to see someone my age or younger looking, so put together and peaceful. And with all of the trappings of official adulthood in quotation marks, a spouse, a house, a beautiful world, a beaut furniture that they didn't find on the street or make out of a reclaimed palette was A bar cart with no booze on it whatsoever. Right. And to see all of that, It was oddly soothing in a way. Like, oh, that's a world that's out there.
Kate Kennedy: It's wishful fulfillment of, in my best case scenario that in my head was like love marriage baby carriage pipeline looked like it was that simple, that straightforward, that beautiful, that void of, of tension and difficulty. And it was maybe peaceful at a point to see that that existed prior to going through things that would prove to me that is not realistic.
And I guess my question for you, since I haven't gone through this transition, did you, did you hit a point where that went from entertaining and aspirational to irritating and misleading when you entered that phase of your life?
Nora McInerny: I would say I stepped away from any observation of the blogger, knackle, right? Love tza, all of that I did not follow those people onto Instagram. When I became a mother, and that is because of the bizarre extenuating circumstances surrounding my entry point into motherhood, which was husband dealing with stage four brain cancer, giving birth a few weeks after he has a second brain surgery, nursing to health myself, a child and an adult man, and just boiling in a pot of cortisol constantly.
I looked at the people in my life who were looking at those influencers, and that's kind of how it seeped into my consciousness, right, is I was still following people in my life who were putting together these beautiful baby showers who were. You know making these beautiful meals from Pinterest or sewing baby clothes for their baby, it affected me almost by osmosis.
And when I dipped back into it, when I started on Instagram, following some of the people who are mentioned in this book, I had also crossed that threshold into being considered in some ways an influencer, even though that is not a primary part of my identity or income in any way. I used to say I was an un influencer before people started saying, D influencer. I'm just not that aspirational. And
Kate Kennedy: But you, had a household.
Nora McInerny: Probably around when we blended our family, what would end up being my last child. And my feed was just filled with things that looked really easy. And really good. And Quartz kitchens. Marble kitchens. Kitchens. See, I didn't I pantries that were really a full kitchen. What's a butler's pantry? It has a whole other stove. Why would you have a whole other room? So you have a show kitchen and these other things and it was no longer Look what I did with my hands and how I made this little thing.
It's like influencing or mom bloggers or whatever used to be. I think it's gone through several iterations from the very beginning with like Deuce or Jenny Lawson.Or these people who are truly just journaling, writing. They were doing online memoir, if you ask me.
They really were. And into, oh, I did these DIYs and then into this. The people who are really, really successful at this. Are a brand and they are their own director, producer, and star of their own reality series. That is going constantly. And I'm not saying that there isn't authenticity to it, because I think as a person, of course there is.
I despise the personal brand narrative for so many reasons, and one is that people can't be brands. You worked in a vague marketing job like I did. It's a collection of fonts and colors and rules designed to try to personify Heinz ketchup, which, sorry bud. Have a personality. People are, people do contain multitudes, even the ones who look so beautiful and so perfect. I really, really had a realization. The thing is, I always feel conflicted. From the moment I started to feel true, like resistance or even anger about it, I also felt a lot of conflict around that feeling too, because it also felt like that frustration or the ways that these people were being criticized, even by me in my own head, were not kind of commensurate with, you know, the punishment wasn't really fitting the crime.
There are companies who, who overturned entire trains full of toxic chemicals in Ohio who don't have pages and pages of internet forums dedicated to them the way some of these women do. And it felt difficult to me to. To kind of hold all of those multitudes in my head that these things can be not helpful for me, but helpful to other people.
Kate Kennedy: Did you happen to see have you watched the Bear Season two yet? There's just an interesting episode that in season two that shows kind of a toxic family dynamic that centers on a woman feeling so much pressure to make something beautiful and perfect for her family. She ruins it by having such a rigid idea of what it should be, what it should look like, and wanting to control how people react to it.
And it kind of reminded me of what you were saying, how this trickles down and you kind of pick up through osmosis that you want things to be beautiful to look a certain way. And that when you execute against that and put in, put in all this labor and then like you have children who don't, they play with the cardboard box.
