You’re not every woman
The title is a joke. Relax. “I’m Every Woman” is not under attack, and neither is Whitney Houston, my favorite diva. She did exactly what pop stars are supposed to do: make fantasy sound emotionally true. For four glorious minutes, she convinced us that one woman could contain multitudes, cast spells, raise children, manage crises, and probably assemble Ikea furniture without crying.
This is about the exhausting modern expectation that women must now perform all versions of womanhood simultaneously while looking moisturized.
More specifically, the woman social media now treats as the final form of enlightened femininity: the highly opinionated lifestyle mother, former celebrity, pastor’s daughter, wellness advocate, or devotional homemaker whose very privileged and extremely well-supported life somehow gets repackaged as universal feminine wisdom. The woman managing multiple children, homeschooling, organic meals, family businesses, Bible verses about submission, and beautifully narrated suffering while looking as though stress personally signed a noncompete clause against her. The momfluencer.
I also remain fascinated by women who repeatedly quote verses about submission while simultaneously running households, businesses, ministries, and entire family ecosystems with the efficiency of mid-level authoritarian governments.
Aspirational femininity
I recently revisited the essay of a well-known local lifestyle matriarch whose online persona revolves around family, faith, homeschooling, and surviving a horrific medical ordeal after the birth of her last child. The story is dramatic and sincere. She nearly died. She underwent a massive operation after complications from childbirth. She suffered physically and emotionally. I do not doubt any of this.
Somewhere between the last birthing, the supportive husband, the extended family, the private hospital care, the giant social support system, and the devoted audience hanging on every revelation, I found myself thinking: Well, whoop-de-doo.
Not because her pain was fake, but because her life is statistically absurd. She is not every woman. She is probably one percent of Filipina women.
This very specific kind of life is now marketed online as aspirational femininity. The complete family. The composed mother. The spiritually centered wife. The beautiful home. The well-adjusted children. The woman is somehow capable of homeschooling multiple kids while remaining emotionally available, physically presentable, and suspiciously unfrayed.
I am not even angry at her specifically. Frankly, I do not know how much of this is deliberate and how much is simply the unavoidable narcissism of social media. Once you start packaging your life for public consumption, people stop seeing a person and start seeing a template.
Failing an invisible test
That is where common sense should occasionally enter the group chat. Because people imitate templates. And women, especially mothers, are extremely vulnerable to the feeling that they are failing some invisible test.
A neighbor once told me this while we were both watering plants on opposite sides of our low metal grill fence. She was laughing the entire time, not in despair but in the self-deprecating way many Filipino women survive comparison without letting it fully wound their pride.
“Why can’t I look like her?” she asked, referring to one of these immaculate mothers online. “After multiple kids, she’s still slim, made up, put together. My youngest is already 18, and I still look like I just gave birth,” she continued before bursting into laughter.
The difference is that my neighbor is self-aware. She knows she is older. She knows she has a different body type, metabolism, life situation, and stress load. She understands that aspiration is not imitation.
Not everyone possesses that kind of perspective.
That is the danger of momfluencing. It insidiously turns one woman’s very specific circumstances into an aspirational benchmark for millions of other women living entirely different lives. Over time, motherhood itself stops becoming a lived experience and starts becoming a competitive moral performance measured through trends, ideologies, and increasingly rigid standards of “correct” womanhood.
Natural birth becomes a virtue. Gentle parenting becomes enlightenment. Homeschooling becomes devotion. “Trad wife” femininity becomes evidence of softness and submission done correctly. Organic meals, attachment parenting, exclusive breastfeeding—each one presented online not merely as a parenting choice but as proof of superior motherhood.
Another benchmark, another doctrine
Every few years, motherhood acquires another doctrine.
Filipino women have always quietly compared themselves to one another. The internet merely industrialized and monetized it. What used to happen discreetly in school pickup lines, church circles, family reunions, and whispered conversations between mothers now happens publicly, algorithmically, and at scale.
Which brings me to a woman I encountered a while back from my alma mater, the University of the Philippines – Diliman. Intelligent, educated, accomplished—a woman people automatically assume makes informed and rational decisions. We were never close, only casual acquaintances, but I remember noticing her baby looked noticeably smaller than most infants I had encountered. She and her husband were both tall, healthy-looking people. Frankly, the child looked undernourished.
Eventually I learned she was firmly committed to exclusive breastfeeding. Breast milk is best, yes. Nobody is disputing decades of scientific study. There are also generous communities of women who donate and pool breast milk for struggling mothers.
But she herself was barely producing enough.
She was juggling graduate studies, work, and motherhood while exhausting herself trying to maintain an ideal. And I remember thinking: At some point, common sense must enter the room. The baby’s nourishment should matter more than ideological purity.
I say this as someone raised by a working mother in banking who formula-fed her children because she had a career and responsibilities. My brother and I somehow survived the scandalous tragedy of not being exclusively breastfed.
Miraculously, we did not turn into complete idiots and may even outlive the average life expectancy of the Filipino population.
The modern mother, according to the internet
What disturbed me was the willingness to subject themselves to rigidity, to blindly obey and follow things to the letter. The subtle moral superiority. The way motherhood has become another arena where women quietly monitor one another for correctness and appropriateness, as though we accidentally wandered back into the Victorian era wearing Lululemon and carrying Stanley tumblers.
The modern internet mother is now expected to be fertile, desirable, financially productive, emotionally available, nutritionally informed, spiritually centered, physically disciplined, and camera-ready simultaneously. Human limitation has somehow become bad branding.
Everyone is branding womanhood now, and the internet rewards whatever elicits extreme emotions from followers and detractors alike: the overtly perfect, the aspirational, the idealized.
And what rarely trends is ordinary Filipina life: the woman commuting to work while mentally calculating grocery expenses; the mother leaving her children with relatives because she works overseas; the exhausted woman who gives her child formula because she has no other practical choice; the aunt raising younger siblings because the parents disappeared; the middle-aged woman who never married; the woman who cannot have children.
Those women rarely trend online unless tragedy is involved.
Breaking the mold of womanhood
The “soft life” of wealthy motherhood is often built on the invisible labor of other women who do not get to live softly at all.
I belong somewhere in that category myself. I am middle-aged, unmarried, childless, and medically incapable of having children after a gynecological operation that fortunately prevented future cancer risks. Healthier now, yes. Grateful, yes. Still very much outside the glossy narrative of ideal womanhood being sold online.
That is precisely why I resist the idea that one woman’s lifestyle should become another woman’s emotional ruler.
No, you are not every woman. I am not every woman either. Frankly, that should be liberating.
