From:www.indianexpress.com

If you are the mother of a celebrity daughter who is a ‘bad girl’, chances are it’s all your fault


“i feel bad for Lindsay. I feel very strongly it it her mother who is her worst enemy. She has planted that seed in her that the party crowd is the place to be.”
“I blame her mom. father wanted to do the wright thing.”
“her mom doesn’t even act like a mother figure, she acts more like a sister to lindsay!”

On Tuesday morning, hours after Lindsay Lohan was arrested on charges of driving with a suspended license, driving under the influence and felony cocaine possession, the typically vituperative posts (also, typically, grammatically challenged and typo-ridden) showed up on celebrity gossip Web sites like TMZ and Us Weekly.

Dina Lohan, Lindsay’s mother, was their target — not her father, who has served time in prison, battled his own addictions and was mostly absent during Lindsay’s childhood.

“People like to blame Dina Lohan,” said Janice Min, the editor in chief of Us Weekly. “I think there’s a belief that mothers will do anything for their kids, while fathers come and go.”

She is hardly the only mother of a high-profile daughter to be verbally tarred and feathered. Kathy Hilton, the mother of Paris and Nicky, and Lynne Spears have also been held publicly accountable for their daughters’ behaviour.

What have Dina, Lynne and Kathy done wrong in raising their daughters? That’s what the media and bloggers want to know. Meanwhile, most of the public doesn’t even know the fathers’ names. (Michael, Jamie and Rick.)

“We have a long history in this culture of mother blame,” said Susan J. Douglas, an author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women. In World War II, women whose sons wouldn’t fight were condemned for tying them too closely with their apron strings. A host of illnesses, including autism, were once traced to mothers, often with dubious scientific proof.

And without mother blame, where would Freud be? “An ideal was set in place by pop psychologists and Freud that the big problems in American society could be traced to excessive mothering,” said Beryl Satter, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark.

To be sure, it’s not as if some celebrity mothers haven’t brought an extra level of scrutiny upon themselves by seeking the spotlight. Ms. Hilton was the host of a reality TV show, I Want to Be a Hilton. Ms. Lohan, Lindsay’s mother/manager, or “momager,” is not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to media coverage.

By portraying Spears, Hilton and Lohan as bad mothers, “we get these class stereotypes about bad mothering,” said Doughlas.
-KARA JESELLA (New York Times)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites