Midnight panty raids on Mumsnet Women were born for social media

For at least five years in the early 2000s, I led a secret double life. Outwardly, I was a respectable university lecturer bringing up two small children. But in a virtual space online, I was another person entirely — an oversharer, plotter, weeper, fighter, rubbernecker. In other words, I was a regular on an internet chat forum for mums.

The particular site I haunted was small, cliquey, and dwarfed even then by the behemoth that is Mumsnet — the motherlode of mother chat, 25 years old this very month. What started off in 2000 as a tiny website, conceived of by founder Justine Roberts as a place to swap tips about holidays and buggies, is now the sort of outfit that can make or break commercial or even political fortunes.

Every month, millions of users ignore the boring articles on the front page and head straight to the “talk” bit: to learn, laugh, vent, and gawp at the incredible state of other people’s marriages. All female life is on Mumsnet: shooting the breeze, recommending products, worrying a lot, talking politics, judging other people’s parenting from a great height, discussing weight loss, and laughing at the unfortunate lady whose husband once ate some Bombay Mix, then tried to give her oral.

Occasionally, men are to be found on Mumsnet too, the weirdos. They should probably be made to do a land acknowledgement. For, despite the ecumenical pretensions to being “by parents for parents”, in essence it is still a woman’s world. It has its own complicated rules, mythologies, social hierarchies, and culture. It even has a language: where else can an OP get a YANBU about that CF, DH, not wanting to SWI during your EWCM phase when all you can think about is getting a BFP?

Never has the wisdom of crowds been so hard to interpret. Eventually you get your ear in, though. My active chatting days on forums are long gone, but I still use Mumsnet for reassurance whenever I or someone close to me has unexplained health symptoms. Simply put whatever physical glitch you are worried about into the search bar, add “Mumsnet”, and find a thread by someone who had roughly the same thing.

There, in the answers, you will find an efficient distillation of at least 10 doctors’ opinions on your symptoms, filtered through the intensely detail-oriented scrutiny of hypochondriac posters who took the very same problem straight to A&E. Discount the answers from the most obviously crazy people, read the rest, and start to breathe again, reassured you probably won’t die anytime soon — at least, until you reach the bottom of the thread and realise the OP never came back.

The odd bit of dilettante lurking is a far cry from my enthusiastic levels of engagement back in the 2000s. I first found my own preferred site when I was newly pregnant, body fizzy with hormones, thrilled and intimidated by what was to come. The front page — a list of questions and exclamations by people with daft made-up names — seemed incomprehensible. Clicking on what I would later learn were called “threads”, I mentally approached each as if I was reading a static text, wondering why anyone would bother recording this ephemera for posterity.

But then came the gestalt switch, a moment of exhilaration I still remember from my current position as a jaded net aficionado. I pressed “refresh”. All the headings changed. I pressed again, and they changed again. The penny dropped: it was updating in real time. Women across the UK were chatting about their lives here under the guise of anonymity. And I could look in, voyeuristically. A few months later, I chose my codename — a very funny one I’d love to tell you about, except that nothing ever dies on the internet — and started to post too. My second life had begun.

For a while, I was quite obsessed, though that could have been the hormones. Because of its small size, being on this forum was a bit like being back at school; except that the cool kids who ran the place were those that were clever and good at writing, which made it very unlike the school I had actually attended. Here, too, there were the equivalents of prefects, rebels, teacher’s pets, sad losers and perpetual comedians. Indeed, as if at a virtual St Trinian’s, our more anarchic members would sometimes daringly embark on what were known as “panty raids” to a still-young Mumsnet to try to stir up trouble there.

As well as larking about, there was a lot of histrionics. “Flounces” were legion, though much mocked. I am sure I indulged in a flounce or two myself — after all, it’s quite easy to get annoyed at strangers on the internet, it turns out. And it was there that I first experienced the hypnotic pull of stripping yourself down to just a name and some sentences: no physical presence or inadvertent gestures for others to gauge the meaning of, but only your words.

Many births were celebrated — including both of mine — and a couple of very sad deaths were mourned. There was a lot of drunken TMI, several blood feuds, and the vastly entertaining presence of some total fantasists. At one point, a regular poster with a useless husband, new baby, and post-natal depression was dramatically unmasked as having none of these things, despite friends on the site having just sent her baby clothes. One of my mates had even just talked to her for hours on the phone, with the sound of her fake baby crying in the background. It is a wonder my own small children survived this period, so gripped was I by the daily melodrama.

Obviously, part of the appeal of these places is that contact is all virtual. Being stuck in a room with your favourite internet characters is less fun that you might imagine — and I don’t have to imagine, because I used to go on forum meets. All the things that make huge gatherings of women hell in person — gushing insincerity, rivalry, passive-aggression, a lack of healthy boundaries, etc — are dialled down a bit, or at least are safely corralled on the other side of your screen. Meanwhile, the fun and life-enhancing bits of female companionship remain to be enjoyed at a distance: common sense, empathy, righteous outrage, campy irreverence, gossip. There is an energy and lightness in social interactions on Mumsnet which you could never get on a male-dominated forum. Quite simply, we were born for this social media stuff.

Perhaps not surprising, then, that Mumsnet has also played a major role in cementing the status of Terf island. If there is one thing I know for sure about transactivists, it’s that lightness and wit are not their forte. In this arena, angry envious men typing insults or shouting mantras just don’t stand a chance; they might as well pack up their laptops and go home to their basements. And anyway, childish emotional blackmail doesn’t tend to work on mums. Not to mention that it’s hard to pretend that human biology is a flexible state of mind, when you’ve just heaved a baby out of your bleeding body and now have to feed it.

The forum I loved the most closed a good few years back, sucked into the huge gravitational pull of Mumsnet and eventually consumed. I’m still in a WhatsApp group with a handful of former members, though the kids we used to ask each other worried questions about are now grown up, and some of them have children of their own. But every now and again my phone will light up as of old, and I will shoot the breeze with Skirt, Chels, Howdie, and Joan of Argos, a grin on my face as I scroll, type, and PMSL. Last night we were discussing a face powder we are all getting ads for: Howdie had bought it already, I found myself bizarrely tempted, and Skirt decided it would make her look like a pharaoh. AIBU to think, when so much else on the internet is dark and sordid, online friendships between mums are a wonderful thing? IMHO they really are.

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