Yummy mummies everywhere, put your Veja trainers and frill-collar shirts away, because last week the Times issued a stinging broadside. Being labelled a ‘yummy mummy’ is apparently now so derogatory as to be an ‘almost cancellable offence’. The Yummy is dead, the headline declared, while my phone blew up like the fourth reactor at Chernobyl as Yummies far and wide forwarded me the article. ‘We are not dead!’ many fulminated, while others were more concise: ‘That’s just bollocks; I’ve never worn barrel jeans in my life.’
Detailing the sartorial transformation of Yummies into so-called ‘cool mums’, Times fashion editor Harriet Walker wrote that ‘in a bid to put as much clear water as possible’ between herself and the cohort that came before her, the Yummy is now the ‘cool mum’ with a look that is ‘less sleek, more knowingly scruffy’. Where once the Yummy was recognisable by her skinny jeans, French Sole pumps and impeccable blonde highlights – oh, and her children – now she’s simply ‘cool’, with the swag to prove it: ‘Trackie bottoms, slip-on gardening clogs and a creased shirt.’ Sounds to me like the cool mum needs to dig out the iron during school hours. But what would I know? I am nothing but a dated, cancelled anachronism.
Yummies have always had a bad press. Part and parcel of the gig is being reviled; endure it long enough and it becomes quite funny. In 2012, Cherie Booth QC, speaking at a Fortune magazine ‘Most Powerful Women’ event, stuck the knife in by declaring that ‘a growing band of yummy mummies’ were happy to put their children first before a satisfying and rewarding career. Cherie, you see, could have been a Yummy, but she was too cerebral, too career-driven to let her lesser-known husband go out to the office and leave her behind with the Bugaboo.
Thirteen years ago, many people agreed with Ms Booth QC. Yummies were ‘trophy wives’ never far from their Range Rovers, using their children ‘as an excuse not to work’ according to Mumsnet and, incredibly, the Telegraph. An academic paper entitled ‘The rise of the “yummy mummy”: popular conservatism and the neoliberal maternal in contemporary British culture’, published in 2013 by Professor Jo Littler, goes even further. Yummies, Littler wrote, perform ‘successful maternal femininity’ in such a way as to ‘to belittle and disavow wider structures of social, political and ecological dependency in order for its conservative fantasy of autonomous, individualising retreatism to be maintained’. I translate this from the academese as the following: Yummies are Tories who drive Rangies and poo-poo biodegradable nappies and anything that might get in the way of lunch.
Strictly speaking, I am not a Yummy. There are two very good reasons for this: firstly, I work in exchange for money, and secondly, my work is writing – an occupation viewed with some bemusement. But I walk, chameleon-like, among the Yummies every day: I park my Land Rover Discovery next to theirs; I have been known to enjoy lunch in their company; I play tennis with them in the summer. In short, I am a diet Yummy: approximately the same taste but without the political calories. With this insider knowledge, I permit myself the following observations.
I am a diet Yummy: approximately the same taste but without the political calories
Firstly, the favoured jeans may have changed, but the Yummy is alive and well, performing a valiant form of do-it-all maternity with grace and flair. Witness the Yummy removing three small children from their car seats and assembling a pushchair single-handedly all while looking coiffed, and I dare you not to be impressed.
What’s more, in the rather difficult conditions at the frontier of maternity, otherwise known as the ‘pramface’, the Yummy achieves something that the stock figure of the stay-at-home mum (or SAHM) does not: she refuses to look downtrodden, poor or self-effacing. As a society, we clearly have a problem with this; one need only consider the success of the BBC TV satire Motherland that depicts ‘correct’ mothers as strung-out and miserable at the expense of the reviled neoliberal self-determining Yummy, free to buy lattes as she chooses. Increasingly, we permit mothers in public, but only if they have been upbraided by the hardships of motherhood and appear sufficiently cowed (and ungroomed).
On grooming, the Yummy has it taped. This leads me to her most important characteristic, and arguably the most triggering for everyone else: the Yummy is meant to be sexy. She is well aware of this and, like her American counterpart the MILF, is a desired subject rather than someone with desiring agency. Does she care, on a moral basis, that she is sexually objectified or infantilised by the term? Not a bit of it. Not for her the race to the moral high ground that the warring tribes of the SAHM or the working mum engage in. I’m sorry to say that she’s simply having too much fun.
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