I was wondering how our culture in general views baby mamas and baby daddies. Twitter, with its unrestrained and unedited commentary, was a good place to find out. The term I searched, though, was “single mother.” At the time I was looking, a search for “baby mama” turned up too many Asian language tweets for a productive review.
Surprisingly, female butts play a starring role in some tweets about single mothers, and sex talk is ubiquitous. (Don’t worry, I’ll explain about the butts. I’ll look at only one aspect of the sex talk.)
It also turns out, but not surprisingly, that all is not what it seems, and the purveyors of incisive as well as pandering comments about single mothers may have commercial motivations for their tweets.
Like baby mama, single mother has no generally accepted definition. In The Baby Mama Syndrome, I define “baby mama” as a mother who was not married to the father when she became pregnant. Most tweets using “single mother” seem to be about mothers who are not married at the time they give birth. So the two expressions are roughly equivalent.
ONE: “Single mothers deserve the highest honor”
For the review I created a column on my Tweetdeck for all tweets using the term single mothers. One tweet I found over and over and over, and then many, many more times: “Single mothers deserve the highest honor.” Intended as a nice thought by most tweeters, it requires blinders to the real world to buy into it. Single mothers deserve the highest honor for what? Having unplanned babies with no means of paying medical bills? Having multiple children they can’t support? Having multiple fathers who want no involvement with their children? Preventing the baby daddy from having a relationship with his child? Fighting with another single mother who has the same baby daddy?
Obviously the expression doesn’t mean any of those things, but those phenomena make the praise inaccurate for hundreds of thousands of baby mamas. Of course, other hundreds of thousands of baby mamas struggle to make ends meet and do the best they can for their children, work multiple jobs, pursue more education, and fight the stigma of being a single mom. But the most common tweet on this subject suggests that all baby mamas deserve the highest honor. That’s simply not true.
The highest-honor tweet is where the butts first come in. Mysterious outfits like Relationship Goals @thisscouldbeus use tweets to get business of some kind. It must work. They have 84,000 followers at that user name. Every tweet contains their profile photo, a woman in panties from behind with her butt taking up a large part of the screen next to a bottle of malt liquor.
Other tweeters also call themselves “Relationship Goals,” and the few I looked at totaled around a million followers. There seems to be an endless number of user names for Relationship Goals in a spider web of tweeters whose profile photos depict a sexual message of some sort. Some of their tweets and retweets seem above-board, but I am skeptical of their motives.
Another butt-prominent profile photo is attached to tweets by Amber Nicole @it’sAmberNichole. (And Relationship Goals retweets her tweets.) She has 2700 followers and bills herself as “part time model / full time hustler.” I can’t figure out if she’s just a personality or she’s in some kind of business.
I’m not the only one who perceives Amber Nicole’s messages as promoting her sexy self. One male responded to her tweet this way: “‘Single mothers deserve the highest honor…’ Lady you a genius! I can tell you were raised by a great Woman!” The tweet was followed by an emoji with a big tongue hanging out.
The highest-honor tweet is also repeated by parody tweeters pretending to be Selena Gomez, Beyonce, and Ariana Grande, all with thousands of followers. Another promotes an herbal Viagra. What are they all trying to gain by the mindless retweeting of this unsupportable notion that all single mothers deserve the highest of honor? I can only guess.
One thing we should learn from this exercise is that the motive behind seemingly positive tweets may be something else entirely. We need to know who the messenger is to know what the message really means. As the saying goes, consider the source.
TWO: Supportiveness
Tweeters also use other overboard praise to celebrate baby mamas, like “Single mothers raise soldiers” and “Single black mothers are the strongest people I have ever come across.”
Many tweets, however, are supportive of single mothers without adopting an attitude that all of them are to be admired. An excellent example of realistic praise: “Good Single Mothers Don’t Get Enough Credit Especially The 1s Out Here Making Sure They Kids Don’t Want For Nothing.”
