Jane Caro: ‘Mummy bloggers’ are making money and it's just not right - Women's Agenda

Jane Caro: ‘Mummy bloggers’ are making money and it’s just not right

Apparently there are bloggers and then there are “mummy bloggers”. Just like there are doctors and “doctors’ wives”. It is very important that poor unsuspecting readers and voters (and possibly medical patients) know the difference, especially if they are men. Otherwise they run the very real risk of taking the content of such blogs seriously or, in the case of the doctors’ wives, the opinions of such citizens on their merits. If that happened they’d get infected with what the boys in my primary school playground used to call girl germs and their penises, which is where men keep their brains apparently, would fall off.

To avert such a national catastrophe — dropped penises being messy things that all those mummies and wives would have to roll up their sleeves and sweep up (see, we’re really doing you a favour, ladies) — sensible non-mummy commentators have been outing such girl germ carriers at every opportunity. There may even be a case for Nicola Roxon to pass legislation forcing mummy bloggers and doctors’ wives to be sold in plain packaging with graphic warnings about what can happen to unsuspecting men who get contaminated.

You see, and this may shock you, these mummy bloggers write about their lives and some of them attempt to make a little pin money doing so. Some people, usually other women, find what they have to say helpful and occasionally even amusing. Which is really weird because, as we all know, women have no sense of humour. Men keep that between their legs, as well, apparently.

Some female bloggers are not called mummy bloggers (just like some wives are not called doctors wives) because they don’t write about icky, girly things like bearing and bringing up children. They write about really super important things like budget surpluses and the latest poll results and whether Warney should be selected for the Aussie cricket team even though he is 43. They may or may not be mothers but – as all decent writers should – they keep such irrelevant private nonsense to themselves.

No one wants to stop the mummy bloggers from writing their fluffy little columns, it’s simply that the rest of us need to be warned on approach. After all, there’s no bloody point having a ghetto — even a pink one — if you don’t let people know that it’s there. Oh, and also come up with a few ways of keeping the people who are in the ghetto inside it. Some have suggested walls and barbed wire, but so far name calling seems to be doing the trick.

The wives who are not called “doctors’ wives” may or may not be married to doctors (just like the doctors’ wives who are called “doctors’ wives”, confusingly) but they are those good women who vote for the Liberal party like their husbands and believe in turning back the boats and that marriage should only be something that those with penises can do with those without them. Thereby, of course, turning them into mummies, but hopefully not the blogging kind.

The problematic “doctors’ wives” are women who live in leafy and therefore naturally conservative places like the North Shore or Toorak or the Eastern Suburbs and have rich hubbies but who pretentiously and foolishly insist on having opinions of their own. Some of the “doctors wives” may recently have turned into “mummy bloggers” so you can see how this whole uterus/vagina thing is spreading. By going public on the internet some fear there may be no containing the girl germ infections contact with their opinions can cause.

What is really causing concern among the self-appointed guardians of our media’s public health is that some of these mummy bloggers are starting to make some serious money. They are attracting women whose entire purpose in life, as anyone in advertising can tell you, is to shop. This used to work beautifully when the money women spent shopping went to the men who owned the shops and ran the factories that made the stuff mummy shoppers bought, but that’s not how it seems to be working anymore. Now these damned mummy bloggers are making some of that money and that’s just not right. Some of the men who used to make all the money out of mummy shoppers are feeling the pinch. And they’re feeling it in their trousers – not just their trouser pockets, where you’d expect them to, either.

I guess those mummy bloggers and doctors wives better start tuning up their dust pans, brooms and Hoovers, because I think I’m starting to hear the tinkling sound of penises falling off – which, as I said before, can get messy. Well, as usual, you’ve only got yourselves to blame, ladies.

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