They're not acknowledging it. Maybe your spouse isn't acknowledging it. If you put in a comparable amount of effort to a lot of these influencers, two things like parties, even today to day, like meals too. During the pandemic, I had a real thing for moms who pack really cutesy lunchboxes where they cut out the sandwiches with like star cookie cutters.
And I always wonder, are you. Does this fill your cup enough that it's okay that you're not getting anything back? Because I think about all the things my parents did for me, and I just didn't, I think about this at the holidays a lot. I, I loved the holidays. It was filled with magic, you know, who was producing that magic?
My parents thankless. , I think what happened over the mid to late 2010s, especially over the pandemic, is we became a little more transparent about help, about childcare, about who was behind the scenes of these beautiful depictions of motherhood. I don't have children yet. I can't keep my home uncluttered for the life of me. Most people don't have a second kitchen to get messy. So their first kitchen looks pristine and it makes you feel less crazy when you know the resources that goes into playing up this personal brand,
Nora McInerny: Why do you think the word influencer feels like a pejorative?
Kate Kennedy: Hmm. That's a good
Nora McInerny: Because if I called you an influencer, how would you feel?
Kate Kennedy: It's a word I rejected for so long, but now, it doesn't trigger my fight or flight the way it once did when I thought it meant I sold tummy tees. It still comes with a stigma of like, people won't value or take my work seriously
Nora McInerny: Why do you think that is?
Kate Kennedy: It looks very self-indulgent to share your life as a normal person on the internet and. Making good money when people started to make good money as an influencer. It's not a trade that you really have to like necessarily train for, go to school for, get a degree for it honestly was mostly women and mostly selling stuff. I just think people trivialized it not only for the categories in which we were participating, a lot of fashion, beauty, lifestyle, home, things that women are criticized for liking and sharing. People love for people not to be who they say they are. It's almost like the obsession with scammers. Like it, it was, I think people want there to be something nefarious going on behind the scenes of this person that just seems to be shamelessly, shamelessly sharing their life online.
And influencers just kind of get categorized as these very self-absorbed people. It's not always fair, and I think it's gotten better but I just think it's a weird parasocial relationship where people let you in, you get intrigued, but if they let you down, it's a long way to fall and you're even harsher on them,
Nora McInerny: There's that phenomenon where when a woman enters a previously male dominated space, where when women start to. Show up in those spaces. When women start to become doctors, when women start to become engineers, the pay goes down, the average pay goes down. To me, this influencer space, mommy or otherwise is women.
Stepping into what? In the early to mid two thousands, we called the guru space where people like Tim Ferriss, or name another guy who was vaguely tech adjacent, were writing books on how to make money while you sleep. And they were talking about affiliate marketing and they were talking about how to get people who follow you to buy into an idea and then buy things.
And they were considered geniuses. And when a woman in Utah, or a woman in central Ohio does it, she's somehow not to be trusted. There is something nefarious about that, and there's also something that is just inherently yeah, untrustworthy, I would say about it for reasons that feel gendered, even though I cannot prove that they are. That connection is so clear and I don't know if anyone else is seeing it or if I'm making it up.
Kate Kennedy: The money thing is such a good point because I don't actually think the hatred and snark toward influencers really even ramped up until they were monetizing their platforms and then people felt like there was something dishonest about making money. I talk about this on my podcast a lot cuz it incenses me how it's like you approving of somebody's work doesn't validate it. You engaging with? It does.
If you're watching people's stories, if you're reading their posts, if you're looking at their images, your eyeballs are what's being monetized and you're validating that that is a channel that they should be able to make money. Because if you participate in television, radio, online, anything you consume for free is monetized by ad dollars or subscription fees.
And influencing is no different, but it's treated like these people misleading and, and swindling, and they have this agenda to just make money. Because their platforms have value and you're contributing to that value. And that's a connection. I don't feel like people are always making, when they criticize people for doing brand deals or, or swipe ups.
Nora McInerny: If I told, any stranger on the street, there's this industry that in the span of a few years has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Right. And it has decentralized advertising. It has decentralized you know, sales and marketing.
They would say, oh my God, that's incredible. And if I said it's called influencing, they'd be like, oh God, come on. Right. But in my vague marketing job, I was in, not in charge of, but something that I participated in was leveraging the unpaid labor of. I mean, some men, but mostly women. We could see the value in having a person who was not an editor at Vogue talk about this product, post about this product, link to this product, share a picture of this product, and we very rarely, if ever had budget to pay them to do it. It's crazy.
