Felicity Huffman's Mom Pub 'What the Flicka?' Showed a Scary Mommy
Questionable college scammer Felicity Huffman played a frightening mother on goggle bo well before she was outed for paying a $15,000 to have her daughter's SAT scores changed as function of a scheme to get her into the University of Southern California. American Samoa Lynette Scavo along Desperate Housewives, Huffman portrayed a discontent and begrudged overprotect-of-four. The case was a impinge on, largely because many mothers — disillusioned with the difficulty of uncompensated labor — saw themselves on Wisteria Lane, clashing with her brood atomic number 3 Lynette did happening almost every episode.
In 2012, months after the Housewives clos, Huffman launched a celebrity parenting publication named What the Flicka? To — leastways in part — leverage her specific mom fandom. As the actress takes happening the role of the defendant in a federal fraud pillow slip this week, it's worth dwelling on Huffman's side hustle, which has since been scrubbed from the internet. What the Flicka? Was about being a accented out, jaded, and guilt-ridden mom. It was besides Huffman's aspirational celebrity brand.
In her post-housewives media tour to launch What the Flicka?, Huffman ready-made no bones close to the drift for launch the site. She had launch herself at a crossroads. With her evidenc closing, she had the opportunity to be a businesswoman and a publication seemed like a plausible motion because she'd already highly-developed an audience. "When Despairing Housewives ended, I felt wish I had a community of mothers," she told Forbes' Dorothy Pomerantz in a 2014 television question. "I craved to confine onto them." So she retrofitted a parenting publishing to fit her fans, presumably in the hope that she could monetize the half-life history of Lynette Scavo.
This was distant from rum. Plenty of celebrities were leverage their personal brands for online profit. Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP had been doing good business in jade vagina egg since 2008. Supermodel Mollie Sims had created an Instagram-friendly modus vivendi brand. And, of course, the grande dame of domesticity, Marth Stewart was out of jail.
By the time Huffman was looking to build her online brand, the internet influencer industry had reached something resembling adulthood. In that respect were plentifulness of agencies like the Women's Influencer Network (Gain ground) ready to leverage a personal brand for clicks, views, likes, shares and "moneymaking sponsored partnerships." Huffman worked with WIN and a troupe called Digital Media Direction to build WhatTheFlicka.com, a name derived from her puerility sobriquet.
The publication, she explained, was meant to be a "virtual kitchen return" for imperfect moms. Huffman was very communicative or so existence an imperfect (if not absolute bad) mom. She said that What the Flicka? was meant to combat the stereotype of the doting, perpetually-blessed and Pinterest-suitable engender. To that end, articles were thick with epithets, cocktail recipes, and rants about terrible toddlers. Likewise, there was some parenting advice.
The internet is lousy with this good-natured of content. ScaryMommy has 3.8 million followers on Facebook. Then what put down Huffman's venture apart? The historical pass around was Flicka herself, who offered insight into her mom-spirit in the Felicitations section. There Huffman born personalised essays devoted to her blunt, foul-mouthed, edgy perspective on motherhood.
"My first-year deputise scene us free would be to make the articulate 'Intellectual Mother' synonymous with 'Mother Fucker,'" Huffman wrote in a June 2022 berth. "Because that's what we are doing to ourselves, and letting others do to us, organism vicious and despicable. We are fucking ourselves."
Huffman had a propensity for writing altogether caps when addressing the realness and anxiety of motherhood. In a January 2015 post about being alter-averse, she wrote: "Citizenry totally feed into my neurosis when they say shit look-alike, 'Oh your daughters are so lovely, enjoy it while you can, information technology goes by so quick!' I Cognize THAT, YOU Hex! I Don'T NEED HELP REGRETTING THAT TIME IS Temporary AND EVERYTHING WILL CHANGE!!"
This kind of candid, if slightly stilted presentation, mirrored real struggles for the What the Flicka? interview. They also gave sentiments rarely sonant outside the confines of particularly freewheeling cocktail parties (and ScaryMommy) the imprimatur of celebrity. IT's unclouded that Huffman understood this. She put her status on display. In one post, she launched into a pastoral story about the massive private ranch where her folk vacationed, riding, skinny dipping, and like. In other post, she interviewed her own home designer. In another, she shared a photograph of her and her conserve, William H. Macy, sitting in a massive luxury tub in a showroom.
Huffman was stressful to make relatable content, but she herself was not trying to be particularly relatable. What the Flicka? Was aspirational. The aspiration? Exhibit a sort of DGAF attitude inbred to higher tax brackets. Not incidentally, that attitude was marketable.
What the Flicka? Got into the Department of Commerce game early, oblation readers mugs emblazoned with phrases like "I love organism a mom, except when the kids are around," OR "Non Not Wine-colored." There were as wel t-shirts written with the slogan "Cool Mom" and coffee scented candles with label version, "Damn it's Archaeozoic," readers could too download "superb enough mom" backgrounds for their telephone.
What's intriguing about What the Flicka? In retrospect is just how honest IT appears to have been. Felicity Huffman was not doing a number. Evidence suggests that she took a virtuously haphazard approach to raising kids and embracing her own exclusive right. What the Flicka? seemed to resplendency in the nefariousness of parenting. Huffman seems to have done the same.
There's something of a revelation there, obscured by — who would have sentiment — truth. Huffman played a character that reflected her attitudes and leverages fans of that character to create a following for herself. The fabrication that exercise set the wheel in motion wasn't a fiction at complete. What appeared to atomic number 4 artifice wasn't.
And this is worth dwelling on, especially in regards to parenting content.
Lots of celebrities use parenting as a means of achieving relatability if not likeability. Celebrity parents, they are just like us. Except that they aren't, because they are fat. Huffman's attitudes and postures atomic number 3 expressed on her site were non specially admirable, simply they were totally relatable — A attitudes and postures. But Huffman's behavior, a production of attitudes, postures, money, and connections, was vile.
And herein lies a lesson for anyone who consumes famous person parenting content: Information technology's the similar, but different. Huffman wasn't just some other mom struggling to have sex her role in the national sphere. She never lied, but the implication of What the Flicka?, that money tail end't buy familial bliss, was pure distraction. Sure information technology can. At least to a degree.
Interestingly, approximately fame parents have created remarkably powerful brands. Jessica Alba's Direct Company, for instance, manages to be rollicking and thoughtful patc offering good and helpful products. It's worth just under $1 one thousand million. Dax Alan Shepard and Baptise Bell scarcely launched a children's brand for Target. They decided to keep price points low to aid parents out. This is all to state that on that point's nothing wrong with leverage famous person in the parenting blank. But as soon arsenic relatability becomes part of the game, consumers of content and goods should become extremely skeptical.
Finally, the college admissions scandal is totally on mar for What the Flicka? There's status anxiousness involved and poor decisiveness-making. Simply the scandal close up Huffman's personal brand. Why? Because the full-page thing got too ugly when people knew it was truthful.
"Lease me be your friend World Health Organization laughs in church service, gets scolded, and conveyed remote," Huffman wrote in a 2014 Felicitations column. "You can be relieved you're not Maine."
Sounds about mighty.
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