Betty Friedan<\/a> were to review the Facebook habits of the over-30 set, I am afraid she would be very disappointed in us. By this I mean specifically the trend of women using photographs of their children instead of themselves as the main picture on their Facebook profiles. You click on a friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted toddler running on the beach. Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favourite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some earnest future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the construction of women\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s identity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at this particular moment in time?<\/strong><\/p>\nMy guess is that this hypothetical future historian will likely think just as much about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the construction of men\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s identity,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at least if s\/he encounters both my and SkipFitz\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Facebook pages, because my husband is just as likely, if not more so, to substitute our son\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face for his in his FB profile photo. Now, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get me wrong; I can certainly see the value of using my own photo on my Facebook page, rather than one of my child, for practical reasons (how else is my 7th-grade boyfriend going to know it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s me when he looks up my profile?) but I hardly think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s crucial to the maintenance of a healthy identity. What about someone who uses a photo of his or her cat\/favorite painting\/favorite photo of Alfred Hitchcock? Is that just as bad? Does it imply that one identifies oneself as Alfred Hitchcock (or worse . . . a cat)?<\/p>\n
Many of these women work. Many of them are in book clubs. Many of them are involved in causes, or have interests that take them out of the house. But this is how they choose to represent themselves.<\/strong><\/p>\nWhy is a book club, job, or stint as President of the Tax the Churches League a better representation of a woman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s identity than her relationship with her child (a person who in some cases shot straight out of her cooch)\u00e2\u20ac\u201darguably a bigger part of her everyday life than most other things? \u00c2\u00a0I agree that a parent (of any gender) should have various interests in addition to his or her children, but ultimately, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see any single one of them serving as a better or more worthy representation of a person.<\/p>\n
The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and caf\u00c3\u00a9s and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when fresh-scrubbed Vassar girls were losing their minds amidst vacuum cleaners and sandboxes. Which is not to say that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand the temptation to put a photograph of your beautiful child on Facebook, because I do. After all, it frees you of the burden of looking halfway decent for a picture, and of the whole excruciating business of being yourself. Your three-year-old likes being in front of the camera. But still.<\/strong><\/p>\nOK, seriously? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Facebook. Yes, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re creating a social persona, and the choices you make (the status updates you write, the links you share, the photos you post) all serve primarily to define that persona for your audience of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Friends\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut does anybody for a second think that a profile photo is the sum total of who a person is? Do we really lack such imagination that we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t handle this one little piece of a person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Facebook identity being anything aside from a literal rendering of that person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actual face?<\/p>\n
These Facebook photos signal a larger and more ominous self-effacement, a narrowing of worlds. Think of a dinner party you just attended, and your friend, who wrote her senior thesis in college on Proust, who used to stay out drinking till five in the morning in her twenties, a brilliant and accomplished woman.<\/strong><\/p>\nThink about how throughout the entire dinner party, from olives to chocolate mousse, she talks about nothing but her kids. You waited, and because you love this woman, you want her to talk \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 about \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 what? A book? A movie? Something in the news? True, her talk about her children is very detailed, very impressive in the rigour and analytical depth and verve she brings to the subject; she could, you couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but think, be writing an entire dissertation on the precise effect of a certain teacher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pedagogical style on her four-year-old. But still.<\/strong><\/p>\nHow does drinking until 5 a.m. constitute \u00e2\u20ac\u0153brilliant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153accomplished\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? The Proust part, sure; but what if that same friend spent the same dinner party talking about nothing but Proust? She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d likely come across as a pedantic schmuck who was still clinging to her college laurels, even though they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d grown dry and crusty and carried the faint scent of mildew. Although I agree that talking for an entire evening about one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s child(ren) is in poor taste, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d argue that talking exclusively about any one thing during a dinner party makes you pretty bad company, and that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a narrowing of worlds\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can happen with regard to any singular focus. My thing is that whatever you’re talking about should be engaging for both you and your interlocutor. If it is, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re golden, no matter what the topic.<\/p>\n
