Spotlight: Jo Piazza
You may know and love Jo Piazza from one of her best-selling books, but have you heard about her new podcast, “Under the Influence”? It focuses on the “Mom Internet,” where Mommy Influencers are selling the vision of a perfect life, for a price.
Jo unpacks the phenomenon both as a journalist, and a mom herself, and even tries her hand at becoming a Mom-stagrammer. We’ve been obsessively listening each week and were excited to catch up with Jo to discuss Mom culture, influencers, and the ‘lifestyle porn’ of Instagram.
In case you aren't already familiar with her work, Jo Piazza is an award-winning journalist and a digital strategist. She is the creator of the acclaimed podcast Committed, and the author of seven critically acclaimed books, both fiction and non-fiction.
A former editor and columnist with Yahoo, Current TV and the New York Daily News, her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York magazine, Glamour, Elle, Time, Marie Claire, the Daily Beast, and Slate. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a master’s in religious studies from New York University.
She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Nick, and their two children.
In the first episode of the podcast, you describe laying in bed at night scrolling through Instagram, which is how you stumbled on the world of mom influencers. Why do you think mom influencers are so addictive?
Mom influencers are so addictive for a lot of reasons. One, they’re addictive because the app makes them addictive. Instagram has been programmed to keep us coming back. We know that. But in terms of moms, I think they’re addictive because motherhood is one of the few times in our life when our identity is blown the f*ck up. I had no idea how to be a mother or who I was as a mother, and I think we are hungry to see how other women are doing it. Mom influencers let us peek into their lives and be voyeurs. I also think their perfection is addictive because it shows us a way to be a mother that is less messy than our reality.
One of the guests on your first episode described escaping into the world of lifestyle Instagram as an escape akin to pornography. Do you think this is a fair comparison?
I don’t think it’s an unfair comparison in terms of talking about what we choose to focus our attention on. I also think the comparison is interesting in terms of the performative aspects of mom influencing.
Part of the allure of Influencers is that they provide aspirational content - a glimpse into the life that could be. What blew us away is the bomb you drop in the first episode: that ground zero of the mom influencer community in the U.S. is the Mormon community in Utah. How did Mormon moms become the ideal for mom influencer culture?
Mormon women have long been encouraged to document their lives as mothers. Mom blogging is a natural extension of that. They are also in a community that puts motherhood and the domestic arts on a pedestal so they have a lot of content at their disposal. They also typically have a lot of kids, which also feeds the beast for content. Beyond that, they are hard workers who take influencing very seriously as a job.
In one of our favorite episodes so far, you talk about how from a business perspective, it’s “f*cking brilliant to get paid off the unpaid labor of women.” Unpack that more for us. What do you mean?
Being a working mom is so hard, and it has never been respected enough in our society. Influencers are able to work while raising their children by taking pictures of the things they would be doing anyway as a mom and capitalizing on that... the things women have been doing for centuries, and not getting paid. I don’t think the idea of influencing would be so attractive if other industries made it easier to be a mother, but I haven’t found one yet.
At one point you decide to try your own hand at becoming an influencer - you say, ‘Can I get paid to become a more perfect mother?’ How has the perception of what it means to be a perfect mother changed since the 1950s? Or has it?
I think women are doing more work than they did in the fifties. In the fifties, it was totally ok to plunk your kid in a crib and let them entertain themselves while you talked to a friend or made dinner. Now we roll around on the goddamn floor with them all the time. I think the idea of the perfect mother has also changed to mean we have to do everything all the time. We have to be responsible for every aspect of our child’s development while doing our own self-care and looking a certain way and being a good spouse and good friend and having a purposeful career. It’s exhausting.
You devote a whole episode to the idea of authenticity, exposing the fantasy for exactly what it is: a curated (well-lit) version of reality. How do you think being bombarded by these images of unattainable motherhood impacts women?
I think it makes us feel like shit, but only if we let it. One thing I realized reporting this podcast is that we have agency to look at these images or not. If an account makes us feel bad, don’t follow. It’s that simple. I do think that seeing such perfect images can sting but I also know that I don’t have to look at them and these women are just trying to forge a career for themselves.
You've explored this world of mom influencers during a global pandemic that has pushed numerous working mothers out of the workforce and has challenged our assumptions that women have made significant advancements in our society. Do you ever think this world of influencing could be a force for advancing women moving forward?
Absolutely. Influencing is an example of women taking control over advertising and making some of the money. I do think this kind of content will only grow to be more powerful.
Did any of what you learned in making this podcast surprise you?
What surprised me the most is just how hard these influencers work. They are doing a job. They are essentially controlling their own mini media empires and we have to give them credit for that. I was also surprised by how dismissive the media is of this world generally and I think that has a lot to do with how dismissive the media often is of women and mothers.
For more from Jo Piazza, listen to her podcast, Under The Influence, or purchase a copy of her latest book, We Are Not Like Them. Jo wrote this novel alongside Christine Pride, telling a story from alternating perspectives about two lifelong friends whose lives are jolted by a tragic event, detailing the powerful experiences that occur at the intersection of race and friendship.