Another: “S\O [shout out] to all single mothers! We see how hard it is to transport, feed, discipline, tutor, motivate & love a teenage boy. Keep your head up!!!”
The last two quotes mix praise and encouragement. Single moms often need both to contend with the disadvantages of being unwed parents. Some baby mamas, though, defiantly provide their own support structure: “Bro I’m the f*cking sh*t idgaf what y’all got to say single parent, my own place, & my own car, and y’all still struggling sit down.” Translation: Bro, I am the best. I don’t give a fuck what you say. I’m a single parent, I have my own home and my own car, and you’re still struggling. So sit down and shut up. I think she said it better than I did.
THREE: Pure meanness
After reading the next several tweets, you can understand why the baby mama above was defiantly defending herself:
“Been with my nephews all day and nothin but wack lookin single mothers been in my vicinity tryna make me a stepdad.”
Sometimes the names of the tweeters bolster the notion that these tweets are just plain meanness from mean people. From Bedroom Bully (spelled with hearts instead of o’s): “Single mothers are a plague on black America. I thought you didn’t know your daddy OR granddaddy.”
From Jaxoff retweeting Phalguy: “Girls who love the bad boys usually end up single mothers.” And a guy who calls himself Fleece says, “You single mothers with a son will have better luck marrying yo son than finding a man.”
Sometimes the words can’t be made any more vicious by identifying the source:
“When dating single mothers, make sure their child(ren) are screened for heartworms & rabies!!” and “That’s it. Single mothers create gay men. Ahhhh. It makes so much sense now.”
FOUR: Sex
Some guys see baby mamas as sex objects ripe for the pickin’:
“My first day at this job went well. Im surrounded by single mothers of all ages and i want to lick all of them. All. Of. Them.”
“Is it weird that girls are more attractive to me if they’re single mothers ..?”
“Some single mothers are so sexy, that you could just see yourself playing catch with their kids!”
“I don’t know how old Detective Benson is …. She can get it tho. She a single mother too. And we all know single mothers got that [emoji flames].”
FIVE: Multipartnered fertility
No, I didn’t find that expression in any tweets. Multipartnered fertility is a social sciences term for a parent having children by more than one co-parent. Baby daddies with more than one baby mama, or baby mamas with more than one baby daddy. Sometimes racism creeps into the tweets about having multiple kids (and not always subtly).
The defiant baby mama above who described herself as the best provides two perfect examples:
“Y’all trying to put single mothers down, never done the mistake twice while all these bald headed b*tches having 5kids.” I think she meant she was only a one-time baby mama. I don’t know if “bald headed bitches” are males or females, but presumably black. The same defiant baby mama included Hispanics in her diatribe: “And I’m not like these Chicanas having three four kids different baby daddies eww.”
Other tweets leave out the anger and make valid points: “I hate to say it but where is/are the father(s)? What do single mothers w/multiple kids expect? A cakewalk?” Another says “Some of these chicks are 2 and even 3x single mothers.”
SIX: Accountability
Some tweets, not always in the friendliest of terms, make a good point that baby mamas and baby daddies should be held accountable for having kids:
“I love what she said…in spite of an absent/deadbeat parent, all single mothers should embrace accountability.”
“I think its time men picked up the ball that we dropped a long time ago. All these single mothers raising your duplicates by they self.”
“How come we talk about single mothers and not absent fathers?! Why stigmatize the ones who stick around and raise their children?!”
This brings us back to the butts. Actually, I’m not sure that what’s depicted in the next tweeter’s picture is a butt. It appears to be some ambiguously posed body part in a blurry photo for hookahsxhoes @thatnameisbs. Hookahsxhoes also goes by @toniwhorrison. Don’t let the names discourage you on this one.
I can’t vouch for whoever is behind those three names, but my limited research suggests that Hookahsxhoes is a commercial enterprise with a polished website for “women of color.” The website has a decidedly feminist bent, and combines social commentary with other, less altruistic, things like the sale of glossy black sex toys.