Kate Kennedy: Meanwhile you see people be like, can you believe, you know, Soandso charges one, two grand for this. And it's like, oh my gosh. Do you have any idea what it costs to hire an agency, to storyboard, to come up with a concept then to hire a crew to produce a commercial? I think brand partnerships, I don't even do them because I find them to be so high labor and I can't charge as much as I want to because my following's not as big.
But even those are completely out of whack to look at size of following and exposures as the way you price it and not labor. Because the amount of money these companies are saving by hiring influencers to produce the creative is so wild to me. I think we both from our vague marketing backgrounds, both like see the issues with it and also completely think it's. A justifiable way to make money because like why? I actually do think a lot of people are pretty discerning about brand partnerships. I mean, a lot aren't, but many are. And I trust some of the people I've followed for years. More than like Jennifer Aniston telling me she has dry eyes. I don't know that she does.
Nora McInerny: love Jennifer Aniston. I think she's the most beautiful creature. I love her hair. I love her skin. I love like the way her mouth moves when she talks. I don't think she uses Aveeno.
Kate Kennedy: I don't either.
Nora McInerny: You know, who does use Aveeno? This, this sensitive girl.
There are two books around this topic that we both read that you've actually interviewed the authors for on your podcast. And they're both books that I think, one, I'm actually surprised they didn't do better. I'm surprised that they were not like kind of instant bestsellers.
And I have this suspicion that it's because people think they know all there is to know about this topic. Including myself. Including myself. And the first one is called mom. Fluent inside the maddening picture. Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture by Sarah Peterson. This book is, So dense. It's so dense. I'm gonna count the actual pages of citations.
Kate Kennedy: Reading it make you feel like you should be more researched backed in your books? Cause it made me feel like I should be in mine. I just give my sweeping opinions with very little foundation.
Nora McInerny: I did find this book to be very dense, very incredibly researched, and I really did appreciate the, what felt like a very academic lens to a derided, easily dismissed multi-billion dollar industry.
Kate Kennedy: I really love the historical context of consumerism and shopability. Can I read you a quote that I pulled from it the insatiable need to believe there's an easier, more comfortable way to inhabit the impossibly fraught role of mother in a culture that demands server two with a smile.
We're all bound by the federers of capitalism and patriarchy, so shouldn't we at least be able to access small hits of dopamine from buying stuff to make our experience of motherhood or to trick us into believing our, our experiences of mother motherhood will be better? And I thought that was such an interesting way to capture the nuance of like, there's so many reasons, like women be shopping, if you will, from how we were women were encouraged to wage the Cold War by.
Shopping for American goods after being kicked out of the workforce that they were brought into during the war. Then when everyone came back, their spots were no longer there, and so they were, in their homes. That's when we were being advertised to about soap with the soap opera thing that wasn't taken seriously because it was largely made by and for women.
So we were being sold to encouraged to buy American products. Like a lot of the, the way women engage with mass culture and consumerism are a product of this bigger sociopolitical agenda that very much is not inherent to our being, but was very much, you know, to kind of corner many to be clear, you know, it was most, I think it was mostly like white suburban women into being this kind of role.
And there's so much historical context to it that I found really fascinating that Are things women are, are still ridiculed for and now there's like a frivolity associated with women still pushing those products on the internet. And meanwhile all of that can be true and it can be from kind of oppressive forces.
But I also do like the dopamine hit and I do like to shop and I do like to live under the delusion that maybe my anxiety toward motherhood will be cured if I do buy this wipes warmer.
Nora McInerny: What you really actually need is a theme for the nursery that's both relaxing for you and stimulating for your baby. And the only way to do that is with an organic mattress, organic sheets, and and a series of of progressively cuter baby onesies all designed to make your child more intelligent. I wanna go back to what you were saying about the historical context of it too.
