Have you seen this stupid graphic on the "Mommy Business Trip" yet? If you haven't, please go and have a look -- and then we'll discuss. It's basically a cartoon strip of all the "wild" times we mommies have when we travel for those blogger conferences. Mainlining cheeze doodles from the minibar, FTW! Right.
Honestly, I just had to laugh. Because if these guys had any idea what really goes down at these mommy blogger conferences? Holy hell, they'd shut us down in a heartbeat.
I mean, let's start with mini-bar attack. You think we're hitting the Sabor de Soledad chips in our hotel room? Aw hell no. It's all about the mini-bottles of booze. But that's just for breakfast.
We're not using the remote control to watch TV. You wanna know why? Because the savvy brand marketers of today know what we moms really want: Free sex with the hot gigolos they always hire. Oh, you didn't hear about that? Yeah ... there's a reason why birth rates spike approximately nine months after these conferences.
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Everyone makes it sound like these conferences are big kumbaya love-fests, wall-to-wall kissy faces and hugs for miles like it's one big wedding reception line. Not so! In fact, these conferences are swirling with feuds and intrigues. I've never seen so much white wine getting splashed into faces. We make the Real Housewives look like Girl Scouts.
And when things get really heated, we take it downstairs. All the way downstairs, to the basement wrestling arena where mom bloggers duke it out, Fight Club style. I'll never forget the way The Bloggess Jenny Lawson ripped out Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond's extensions (oh please, that hair is NOT real, girl) right before Ree dislocated the Jenny's shoulder. Partly because at the time I was in incredible pain from having both knees kicked out by Lindsay Ferrier's stilettos.
We pick up all that swag the brands insist on pushing on us and we sell it all on the black market. Because those blogs aren't gonna pay for Mommy's Louboutins, honey.
But what we really come for is the INFORMATION. That's right, we're spies. We're actually a totally different branch of the government you don't even know about. It's that classified. All those happy tweets you see coming from the conferences are actually encoded messages. "Loving this panel on life/work balance" really means "build three schools in India stat or our contact in Goa is splitsville."
After all the brunch cocktails, and the midafternoon rum and cookies, and the pre-dinner cocktails, and the belly button wine tastings, and the tiki bar fire walking orgies are over with, we finally get down to business. Oh yeah, the cocaine-fueled disco inferno after parties. We're all doing eight balls and it's a miracle any of us ever make it home.
So yeah, that cartoon of Mommy sleeping in until (GASP) 8:45 a.m. and feeling so darn groovy that we're not doing the school run? Bitch, please. We're just dragging our hungover asses home at that hour, false eyelashes and false boobs askew, missing a shoe, stockings ripped, the usual.
But hey, thanks for noticing, media. We know you tried to really capture the zeitgeist, or whatever. Better luck next time.
Did you think the Wall Street Journal's portrait of "Mommy Business Trips" was stupid and condescending?
Image via aoife mac/Flickr