You notice that at another, livelier corner of the table the men are not talking about models of strollers. This could in fact be an Austen or Trollope novel, where the men have retired to a different room to drink brandy and talk about news and politics. You turn back to the conversation and the woman is talking about what she packs for lunch for her child. Are we all sometimes that woman? A little kid-talk is fine, of course, but wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there a time when we were interested, also, in something else?<\/strong><\/p>\nHuh. Looks like I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m attending the wrong parties, then, because when Skip and I get together with our friends (with kids), join our hands and step into our own version of an Austen novel (because I do agree that once we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve all left the dinner table, the conversational circles that form do tend to be gender-based\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut I ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t nobody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Trollope), the fellas are just as likely to be talking about the kids. Sometimes moreso, in fact: often after the party\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s over and Skip and I are having our post-party debrief, he has gleaned much more information about our friends\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 kids from the Dad Discussion than I have from the Meetin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in the Ladies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Room. So I think there are some unfair and untrue assumptions being made, here\u00e2\u20ac\u201deither that, or this gal needs some new friends . . .<\/p>\n
The mystery here is that the woman with the baby on her Facebook page has surely read The Feminine Mystique<\/em>, or The Second Sex<\/em>, or The Beauty Myth<\/em>, or the websites DoubleX or Jezebel. She is no stranger to the smart talk of whatever wave of feminism we are on, and yet this style of effacement, this voluntary loss of self, comes naturally to her. Here is my pretty family, she seems to be saying, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter any more.<\/strong><\/p>\nOr maybe she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dude. Is my family the shizz-nit or WHAT? I mean, LOOK AT THEM. I did this bizness, yo. \u00c2\u00a0I friggin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 ROCK.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00c2\u00a0(And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sorry, reading that paragraph just makes me think of Terri Gar as Sandy in the movie Tootsie: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care about I love you! I read The Second Sex<\/em>! I read The Cinderella Complex<\/em>! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m responsible for my own orgasms!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d)<\/p>\nI have a friend whose daughter for a very long time wore squeaky sneakers. These sneakers emitted what was to adult ears an unbelievably annoying squeak with every single step she took. I asked my friend once why she put up with the sneakers, and she said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Because she likes them!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Imagine being in this new generation, discovering with every joyous squeak of your sneakers that Galileo was wrong: the sun is not the centre of the universe, you are!<\/strong><\/p>\nOur parents, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help thinking, would never have tolerated the squeaky sneakers, or conversations revolving entirely around children. They loved us as much and as ardently as we love our children, but they had their own lives, as I remember it, and we played around the margins. They did not plan weekend days solely around children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s concerts and art lessons and piano lessons and birthday parties.<\/strong><\/p>\nWhy, many of us wonder, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t our children play on their own? Why do they lack the inner resources that we seem to remember, dimly, from our own childhoods? The answer seems clear: because, with all good intentions, we have over-devoted ourselves to our children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s education and entertainment and general formation. Because we have chipped away at the idea of independent adult life, of letting children dream up a place for themselves, in their rooms, on the carpets, in our gardens, on their own.<\/strong><\/p>\nOK, here I totally agree; not that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not guilty of placing my gorgeous boy on a pedestal every once in awhile, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true that SkipFitz and I attend a damn lotta birthday parties, play dates, and activities designed to be fun for our child. (I mean, he is part of our family, after all; he gets a vote. Our votes trump his, sure, but we do consider him (as we do each other) when we make decisions about how to spend our time.) We are also, however, the parents who teach our son to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Excuse me, please\u00e2\u20ac\u009d if we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking to each other or to other people and he wishes to interrupt. (We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re also trying to teach him that he should only interrupt if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s important, but \u00e2\u20ac\u0153important\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a tough notion for a 4-year-old to grasp, so quite often, his \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Excuse me, please\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is followed\u00e2\u20ac\u201dafter confirmation that yes, it IS important\u00e2\u20ac\u201dby \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I just saw a muscle car!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How do you make cotton candy?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the parents who are teaching him to be polite and considerate of others in restaurants, movie theatres, and bookstores (which even some adults haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t learned, as we all know). Are we perfect parents? Not by any means, and quite often we make the wrong damn call. But we do try our best to raise a child who realizes that neither his immediate world, nor the world at large, revolves around him. And by the way, those playdates? Quite frankly, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not really about my kid at all. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re pretty much all about me. And wine.<\/p>\n
Facebook, of course, traffics in exhibitionism: it is a way of presenting your life, at least those sides of it you cherry-pick for the outside world, for show. One\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s children are an important achievement, and arguably one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most important achievement, but that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean that they are who you are. It could, of course, be argued that the vanity of a younger generation, with their status postings on what kind of tea they are drinking, represents a worse or more sinister kind of narcissism. But this particular form of narcissism, these cherubs trotted out to create a picture of self, is to me more disturbing for the truth it tells. The subliminal equation is clear: I am my children.<\/strong><\/p>\nSometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a photo of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s child simply means \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think my kid is pretty cute.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Facebook was pioneered for a younger generation, of course. It lends itself naturally to strangers who run into each other at parties and flirtations struck up in bars. Part of what is disturbing about this substitution is how clearly and deliberately it subverts that purpose: this generation leaches itself of sexuality by putting the innocent face of a child in the place of an attractive mother. It telegraphs a discomfort with even a minimal level of vanity. Like wearing sneakers every day or forgetting to cut your hair, it is a way of being dowdy and invisible, and it mirrors a certain mummy culture in which it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost a point of pride how little remains of the healthy, worldly, engaged and preening self.<\/strong><\/p>\nOK, I have all kinds of problems here. I may as well itemize:<\/p>\n
\n- Um, is it really so bad to subvert the purpose of Facebook\u00e2\u20ac\u201despecially if said purpose (purportedly) revolves around flirting in bars?<\/li>\n
- Though my husband, who has seen some of my most cherished underwear, might argue that my sole goal in life is to leach myself of sexuality, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s even possible for a person to do without straight-up removing his or her genitals. Furthermore, I disagree with the notion that using a photo of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s child on FB is a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153clear and deliberate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d subversion of sexuality. First of all, let us not forget that sex is one of the main ways to make children. The mere fact of having a child, in many cases, basically means you put out. Even if your child was conceived via IVF, turkey baster, people you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never even met, or some other means (and as tempting as it is, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not bring Todd Akin into this discussion), it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably fair to say that you have<\/em> put out at some point, or at the very least that you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hate the idea. This whole argument smells weirdly of the whole Madonna\/Whore dichotomy, like sexuality and children are mutually exclusive. (Obvious disclaimer: NO WAY IN HELL am I advocating the integration of the two in the manner of Jerry Sandusky\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut I would still say that sex and children are related concepts.) And besides\u00e2\u20ac\u201deven if a woman DOES choose to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153leach herself of sexuality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by way of her Facebook profile picture (whether by posting a photo of her child, or of herself clad in fencing gear, a Richard Nixon Halloween costume, or my favorite underwear)\u00e2\u20ac\u201dso what? Is the author implying that open displays of sexuality and vanity are the only means by which a woman can\/should express herself?<\/li>\n
- As far as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153putting the innocent face of a child in the place of an attractive mother\u00e2\u20ac\u009d . . . Well. Show of hands: who here thinks ALL mothers are attractive? Beauty is absolutely in the eye of the beholder (can I get a witness?), so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d venture to say that nearly everyone is attractive to SOMEONE (as it should be). But if you honestly think that being (a) a mother, and\/or (b) a woman automatically makes a person attractive in any sort of general sense, you must not watch much reality TV (which is also as it should be, but still, you should really get out more).<\/li>\n