It's very hard to tell what is our inherent nature and the ways that we were socialized. And it does feel inherently a part of that communal aspect of motherhood, the way that we used to live in communities and we used to help raise each other's children and it was normal for your mom to live with you and help you after you gave birth
we are sort of shattered into this nuclear family, and they're still a part of us as women and mothers who do want to help each other, who do look to each other for advice. And after women are sort of booted out of the workforce that they had to enter in order to keep our economy going. Tupperware's invented and who can sell it right?
Can't be in a store. It can't be in a store. It has to be a woman who can sell, who can sell Mary Kay Cosmetics, right? It's women going to each other's homes. And in a lot of ways, that is the monetization of our relationships.
A natural extension of them. And in some ways, the influencer approach does feel very similar to an mlm.
Kate Kennedy: It's kind of the leveraging of a personal relationship to subtly sell you something. And even though on the internet it is parasocial, I do think part of the issue with influencers is feeling like you know them and being let in, in a way that celebrities simply don't let you in.
I think that MLMs and pyramid schemes are so closely aligned with American values and the way we view, pull up by your bootstraps entrepreneurship. Prosperity gospel. The harder you work, the more money you make. Like if you really look at anything we're doing, it feels like it mirrors an MLM or a pyramid scheme because it's basically like the internet allows you to showcase best case scenarios.
And then even if you're not directly telling somebody else to be an influencer or an in influe or an influencer marketer, you see that they create their own hours. They're home with their kids, they're making good money. You see how their life is progressing through status symbols.
Nora McInerny: Part of my like inner conflict about being critical of this as an industry is , knowing people who are legitimate influencers. That is their job title. That is what they do all day, every day. And also through these books, how much work it is, how much work it is to actually do this and do it well.
As I mentioned, what teams of people do at an ad agency or at a publication on your own to trend forecast, to look for, products that you think your audience would really like or to buy things and try them out to, put the right link in the right place, put out the right message at the right time.
It's a lot of actual work that in any other context. I would not be critical of the person doing it or how they were doing it.
Kate Kennedy: I think the thing getting MLM e perhaps is the the, the trips and the, I feel like, you know, whether it's revolve or tart or Amazon or whatever these brands, the, the problem I do see happening that I don't think is directly the influencer's fault, but the kind of bigger issue with capitalism and how the brands are capitalizing on influencers is incentivizing the people at the top, the top earners, the top sellers, the top sharers with the biggest audiences by providing them really glamorous circum circumstan circumstances, trips Bringing them together, kind of creating this FOMO marketing vibe.
And that to me is the most MLM e of all, because it reminds me of the trips people take who are the top sellers to like Cancun. It's kind of like we're rewarding people who hawk our product for, for free the most. Because a lot of affiliate market, you're not, you're not being paid unless you have a big network.
It's network marketing. So you're advertising for these brands for free. They're not paying you for your labor, but they're incentivizing you with things like these trips. And I think that is perhaps the most mlm e it's gotten for me. The other thing I want, I think about mom Fluence that I wanted to ask you about, she talks about the cult of domesticity, which was actually very helpful for me because I think that if I hadn't really done the work, I might not have pursued being a mother because I didn't consider myself domestic or maternal. And this book kind of debunks that, like that's to your point about nature verse nurture, that's not really a thing.
Nora McInerny: The performance of domesticity or being like naturally leaning towards that. I think the only reason that none of that sank in was not just that I'd sort of like retracted from that that area of the internet naturally when I was trying to become a mother. But because I was raised by a woman who was so different from other moms that I knew, I cannot say enough about the way my mom shaped my notion of what motherhood could be, which is that she was Herself, she was there.
Were certainly, there are things that every parenthood does it. Innately require sacrifice, but she did not sacrifice herself at the altar of parenting. This woman went on vacations with just her high school friends, not my dad. They took separate trips. My dad wanted to golf, my mom wanted to do whatever people who liked to travel do.
My mom always had a career. She had a career she liked, she had a career she was really good at. And she also had a career where and she reminded me of this. She would just, she was a freelancer and she would just not work for parts of the summer. She would just be home for six weeks. She was not concerned about other people were parenting, and maybe that is because it was the nineties. It was hard to see. But she certainly had friends who had really traditional. Situations and marriages. She certainly was an outlier in our grade school.
My mom never picked me up from school, definitely never on time. My mom didn't come to softball games that were at three 10 at Pearl Park. I biked there myself and I looked at the other moms like, what are you doing here?
