Glurge and its downside

Last week I referred to the fake job interview as glurge: syrupy sweet stories of questionable accuracy. It is very popular; I used to get a ton through e-mail, and I still see some through social media, though I think a lot passes me by. It does give that initial rush of emotion.

The one applicant who said "Moms are the best" clearly was moved. After hearing about the impossible job requirements, that no one could do or would want to if they good, and then hearing "mother", she probably remembered her mother working hard for her and making sacrifices without any paycheck, and was touched.

If she had thought about it more, though, she may have remembered that her mother did in fact sleep and take breaks, and maybe that her mother was not a great cook, or that sometimes her mother read her diary, or that they had a lot of blowouts over things she was allowed to do, but then she would also remember specific good things, like good talks they shared, or how some of the restrictions in retrospect were exactly right. You get a person instead of a paradigm, but you love the person in a way the paradigm could never inspire.

My reason for getting irritated of glurge is that it robs the truth. Real life, unvarnished, is full of amazing and touching things. It is also messy, so sometimes fiction can focus various true things in a way that while it is not real, it still is, and because it is labeled fiction you know how to weigh the truth in it.

What we have here though is something that is false but passing itself off as true. To do that, it stays shallow. It is an imitation, which is I guess why this type of thing is so often described as "saccharine". And, I don't believe it's harmless.

Sticking with the fake job interview, the ostensible purpose is to celebrate motherhood: Moms are great. Yay!

However, it is saying they are great in a way that they actually are not great. They didn't even go into a fairly realistic general description; it equated motherhood with straight masochism. Maybe it feels that way sometimes, but if the mother is actually looking for punishment she may have issues that are not helpful to her happy family.

Sure, it might make a lot of women who aren't mothers feel like crap, and it might make a lot of us more cynical types roll our eyes and twitch a little, but I see a real possible outcome of making some hardworking but imperfect mothers feel insecure by reminding them of all the things that are not good at, but feel like they should be, when in fact a lot of it does not matter.

Shortly after I posted last week I noticed that the real difference in between what I said about my friends and what the video said about mothers is that with my friends, there was individualization. They do some things the same, but other things they do pull from their talents, their abilities, and their personalities. They are people.

Getting back to The Feminine Mystique, the focus became so much on making a home and motherhood that there was nothing else for the woman. She was unsatisfied, and she was doing something that everyone said was important, and rewarding, so why was she unsatisfied? And no one could put their finger on it.

So, next week we will go into that a little.