You might tell me to consider my source, and you could be right. But there’s no getting around the accountability messages in this series of tweets from @thatnameisbs:
“Few people bother to address the men involved and hold them accountable for not taking responsibility for the child.”
“It’s always ‘Black women are single mothers’ like they miraculously reproduce and birth their kids on their own.”
“If you need a PowerPoint presentation telling you why you should bother with the human being you made, I can’t help you.”
“Some men really expect you to raise a child and miraculously ‘turn them into men’ so they can occasionally show up in the kid’s life.”
“If you, as a grown man, constantly make excuses as to why you won’t raise your child or blatantly refuse to, I can’t do anything about it.”
“Some of you sit here and show your ass all day saying silly things about single mothers like you don’t have a child out there that you deny.”
SEVEN: Tax evasion and child support avoidance
Some guys, like Benny and FunkyMunkyLuv, ought to keep their mouths shut, or at least not mouth off on Twitter. These tweets would be a prosecutor’s or child support enforcement lawyer’s delight:
“Yo wasup what one of Yall single mothers wanna let me use your Kids for taxes”
“And yes, single mothers who force fatherhood onto men by forcing them to pay/make money, those are forms of parasites.”
EIGHT: Taxpayer complaints
Some people actually do have a point to make about the cost to taxpayers of providing government benefits to unwed parents and their children. The gigantic expense resulting from unwed pregnancies and borne by the public is one reason the subtitle to my book is, Unwed parents, intimate partners, romantic rivals, and the rest of us. I don’t subscribe to all the sentiments expressed in the taxpayer tweets, but I understand the point of view:
“Fewer marriages = more single mothers. Who could have guessed? Someone (Joe Taxpayer) has to pay for all this ‘progress.’ ”
“No more money for single mothers. Enough rewarding these breeders of our future criminals.”
NINE: Objective critique
Thank goodness for the occasional objective critique expressed in the tweets mentioning single mothers. A sampling:
“Married women have seen stronger income growth than have single mothers. bit.ly/1BLN69Z pic.twitter.com/8QNFLnyvpU.”
“Thousand being born into poverty with single uneducated mothers — what effect is this going to have in the future?”
“WATCH: Journalist Reveals ‘Biggest Impediment’ To Black Progress huff.to/1didD5U.” (This is a reference to Bill Moyers’s view, echoing the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan that the rate of unwed pregnancies hurts the black community.)
“How do you explain all the single mothers? All the laws restricting choice. Limiting healthcare for women only. It’s very simple.” (I constantly advocate free LARC, long acting reversible contraception [IUDs and subcutaneous implants], as a way to cut unwed pregnancies and the abortion rate by more than half.)
“Then you have single mothers homeless benefits capped as they can’t make interviews for lack of childcare funds.” (We may not want those unplanned births, but once the kids are here, simple humanity requires us to provide for them if their parents can’t or won’t.)
Before you protest racism on the next two, by the same female, consider that she is defending black baby mamas and calling out their baby daddies who don’t support the kids they created together. To put her numbers in perspective, it helps to know that the most recent statistics on unwed pregnancies indicate that over 70% of all black females who give birth in the US are not married to the father.
“[I]t matters when they wanna say 73% of black women are single mothers.”
“Most of those black single mothers had children w/ black men, so y’all would make up a good % of dead beat dads. Right?”
TEN: Christian
Here are two contrasting expressions of Christian beliefs. Pick your favorite:
Peter (I’m pretty sure he’s not the disciple in the Bible):
“You shame and slander single mothers and then dare to call yourself a compassionate Christian? Fuck you.”
Then there’s Family Promise of Western New York, a homeless shelter sponsored in large part by the faith community:
“Accepted two more families in our program today. So we now have three families with single-mothers.”
In the midst of so much meanness, Family Promise of Western New York is a beacon of hope and love. Putting their hearts and their money where other people just run their mouths, or their keyboards.
The post Twitter Themes About “Single Mothers” (and Who’s Tweeting) appeared first on Judge Doyel.