She also really loved Martha Stewart made us beautiful meals, but she also just, you know, would wear one earring if she lost the other and she didn't shave her legs and you know, she'd just show up to something in an outfit covered with paint.
She let my brother cock a plastic turtle to the hood of her car, Just a, just a quirky weirdo, and I think that is the only reason why I did not lose myself to that idea, or why I felt like I could be whatever kind of mom I ended up being,
Kate Kennedy: I think about that, that being such an important example for you personally, and thinking about how that non-performance, like I would love to see people doing online. I really like watching examples of people who do things a bit unconventionally, but because I think the surveillance of women on the internet is so harsh, very few people are incentivized to be more honest, who do do things unconventionally.
Nora McInerny: I love the word that you use surveillance, because I don't know where the line between watching and surveilling happens, but you and I are both aware of the concept of a hate watch or a hate follow.
Kate Kennedy: of course. Can't look away. And I think that, that, that's what kind of what I was saying earlier with like your approval of someone's work doesn't make it valuable. Your engagement with it does hate them or love them. And I think some people really, I Double down and leverage that sort of dynamic.
I don't know if we're getting to Stephanie's book yet, but I think one of the people she featured, she had Bird is a great example of that where it's a person who very imperfectly, shared a lot of their moves on the internet and their engagement rose as a result. And it becomes not a thing where you're popular because you have a lot of supporters.
It's because your people wanna see what you're gonna do next. And that was a fascinating thing for me because I simply could not survive if I felt like the majority of people watching me were just really excited to see me mess up.
Nora McInerny: Think the interesting thing about these books together is that Sarah's book, mom, fluent reads like a heavily researched P of academia and Steph's book because she was a Buzzfeed journalist and because she just has that sort of snappy writing style and because the subtitle is inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers, it feels like a conversation and it feels like living in the experience.
Kate Kennedy: Kind of lifts the hood, and Stephanie's allows us to participate. Still mostly on the surface in a good way, like we're allowed in, , but Sarah's really contextualizes a lot of this behavior in a big way. And sometimes I'm in the mood for the context and sometimes I just want to enjoy skating along the surface.
Nora McInerny: And this is what it comes down to time. There's even one person watching. It becomes a performance, whether or not you want it to be. There can be authenticity in there, but the very act of being observed changes us.
When Steph goes to Shannon Byrd's house and Shannon starts to reveal the parts of herself that have been affected. By people hate watching her or hate following her, by people engaging with her content or observing her content and commenting on it elsewhere. You can see the ways that has affected her performance and affected her as a person. We understand that the actors we're seeing on TV are actors. We understand even that in reality tv. The Tom Sandoval that we see on Vanderpump Rules is an amped up version of Tom Sandoval, and yes, there are authentic parts of him on there, but he is aware of the game.
He is also compensated per episode. He also has a few layers in between himself and the production, right? Like an editor edits it and a producer produces it and it goes up on TV and a TLC show. We know we are seeing people. On hoarders or on whatever, you know, train wreck, show that we like to watch 90 Day Fiance. We know that we are seeing people not at their best and we're watching for that reason. But they do feel a lot more personal when it's the person putting themselves out there.
Kate Kennedy: I think anybody that's being put on a platform by like a production company who has a team is just going to have a little bit more of a buffer established that separates them from the audience. But there's so little separation from these influencers. And I think even Steph was like, it's crazy. You can just go to their houses.
It's pretty clear where a lot of these people live. You know where they are, what they're doing. There's just not a lot of buffer there. And yeah, Shannon's life, it, it was an interesting dichotomy of, of it was very clear how affected she has been by the feedback she's gotten from people on the internet while also maintaining this idea of that she doesn't really care.
Nora McInerny: It's like if you don't really care, you won't react to it or you won't play into it. And I also think that reading that what I thought too was well, you might as well give them something to talk about if they're gonna do it anyways. Like I could understand that kind of defiance. But what's interesting to me is that we have no longitudinal study and how this will affect us as. People who engage in this, in on whatever level. We know that social media is, you know, in general, bad for people, bad for kids, bad for ourselves, and yet the box has been opened.
