Chappell Roan says that maternity is “hell”. She is right.

Being a mother in the United States is very difficult. But many of us would always like to claim that this is not the case. This was obvious after the counterposer of the recent comments from Chappell Roan on parenting on Calls his daddy.

On the podcast, Roan told the host Alex Cooper that most of his friends from his original state from the Missouri had already married and had children, and that she was not sure that she was interested in becoming a mother. “All my friends who have children are in hell,” Roan told Cooper. “In fact, I do not know anyone who is happy and who has children at this age … I have literally met anyone who is happy, whoever has light in the eyes, who slept.”

It is in theory not a controversial declaration. Roan is 27 years old, which means that most of his friends are probably about the same age and therefore have very young children. Multiple studies have indicated that it was the most stressful period of the lives of young mothers, the levels of satisfaction of women halved hastily from the moment when they give birth to their first children when they become more self -sufficient, about 8 or 9 years. (The levels of happiness are even lower for women who have several young children.) It is completely logical that Roan does not know young mothers who are happy, because statistically, most of the young mothers she knows probably do not know.

And even if I am sure that there are mothers who would dispute the definition of Roan’s declaration, as a mother of two, I do not know a single mother who would not agree with the knot. I do not remember the last time that I had a conversation with the mother of a child under 10 years old, where we did not talk about the little sleep that we were doing and how much we were completely stressed. Of course, there is a spectrum, and some mothers seem better equipped to deal with this stress than others. But stress is always present, because it is only the daily reality of the education of young children.

But mothers on the Internet were indignant by Roan’s comments. Conservative publication EVIE MAGAZINE Published an Instagram coil with legend: “Having children is a blessing, not a burden”, sewing Roan Coronarcha Appearance with images of beautiful young parents gambling with their babies in tropical places. Moms on Tiktok also crashed. “Does your child lock your eyes with you through the room and relax immediately because you know they are safe in your presence?” A creator asked for rhetorically, before placing a kiss on his baby’s down. Another said of Roan: “It’s funny because what she needs is a child to bring this happiness and bring this love to her heart.”

At a certain level, this is only the last episode of the secular debate between women with children and women without them, in which the two parties feel the need to prove who has made the best life choice. You see that all the time on the internet: when someone publishes a viral tiktok boasting of the way he refused to give up his plane seat with a little-me-only, or when someone tweets how irritated they are when small children try to caress their dog. The conversation invariably turns into a blood war between two sides trying to make an argument that no one really asked them to do at all.

But something is happening here. Recently, there was a cultural change in the recognition of the realities of maternity to papers. In the early 2000s and 2010s, there was nothing particularly subversive to go online and to proclaim that being mom is really difficult. In fact, it was almost up to the course among the liberals and the conservatives. The climb of the mom’s blogosphere in the mid-2000s, in which the housewives shared their unhappy reflections on postpartum depression, spitting and breastfed difficulties, reflected the need of women for a space to share their complex feelings on maternity. Even the most ambitious and perfect Instagram influencers, women who were often politically and religiously conservative – published selfies without makeup, photos of disorderly nurseries and legends about their difficulties with postpartum depression or infertility.

During the pandemic, which let women assume most of the childcare tasks, the conversation on parenting difficulties in the United States is even stronger. Calls for remunerated and compressed leave by the government and to childcare funded by the state abounded, and there was a widespread belief that something should desperately changed. In recent years, however, this consensus has disintegrated.

Now, if you spend a lot of time on the internet, where our flows have filled with images of women with blond household savulles cutting off their infants, it is difficult not to feel like a concerted effort to minimize the difficulties of maternity in favor of promoting its rewards. Tiktkers like Kylie Perkins have built massive monitoring of shame of young mothers for feeling stress or professional exhaustion, essentially shouting them to make the laundry or clean the house, and books like What are children for? Try to persuade the ambivalent liberals that they have a moral obligation to reproduce. Right influencers like Candace Owens and Brett Cooper also played a huge role in praising the virtues of young maternity to women who were previously seated on the fence. “They believe that maternity is important,” said Cooper last year from Gen-Z Women, who, according to her, began to fantasize to become young mothers because of their “biological instincts” to procreate.

He no longer seems acceptable for an internet mother to clean himself on the realities of parenting. In the rare event that we make – like the nurse Tiktker Hannah, who posted a video of herself leaving 17 dirty layers scattered in the house for a solo parenting weekend – they welcomed a generalized opprobrium. Commentators accused him of being a pig and a bad mother, rather than asking what disastrous circumstances led to the state of her household in the first place. On Snarky sub-reliefs, there is apparently a new Hannah nurse every day, with redditors criticizing each aspect of a mother’s parenting, the food they give to their children to the cleanliness of their playgrounds. Women who dare to recognize the less desirable aspects of mothering are particularly vulnerable to this treatment. Like Roan, they are castigated as miserable and bitter feminists who do not even deserve to be blessed with children in the first place. We used to consider the difficulties of maternity as a universally accepted truth. Now when someone is honest on hardness, we perceive their honesty as nothing less than a guilt admission.

It is difficult to overestimate how much this is disorienting. Because in spite of the preponderance of pro-maman imaging in culture at the moment, being a mother in the United States has not become easier-in fact, thanks to the war of the conservatives against the reproductive freedoms of women, it is undoubtedly much more difficult. Not only do women now have less to say how or when they choose to have children first, but they must also pretend to enjoy them every second, or risk being labeled. It is not only that Chappell Roan is right – every mother of young children knows it. What has changed is that now they are under immense pressure to claim that she is wrong.