Shame Your Mother’s Body Hair Today

With the gift of laser hair removal!

"This Mother's Day, tell your mother her underarm hair is off-putting and unacceptable by paying to forcibly damage her hair follicles via a painful application of light and heat which, after six or so sessions, will prevent them from producing all that skin-protecting, pheromone-diffusing stuff in the first place!" Such is the subtext of a recent Mother's Day advertisement for laser hair removal from Laser Away. The actual text? "MOMS DESERVE LASER." (Ironically, that copy makes me want to rip the hair right out of my head.) 

I came across the ad in the Second Annual Fuck Mother's Day post from Sara Petersen's newsletter, In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. It reminded me of an interview I did with the Momfluenced author last year on how beauty ideals inform the concept of “the ideal mother.” Some of our discussion is excerpted below, and you can read the full thing here.

Happy Mother’s Day! I hope none of your loved ones suggest you celebrate by manipulating your physical form to better adhere to beauty norms!!

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Sara Petersen
In your research, have you seen many momfluencers hawking beauty and skincare products?  

Jessica DeFino (me)
Oh yeah. I think there's a very natural flow between motherhood and beauty. And I also think a lot of beauty influencers with huge followings are now at the age where they're becoming mothers. And so they've been able to transition a lot of their beauty and skincare content into motherhood content into beauty-and-skincare-as-a-mother content. So I do see a lot of flow and overlap between the two categories (motherhood and beauty), especially in the MLM space.

Sara Petersen
Oh my god, yes. The oils!

Jessica DeFino
Yeah, MLMS have always preyed on mothers and beauty is a huge, huge sector in the MLM industry.

Sara Petersen
Do any specific influencers come to mind?

Jessica DeFino
Not so much. I mean, I have been pretty much off of Instagram for about six months.

Sara Petersen
Holy shit.

Jessica DeFino
Yeah, and three months before that, I started weaning myself off. So I do kind of feel disconnected from current influencer culture right now, which I’m seeing as a sign of success for myself!

Sara Petersen
The dream. One thing that I've talked to a lot of moms about is how motherhood can be an identity eraser. I mean, almost as soon as the baby vacates your body, the nurses and healthcare providers start calling you “mom” versus your actual name. And I feel like the beauty industry has really latched onto this identity shift, and is really good at convincing mothers that if they buy this fun pink lipstick or if they buy this, you know, fucking $60 eye cream, they are reclaiming their identity, their individuality, their autonomy, their womanhood. And so yeah, I just find that messaging really problematic.

Jessica DeFino
I think it's hugely problematic. I think it really preys on women and mothers when their sense of identity is shaky. One thing I always hear from mothers especially is like, I don't feel like myself anymore. I don't look like myself anymore. And you want to go back. And my response to that is, you're not supposed to feel and look like yourself. You’re growing. The whole point of life is to continue evolving. And like yeah, sometimes those evolution points can be painful. And they're scary and they're weird because you don't know what's going on. But that's a sign that you are living your life. Because if everything is always the same, then something is not progressing. You're not learning, you're not growing, you're not evolving.

And I think it’s really dangerous to target women when they're at that sort of point of in-between stage, and tell them, you must revert back in order to be good. Reverting back is almost never going to be the best path forward for your own personal fulfillment. And I also think that this messaging is really dangerous because it props up beauty as this sort of radical alternative identity to motherhood. And it's really not. It's like one of the three default archetypes of woman. You are Mother, you are Wife, or you are Beauty Object. And deciding to feel less like a mother and more like a beauty object is not radical. You're just floating through these three societally conditioned archetypes that are not actually you or your identity.

Sara Petersen
Totally. And I think momfluencer culture in particular has done such a terrifyingly good job of marrying all three of those archetypal identities together. Like, you can have a kid but still be hot. And by hot, I mean conventionally or marketably attractive, which often also means thin and white and non-disabled.

Jessica DeFino
Yes, yes. And I don’t know if this is unique to mothers at all, but I think the reason that beauty marketing gets to us so much is because I think real beauty (not standardized or industrialized beauty) is an inherently spiritual concept that every human craves. Like, we want to see beauty all around us. We want to be immersed in beauty, we want to be part of the beauty, but not all of us feel like we belong in standardized, industrialized ideals of beauty, right? The longing for beauty is very pure, but we’re given very limited tools to access or express it.