We're not going to be able to shut it. This feels like just kind of a way that people live and operate in the world now, and we don't know in 20 years, like we're 20 years into this era. By the way, like in 2003 people weren't Pinteresting but they were blogging, right? A lot of these people like have evaporated from this industry entirely, but like we also don't know how will it, how it will affect the kids who are involved in it.
Because even if they are. You know, compensated in some way, as I think all parents claim that they're compensating their children for this work. These kids' lives are on the internet. And for me it has always been since I kind of realized this, right? This is like my kid's real life. The line between your experience and their experience needs some delineation, actually.
Kate Kennedy: Right. When Stephanie was on my show, she said something interesting because she kind of has an in different view of Shing because while she thinks that privacy should be maintained and it's important, these conversations about consent and compensation and whatever are, are very important.
She also was kind of like, I don't think kids are gonna care as much as we think they're gonna care, because if everyone's on the internet, no one's on the internet.
And I was like, well, that's an interesting thing I hadn't thought of because like what? There was a part when she was talking to Shannon about like, are your kids, you know, embarrassed or whatever, that you're an influencer?
And she was like, literally every kid's parent is trying to be, or an influencer at their school. It's like viewing it from how the world operates now or how we grew up with that privacy and being able to consent and what we put online about ourselves versus like the reality of when it's, how it's changed and if it's saturated.
Nora McInerny: There's not a lot of parents at my kid's school who are like me and Ralph Googled himself. You already know this from reading Bad Vibes only, and he was horrified, but I think what will affect a kid more is Googling themselves and finding all of the hate forums about their parents. I think that'll be really rough.
Kate Kennedy: I have to pretend they don't exist.
Nora McInerny: To, your point, like if everyone's on the internet, no one's on the internet. I do think that privacy is going to be the next luxury, especially as we move into an, an increasingly just surveilled environment, period. There are robotic cars driving around my neighborhood constantly. They're covered in cameras that are constantly spinning, constantly filming. I think that being unsearchable is going to be the mark of the new 1%.
Kate Kennedy: You know, I think we have similar feelings about this. I feel very aggressively a toward like frustrated and angry and violated by people that think it's appropriate to film strangers without their consent and make talks about it at like airports. That's the society I'm worried about for us. And kids included. It's nuts how anyone can go viral posting anything, and you could be in the background and just not know it.
Nora McInerny: Your kid could be having a fit and someone could tape it and put it on TikTok and now your kid is out there. Or I think on like the smaller levels of how. Only some people like write about their kids on the internet or share them on the internet or post their outfits.
Like the fact that now that's just kind of regular human behavior is so interesting and strange to me because the conversation happening in these books is people who decided to make it their career.
Kate Kennedy: Mm-hmm.
Nora McInerny: Decided to do these things and create this brand around who they are. But a lot of these behaviors are things that are things that a lot of people do.
So you'll see someone on TikTok who has five followers, put out a video of their child, doing something that is embarrassing because they just thought it was so funny and that it has millions of views, it has more views than, an average television show.
It has more views than I would say, like some news programs have. Right? It reaches this kind of level of ubiquity and it's is attached to this kid forever, and maybe it won't and maybe it will. And that will be another book that we talk about in 20 years.
Kate Kennedy: We were already seeing it go either way. There are kids that are coming out and saying, They're kind essentially strange from their parents who were, you know, YouTube vloggers that who felt they could not meaningfully consent at the age when they were on screen. But then there are people like Brooklyn and Bailey, who no joke, call themselves second generation YouTubers who were thriving.
So it's really going to depend on the experience and I think, we'll see it play out in real time. And I think we just have to be comfortable with living with the consequences of whatever we decide to do based on the zeitgeist we're in. And you've given me a lot to think about with what I do with Rene May here they're poor.
Nora McInerny: Both of these books include in various ways, the darker side of being an influencer, which is what we were discussing, which is like the, the hate forums, which is kind of like the snark, and it feels like just an extension of another human trait, right.
Which is gossip, right? Then there are parts of it that feel so extreme and. The parts of it that I think were the most nauseating in both cases are just this sense that if you do something publicly, that you are consenting to this kind of abuse, and that if you don't like it, you shouldn't look at it.
