Danny Moloshok/Portal
Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner arrived together at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party after the 95th Academy Awards on March 12, 2023.
Editor’s Note: Patricia Grisafi, PhD, is a freelance writer whose work has been featured in The Guardian, Salon, NBC, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mary Sue, The Daily Dot, and elsewhere. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN –
America loves to punish a “bad mother” — and it has a long history of using celebrities as warning figures of vile motherhood. When it was announced that 34-year-old musician Joe Jonas had filed for divorce from 27-year-old actress Sophie Turner, it was no surprise that the media claimed that Turner wanted to go out at night while Jonas wanted to look after his children .
Gossip sites like TMZ and Page Six portrayed their “different lifestyles” – Turner as a party girl and Jonas as a “homebody” trying to take care of his daughters.
Courtesy of Patricia Grisafi
Patricia Grisafi
To media literacy analysts, this seems like a tactic out of Celebrity Image Control 101, relying on the bad mother and self-sacrificing father tropes.
American society is primed to devour such narratives, given how eager we all are to give fathers awards for simply… raising children. I’ve seen this firsthand. My husband and I once went to lunch with friends in Brooklyn. I struggled with my sandwich, my six-month-old, and yes, a glass of wine. My husband saw that I was struggling, picked up the baby and took him outside to give me a break.
When he returned, he reported that at least two older women had stopped to compliment him on how well he was holding the baby. We laughed at how low the bar was for fatherhood. But I was secretly upset. Just that morning, a woman had stopped to berate me for neglecting to put a hat on my son.
This narrative—whether it’s used to valorize fathers or demonize mothers—is a trite, misogynistic dig at women who don’t present themselves publicly as traditional caregivers or who are caught on camera making a parenting mistake .
Britney Spears comes to mind as a victim of this type of rhetoric. Spears was branded a bad mother in the early 2000s and unfortunately continues to be labeled so today, despite what we now know about her abusive conservatorship and her fight for autonomy and self-expression.
But there is still a little bit of hope in this story. In the past, attempts to portray women as bad mothers during divorce would have worked. But that has not yet been the case in the Jonas and Turner situation.
On social media were users was immediately skeptical about Jonas’ Expectations. Many commented on their seven-year age difference, the fact that Turner was 19 when the two met, and that she became a mother at 24. They noted Turner’s public expressions of homesickness for her native England, including a distressed comment that she overlooked her family and friends: “I miss England so much,” she told Elle UK in May 2022. “The people, the attitude, everything. I am slowly retiring my husband.”
Why is all this important? In many ways, celebrities help us identify and define our experiences and clarify our own fears. We want to see how the world reacts to their lives. And in this particular case, let’s see how our culture deals with women who are implied or judged as “bad mothers.”
These voices join what appears to be a growing chorus of resistance to the tired tropes of the past. For every person who criticizes Cardi B for being too sexual, there is someone who defends a mother’s prerogative to maintain her sexuality and feel good about it. Of the people who have accused Emily Ratajkowski and Meghan Markle of “miscarrying” their babies, just as many are rolling their eyes at such sexist judgments. And while people debate Julia Fox’s parenting advice, others are praising her candid comments and honesty when it comes to being a single mom.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has opened people’s eyes to how much physical and emotional work mothers do every day – and how fathers are able to take on the same parenting responsibilities. Nobody is special; Everyone does their best. Fathers should not receive awards for taking care of their children while the mother works. Mothers shouldn’t be burned at the stake for going out with their friends. Do you want to shame me for not putting a hat on my child? Mind your own business, we’re trying to stay healthy and alive here.
In their official joint statement, Jonas and Turner shared the following post on their respective Instagram accounts: “After four wonderful years of marriage, we have mutually decided to end our marriage amicably. There are many speculative stories as to why, but it is truly a shared decision and we sincerely hope that everyone can respect our desire for privacy for ourselves and our children.”
We don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes with these two people. But that’s not really the point. These tabloid narratives provide opportunities to take the cultural temperature and assess changes in our cultural attitudes. Most importantly, they provide opportunities to look less voyeuristically at what goes wrong in other people’s lives and more critically consider how challenging gender-based parenting stereotypes can have big impacts, even on small scales.
Correction: An earlier version of this essay incorrectly stated Turner’s age when she became a parent.