The Hot Bikini Mom Controversy

Many Such Takes Special Edition

Before we begin, I’m once again reminding everyone that my book, Will There Be Free Food?, a series of comedic personal essays about being socially inept, having OCD, and working in the chaotic 2010s San Francisco tech scene as a young married woman who is bad at all jobs, is launching as a paid series of chapters on my Substack. The first chapter was published yesterday for both free and paid subscribers but the rest will be paid.

If you like what you see and want a paid subscription, take advantage of my 20% off sale which expires tomorrow!

---

There are certain iconic images that repeatedly take the Internet by storm, and this phenomenon is most pronounced when the image is aspirational. Take for example, the constant controversies surrounding relatively innocuous content by Nara Smith or Ballerina Farm. Generally, these images (and videos) spark discourse because they make women feel insecure (albeit by accident) and are held up by men as attainable ideals that women could meet if only they weren’t eating ice cream and gooning around to Bridgerton all day. This week’s discourse was no exception.

If you’re on Twitter (especially mom Twitter or trad Twitter) you’ve probably seen one or both of these images before:

They’re almost always posted by men. If the argument is, “Hey, it would be so fucking rad to live in a mansion with a super hot wife and have kids with her,” then no disagreement here! But it’s often something much more annoying than that. There’s a subtle insistence that men are simple, easy-to-please creatures, and if only we understood that all they want is a simple life with an effortlessly hot woman who has their children then maybe we’d understand just how easily impressed they are and how little we really need to do to keep them happy. Look guys, this is all they want! Just a modest little supermodel with a perfect body after having three kids. No biggie!

The post that sparked this week’s discourse wasn’t really saying that—he was just sort of saying that this was most men’s fantasy, which is fine. I mean, women have their fantasies too:

Narrator: this was not, in fact, an unpopular opinion.

Anyway, I think what drove many women nuts about this discourse was that although the original post was pretty harmless, the comments went beyond openly fantasizing about having a hot wife (Who doesn’t want a hot wife? *Trump voice* we love our hot wives, don’t we folks?) and into some obnoxious scolding about how such a body is actually easily obtainable, and women who don’t look like that are just being lazy.

To be clear, most men didn’t say this. Most men, even the ones on Twitter, are normal people. So most guys who saw the photo acknowledged it was unrealistic:

Some guys went LinkedIn mode:

But then there were others who, maddeningly, decided that the issue was binary: either look like the absolute goddesses in the photos above or be a lazy sack of shit:

Sure, some things are unrealistic—such as fake bobs. But otherwise, this is just what all women are meant to look like if they’re healthy.

I think this really took off on the right-wing side of Twitter, because on the left-wing side, nobody is talking about how women should look six months after giving birth. They’re too busy talking about how selfish such a woman is for bringing a child into a world riddled with climate change and Mango Mussolini, and how the child is taking up a coveted spot that’s meant to be reserved for a traumatized pitbull with two legs. So you really need to wade into right wing Twitter to even see these discussions play out. And that’s ultimately what I did.