Sara Petersen
And the beauty industry makes it easy for us to recognize beauty within ourselves if it looks a certain way. Like if I put on whatever fucking highlighter and I see that my face is subsequently glowy then I can sort of internally check a box and say, okay, this is beauty. I'm doing beauty right.

Jessica DeFino
I think it all comes back to this idea of goodness. Beauty has always been messaged as a moral imperative. An ethical ideal. Even in Disney films. The princess is always beautiful and has, you know, pale skin. And red lips and she’s thin. And then you have a villain like Ursula who is fat and “ugly.” And so from a very young age, we learn that beautiful is good and ugly is bad. And beautiful is this very narrow ideal and ugly is everything else. And I think that directly correlates to motherhood. Like, think of how much ethical, moral shit is tied up in what a good mother is and what a good mother does. So I think in both of these struggles, we just want to be good, and we’re given really bad models for what good is.

Sara Petersen
For Momfluenced, I did a bunch of research about the history of marketing to moms. And I wonder what you've come across in terms of how mothers specifically have been marketed to and how influencer marketing has just been super effective with moms in particular.

Jessica DeFino
I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is skincare. Because all of a sudden, as soon as you get pregnant, there's a whole bunch of very mainstream ingredients that you’re no longer supposed to use. Suddenly you've been restricted on what you can use. And just like anytime you're restricted, that naturally makes a human being want to overindulge, you know, to sort of replace that thing. So yeah, I think skincare is a really natural gateway into the whole beauty and motherhood realm.

Sara Petersen
Is there an inherent danger in chasing the dopamine rush of perusing a momfluencer’s feed and clicking “purchase now?” What’s wrong with chasing that momentary little blip of hope that this beauty balm or whatever is going to make my experience of motherhood somehow less shitty?

Jessica DeFino
It's so layered. Whatever you're hoping to get from the product, you will not get from the product. I think that most people would agree with that statement, which is why we keep buying the damn products. So it creates this cycle where like, you need to buy more products to get that dopamine rush because a prior product has let you down, or simply doesn’t work, or maybe it gave you a rash, or a new product came out that’s supposedly better. There’s always going to be something more. So if we don't interrupt that cycle within ourselves and within our minds, we're just setting ourselves up for future failure.

And then there’s the more widespread effect of what that constant cycle of consumerism does to the world. If you want to tie it back to motherhood, almost all beauty and skincare products contain palm oil or petrochemicals in some way. Mica and a lot of these ingredients are harvested by child labor all over the world. There's this very weird tension of wanting to take care of yourself and take care of your kids. But what about other people's children, who are being harmed by the process of harvesting these ingredients? And being harmed by the process of producing all of these plastic bottles? Or the effects of climate change, to which the beauty industry is a huge contributor.

Everyone deserves a little pick-me-up. Everyone deserves a little dopamine rush because life is fucking hard, but I just don't think all of the downstream effects of buying beauty products is a good way to get it. And in terms of wanting to feel beautiful or wanting to express ourselves, these larger concepts don't actually require products. But we've been trained by consumer culture to believe that they do. So when we buy ourselves something, we think we're doing something beautiful for ourselves in terms of like, empowering ourselves or believing it to be self-expression. And I think it all just causes more physical, psychological and environmental damage. We would be better off looking for dopamine hits and self expression and empowerment in concepts that don't require an external product. Maybe it’s art. Or writing, singing, gardening, getting your hands in the earth. There are so many ways to access beauty that don’t require products.

Sara Petersen
I do often wonder if the act of constantly pursuing (by way of purchasing) a better version of motherhood is a huge distraction from advocating for actual maternal rights and structural reforms for mothers.

Jessica DeFino
100%. I'm sure there is a big parallel here between motherhood and beauty culture, but I always say beauty culture starts with the idea that you are bad. Your skin is bad. You're not beautiful enough. You need something else. And this is compelling because a lot of people are walking around not feeling good about themselves. And so we say, I deserve to feel good and so I'm going to participate in this beauty standard that is actually like an oppressive thing, but it's the only way for me to feel better. And when we funnel our time into chasing that standard, we don’t have the energy to actually fight the oppressive beauty standard. We're actually perpetuating the oppressive beauty standard, right? You could use that same time and energy that you funnel into trying to become a physically impossible ideal of beauty, into changing that physically impossible ideal.

Sara Petersen
Totally. Instead of buying the eye cream to make you look less tired, you could advocate for all people to have access to postpartum doulas so you (and all the other exhausted new moms) can get some fucking sleep.