Mumsnet: beware lawsuits from angry childcare experts
A few weeks ago my children were drinking bleach in the kitchen while I was once again wasting time on the Mumsnet talkboards (Mumsnet is an online community of mothers sharing advice and support). Life with small children is boring. Small children do not appreciate my witty asides, opinions on current affairs or snide comments about people who are more clever and successful than me. My carefully refined skills in sarcasm and irony go over their lice-ridden heads. Years of developing a repertoire of hilarious office banter stagnate in the hamster-wheel of laundry and hoovering that defines my life as the mother of small children. So, like a lot of mothers—over 250,000 a month visit Mumsnet—I spend more time than I would like to admit on internet talkboards.
Talkboards are the office floor for stay-at-home mothers who want to joke, debate, talk, swear a lot, argue about the best way of using up sausages—basically to get a bit of intellectual stimulation. People are fiercely loyal to their talkboards. You get to know the regulars and they become like the people at work on the desks next to yours. You throw comments into the ether and you know how people will respond, what will make them laugh and what will get their backs up. Talkboards feel cosy. And it’s easy to imagine that your comments are only being listened to by your select group of fellow “posters” and will simply disappear afterwards, like when you mutter about your boss to your colleague by the photocopier.
In July I found myself once again gaily ignoring the children so I could log on to Mumsnet to discuss a controversial childcare guru who had teamed up with a washing powder manufacturer for a laundry promotion. “Win a one-to-one consultation with Gina Ford!” warned the blurb, and I was debating the promotion with some other virtual mummies.
Some mummies were incensed about the promotion and declared that they had emptied their stock of washing powder down the toilet. Others said they would actually rather relish the chance of a one-to-one with Britain’s number one childcare guru and the author of The Contented Little Baby Book, and we concluded that we would rush out to bulk buy washing powder in the hope of a golden ticket. All in all, it was a funny, flippant and light-hearted conversation.
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This is why, on all of the “debate” message boards that I enjoy, I never ever log in with the real name. I once posted a comment on a board discussing credit card interest (that’s how dull my life is) and got an e-mail purporting to come from Islamic radicals who threatened me with all sorts of unpleasant things (they objected to people discussing interest rates because interest is unislamic).