I can see that rationale in some ways, right? Well, if you really want to be private, then don't put your stuff on the internet. And I also think that as a culture, as just people, I do think that the baseline for existence shouldn't be, I. Well, if you don't want something bad to happen, don't leave your house. There's a certain kind of, she's asking for an energy to it that I just really don't love. And again, if there are forums dedicated to dissecting, you know, every single interpersonal choice or tweet or video posted by any man I d I wanna know, I do wanna know. I will figure out Reddit to get there.
Kate Kennedy: I know that's like the hard part about it all. It's like I have so many opinions and hot takes, but I also recognize that the way we engage with and talk about female influencers is so disproportionate to how we talk about male influencers. The economic impact on these influencers that like mess up when it's a female is so different than like your Dave Portnoy of the
Nora McInerny: Yes. Oh yeah. That's a great take right there. Explain to people who Dave Portnoy is and
Kate Kennedy: the CEO of Barstool.
Nora McInerny: Mm-hmm.
Kate Kennedy: And he said, endless controversies that would've wiped me clean from the internet the first time. And there's just a level of I don't know, redemption and like that the severity just doesn't f and shame doesn't feel the same for a lot of these people that mess up, whether it's David Dorich or whoever.
And that does frustrate me, but at the same time, like I don't really engage with most male influencers nor care about what they're doing because I wanna follow female once, but I, the she's asking for it energy is, is something I find really frustrating, especially because what I don't think people get too is that there are a lot of people with a lot of followers that, that, I can see getting a level of hate when at a level of income and at a level of having a team and people take care of stuff
Fame is different than being an influencer, and I do think that does come along with fame in a way that the benefits kind of outweigh the costs, but most influencers aren't really making enough and don't have enough of a buffer between them and their hate followers. For them not to be profoundly hurt and impacted by those opinions.
And that kind of like makes it not feel worth it. Even I've complained about pregnancy and people have been like, well, you wanted to have kids. We feel like we shouldn't let people complain or express their experience or tension with something if they theoretically chose it. And I just think that's an unrealistic expectation we have for people. Cuz you don't know what it's like until you get
Nora McInerny: Are there other books that you think are kind of related to this conversation?
Kate Kennedy: I interviewed another person per the MLM of it all this spring named Emily Lynn Paulson, who was like a very high up at an mlm. And she explores kind of the intersection of MLMs and cults and, and religion and capitalism and influencers. And it kind of connects all this in a, I would say that it's like a perfect third piece of this where she's an example of somebody that did the more nefarious thing and very, very openly talks about the ways she was manipulated and manipulated people. And I think there's something very healthy and interesting about somebody exploring how they're both victims and perpetrators of these systems that women get put in. And her book's called, Hey, hun.
Nora McInerny: There's so many sort of threads and legs that this all spins off from, but it does all come back to American values and we are self-sufficient and we are, inspiring and we are the power of positive thinking.
The center of the Venn diagram of all of these is. Vulnerable people, oftentimes mothers who grow up in a society that tells them they're empowered, but in reality they're barely supported. And there are endless ways you can be exploited by influencers, by brands, by capitalism, by whatever.
Kate Kennedy: And I think that we all find ourselves in that vulnerable position no matter what, and have fallen victim to somebody making something look a lot rosier than it really is in, in feeling the tension of the disconnect from how our lives don't resemble that.
Nora McInerny: I also think that when we are living in such a troubled era as we do, when things feel so far out of our control, And blaming capitalism is like blaming the moon for changing the tides, right? I feel like it is very human to focus your energy on in effigy a person who can kind of represent this situation,represent this culture, represent some of the ills of it, and to somewhat on various levels, proportionately punish them for participating in a game that we are all playing and cannot opt out of.
We cannot hand capitalism a note and be like, I'm on my period. I can't actually.
But wouldn't we love to!
That was Kate Kennedy from the podcast Be There In Five. Kate's book -- an essay collection called One in A Millennial is out next year, and we'll link that in our show notes along with the books we discussed today:
Momfluenced by Sara Petersen, Swipe up for More by Stephanie McNeal, and the book Kate mentioned -- Hey Hun! by emily lynn Paulson.
You can find all our book recommendations at our Bookshop, also linked in the description, and sign up for our emails for bookish things like giveaways of the books we talked about today!
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