Then different news outlets picked it up. Huffington Post picked up my “double standards of parenting” comic, which became by far the most shared of any of the content I made. From there it really grew quickly but really went viral in January, and then it really went berserk. So last July I thought I’d make a separate feed for it and create a community of moms. After doing it for about a year it had taken on a whole mind of its own, but it was still living on my personal feed and it felt kind of strange. It was a creative outlet during the challenging thing of the pandemic - I’d put myself in the office, close the door, and make a little cartoon. All throughout the pandemic, it became a little therapeutic thing I did to express my frustrations. So for about a year I was making them on my personal feed. I could see from the analytics that they were shared so much, and so widely. People were connecting over them in a way I’d never really connected with people online before. I just started making these little drawings that captured little moments, but I saw very quickly that response was very different from my other normal Instagram posts. It wasn’t like I started these comics with any purpose - it was just my personal feed. Mary Catherine: It started very organically. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.ĭoree: Why did you start Mom Life Comics? I spoke to Starr to hear about how she’s been faring in the wake of peach-gate, why she thinks this comic made people so angry, and what her husband really thinks about her comics. But that also seems, to me, to put the onus back on Starr, as the woman, to fix the problem, when instead what we should be trying to fix is our broken society that doesn’t support parents. Much of the criticism of Starr on Twitter seemed to be coming from people without kids who could not fathom that this would actually be the nature of a heterosexual marriage, and so Starr must hate her husband and be a miserable person, because why else would she choose to portray him in that way? And there seemed to be a certain amount of sexist schadenfreude, from both men and women, about the state of her marriage and why she hasn’t fixed it. I think it’s this dichotomy that many of Starr’s critics don’t actually want to wrestle with they want to believe that we have, as a society, moved past the heteronormative, traditional gender role breakdown, but the reality is we have not, and that holds true across the socioeconomic spectrum. (And yes, of course there are exceptions.) We make the doctor’s appointments, we plan the meals, we sign the kids up for aftercare, and the list goes on, and on, and on. Yes, AND BUT: I see it in my marriage I see it in the marriages of most other women I know. But perhaps it’s because she persistently highlights what is, still, a very real discrepancy between men and women in cis, heterosexual partnerships - mothers take more on when it comes to parenting - and she did it in such a digestible format (a comic that did the work of the countless books and articles that have been written on the subject, most of which it seems her critics have not read) that it went so viral. After all, it’s just a slightly different version of the discussions around the mental load that have been happening in the last few years. And yet, I was also confused why it went so viral, and why people seemed to respond so viscerally to it. Yes, Starr’s comics can sometimes feel a bit retrograde there’s a through-line of “husbands, AMIRITE?” running through a lot of them. I was horrified but also fascinated by the internet pile-on. Alfred Prufrock.” Many of them were, in a word, mean. There were many parodies, and there were way too many people who rewrote the words to “The Love Song of J. ) Andelman’s tweet quickly went viral, as people analyzed Starr’s marriage and her parenting via this comic and the others on her feed. (I published one of Starr’s comics, about moms feeling like they’re drowning, in the first issue of my newsletter. Andelman had found a comic by Mary Catherine Starr, the writer and illustrator behind on Instagram, whose feed often highlights the emotional and mental load of being a mom since launching last July, it’s gained nearly 225,000 followers.
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