MIA: 'My kids can call me mummy. Anyone else who uses it is being a dick'

 By MIA FREEDMAN

There are three people in the world who are allowed to call me “Mummy”. They are my children.

Anyone else using it to describe me is deliberately being a dick.

Using the term “mummy” as a patronising prefix to describe the things women read, write or say is becoming increasingly common. Mummy blogs, Mummy porn, Mummy wars…..they’re all condescending put-downs and it’s time we killed them off.

After all, why is there no Daddy anything?

Men just have porn. And blogs. And wars.

So why, when women write or read or debate does it need a dumb name?

Kate Eltham, CEO of the Queensland Women’s writer’s centre says:

“If you’re a male writer who blogs, then you’re a social commentator. If you’re a woman writer who blogs, you’re a “mummy blogger” (whether mother or not). And if you are a woman who writes about motherhood (whether in a blog or anywhere else), applying the term “mummy blogger” to what you do undermines all the significance of your artistic and intellectual contribution.

Doctor Karen Brooks, academic, columnist and author, agrees:

“The term ‘mummy blogger’ manages to keep these women on the margins of culture and forces them to be viewed as non-threatening to mainstream opinion makers. It erects boundaries and keeps them on the outside, as ‘mummies’ who gossip and play where the big boys and girls dare to tread.”

When I worked as a columnist for Australian media company Fairfax, I would sometimes attend dinners with other women in the organisation where we’d meet informally with senior female politicians and business leaders.

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard – who was then deputy opposition leader – was one of our guests, as were senior Coalition ministers such as Helen Coonan. Politicians (both male and female) are constantly having off-the-record, informal conversations with all sorts of people. They do it to talk and to listen – to gather information about how they and their party are perceived and to disseminate their own spin in a relaxed, off-the-record setting.

So why does everyone lose their shit when some women who write online – women who are self-made, self-published, self-employed entrepreneurs –  are invited to meet with the Prime Minister?

Why does the mainstream media insist on reporting it in such shocked, snide terms? Why is the term ‘Mummy Blogger’ always used so blatantly as a put-down?

This has happened three times now – twice last year and once this week – and the media coverage has been consistently incredulous that the Prime Minister would waste her time talking to Mummy Bloggers.

Politicians cop less flak for kissing babies or wearing hard hats than for reaching out to a bunch of smart women who come from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, who have families that come in all shapes and sizes and who write for large, like-minded audiences. Audiences they have built from zero, often without any formal tech or media training.