On the face of it, Similac’s new ad, “The Mother ‘Hood,” is one of the most queer-inclusive ads I’ve seen recently, with both two-dad and two-mom families, including women who are rocking a clearly queer aesthetic. But does it exclude as well?
In the ad, various contingents of moms converge on a playground. There are breastfeeding moms, bottle-feeding moms, attachment parents, working parents, and stay-at-home moms, as well as the aforementioned queer gals. There’s also a group of dads, including a two-dad family, with their kids. Trash-talking ensues—until a near-tragedy reminds them, “No matter what our beliefs, we are parents first,” and brings them together into “The Sisterhood of Motherhood.”
It’s a very funny send-up of the conflicts among different approaches to parenting. To that extent, I loved it. I’ve always disliked it when parents think their style of parenting is better than another’s; I dislike it even more when the media plays up those differences in order to create controversy—the so-called “mommy wars.” That only serves to drive people apart, and may prevent us from uniting in support of things we all need. (Paid parental leave and affordable childcare, anyone?)
What are we to make, then, of the ending tagline, “Welcome to the Sisterhood of Motherhood”? Brent Almond at Designer Daddy feels, with some justification, that it is dismissive of the dads that they earlier tried to include (even having made an excellent point about how dads are often wrongly seen as “babysitting” when with their kids).
This got me thinking. As I discussed at length a while back, some LGBTQ parents are making the argument that being a mother or a father is not necessarily correlated to being female or male—regardless of one’s gender identity. Some men, for example, may feel they take on the traditional “mother’s” role; some women may feel more like dads. Or not. Some transgender and gender nonconforming parents may use the parenting title that corresponds to their self-identified gender, while others (particularly, it seems to me, those who had children before transitioning) keep the title that their children first used for them, based on the gender they were assigned at birth, even if they use pronouns of their self-identified gender.
Rutgers University law professor and gay dad Carlos Ball, in his book, The Right to Be Parents: LGBT Families and the Transformation of Parenthood, suggests that we think of “mother” and “father” as “verbs rather than as nouns” and “focus on what it means to mother and to father a child,” instead of on the sex of the parent who is doing it. That would mean that “motherhood” isn’t always a “sisterhood.”
These are relatively new ways of thinking for many, and may take some time for people to get their heads around. The Similac ad isn’t bad, by any means—and in many ways, it’s brilliant—but it offers us an opportunity to examine these issues and see if we can do even better.
Kudos, then, to Similac for a) being inclusive of same-sex parents and b) making fun of the divisive and overhyped “mommy wars” in a humorous, engaging way. Like Brent, I would have preferred it if the dads weren’t dismissed at the end with the “Welcome to the sisterhood of motherhood” tagline. I also think the line doesn’t leave room for the many ways “motherhood” and “fatherhood” are being expressed by those of all genders and gender identities today. The tagline wouldn’t even have been that hard to change—what it might lack in the parallel of “sisterhood” and “motherhood,” it would make up for in inclusion:
“Welcome to the club of parenthood.”
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