For those of us who don't wear Boden...
This half term we've been amusing ourselves by reading the increasingly nasty comments on an article in the Daily Mail (yes, we know we shouldn't be reading it, but, anyway). Janet Street Porter's entertaining and eloquent response to the 10th Birthday party invite she received from a certain mummy site, clue's in the title: This smug Mumsnet mafia won't get my vote, has had us equally appalled and amused since it's re-ignited the age-old war between (vocal) mothers and the rest of the world.
Let's start by getting the obvious out of the way. By putting 'Boden' as a dress code (irony ladies, is always lost in print) Mumsnet have publicly fallen head first into such a rabbit hole of snobbery, that it's like we've been whisked back to the 1950's, to a world were grammar school kids with cheap shoes are still frowned upon, however clever they are. And what nightmarish scenario might unfold should we all gather together marching through mummy forums dressed in clashing prints with a contrast edging. Seriously, someone call Sam Raimi.
But the thing that really stuck out like a sore mum in this debate is the highly irritating fact that women who have children are suposedly stuck between a rock (lumped together in mummy cliques or cliches) and a hard place (the pointy-fingered media). Does that happen with fathers (grrrr!). The comments on Janet's article have largely sprung from both the 'child-free-and-happy' brigade and the Mumsnet supporters. As one person rightly suggested, if you are child-free and happy, why are you wasting your time reading and commenting on articles about parenting. Something tells us you're not that happy - go and lounge around on a sofa and watch Deal or No Deal (you read the Daily Mail for Chrissakes!). If it were us we'd be jetting off to Vegas for a night or five on the town, or failing that sinking into our sofas to watch something brilliant by Almodovar. Well for a bit anyway.
So, if you're not in the mummy clique, and you're not a mummy-hater, where do you stand? Maybe you just stand with the rest of us, running around and trying to do everything you need doing, while usually not having enough time to bitch about people you don't know in the virtual world. Why is it so hard to believe that if we don't want to belong to one gang or another, in this case, the Mumsnetters, or the child-free-and-happy crew, that we don't have a say? We do, and let's hope we're the ones who are going to help decide the next General Election. Nobody should have to belong to a gang to have a voice, and no matter how well-intentioned Mumsnet is in it's urge to politicise it's members (and actually it's sort of a good idea isn't it?), having a herd mentality is never a good thing.
So round one goes to Janet SP, and it's back to the (Boden) drawing Board ladies. We'll be the ones watching from the sidelines (mildly amused, if we have the time of course).
Finally, we did sort of wonder. If Boden was the dress code for Mumsnetters. What would ours be - or is that just too horrible a picture to conjure up. What do you think?
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