- I just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get comfortable with what the author seems to be implying with this whole paragraph, which is that a woman is somehow less of a woman, or is failing to adequately express herself as a woman, if she fails to wear cute shoes (as opposed to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sneakers every day\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), make regular visits to the hairdresser, and get herself all preened up. \u00c2\u00a0(For the record, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been known to go years without a haircut, and while I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t advise it, I resent the idea that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m less \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (which apparently equals \u00e2\u20ac\u0153less female\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) because of it. Also, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wear makeup. I know, right? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m practically John Holmes swingin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 it up in here. Watch out lest I spin around too quickly.) I realize (or I think, anyway) that what she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s getting at here is that you should think you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re \u00c2\u00a0beautiful enough to use your own picture on your FB page\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnot a photo of your child. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m here to tell you that I think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a total hot tamale (hel-LO-oh, does the name InstaPrincess tell you NOTHING?)\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand any \u00e2\u20ac\u0153failure\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of mine to use my own face on my page does not diminish or negate that fact, but rather is merely an indication that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lucked upon a photo of my (equally beautiful) child that I really, really like and want to share. As soon as someone takes another awesome photo of me <\/span>that I feel trumps the kid photo, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll update.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
What if Facebook pages are only the beginning? What if passports and driver\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s licences are next? What if suddenly the faces of a generation were to disappear, and in their places were beaming toddlers? Who will mourn these vanished ladies, and when will Betty Friedan rest in peace?<\/strong><\/p>\nWeren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Betty and her cohorts fighting for women to have more freedom? Including, one might suppose, the freedom to express themselves however they might choose? Would it really help Ms. Friedan rest more peacefully knowing that women are being told that their only choice for proper self-expression is to set their sneakers ablaze, shove their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153girls\u00e2\u20ac\u009d into push-up bras, and smile for the webcam? The irony burns.<\/p>\n
EPILOGUE<\/p>\n
Now. Here is why you can take what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m saying with a grain of salt:<\/p>\n
\n- You can pretty much take anything with a grain of salt. In fact, you should probably take most things with a grain of salt, except then you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d get all bloated and unattractive which, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a woman, might cause you to grow a penis, depending on what shoes you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re wearing.<\/li>\n
- Confession: I did not plan to have children. Liked (some of) the ones other people had, but did not want them for myself. When I realized, based on the prophetic powers of my urine combined with a small plastic stick, that I was going to have a kid, I knew that I was going to want to talk about it obsessively\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbecause that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what I do when something (big or small) happens to me. So I started a club. Not officially, of course\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthere are no dues or secret handshakes\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut I just started inviting other people who had recently become parents to bring their kids to my house and hang out with me. In order to seem less transparently needy and desperate, I called them play dates (and sometimes even came up with a cute theme or activity for the kids, like a bug hunt or a backyard movie) but seeing as I started hosting them before any of the kids in question could move or even see more than a foot ahead, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s be real: they were (and are) all about finding an appropriate audience for my endless blather about parenthood\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand happily offering full reciprocation (and booze!) in return. Yes, I work outside the home. Yes, I read books. Yes, I enjoy running, reading, yoga, and pretending to be Sheila E. But dammit, sometimes I just wanted to talk about my nipples and the things I found in my son\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s diaper (and know that I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t alone in my horror over what happens when you feed a toddler too many blueberries)\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor, lately, the hilarious things he says* and the sheer insanity that ensues when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re trying to choose a good day care facility. Doing this makes it possible for me to engage socially at other times with people who don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to hear ALLLLL about my kid. But for the record, I could conceivably be one of those dinner-party boors.<\/li>\n
- I do have a particular aversion to the idea that certain interests\/topics of conversation somehow trump others when it comes to Living a Life Worthwhile. And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a hill on which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been dying for quite some time. When I was in my late 20s, I spent every Friday night at my mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house; we ate bad food, watched worse TV, and chatted about whatever random topics struck us as worthy of discussion. Inevitably, the end of the week would roll around; \u00c2\u00a0one or another of my friends would invite me somewhere on a Friday night and, upon being turned down, give me a hard time about it, insisting that I should be out LIVING! Discussing literature over wine! Checking out this or that new band! Doing tequila shots and grinding up against my girlfriends on the dance floor! Etc.! LIVING!\u00c2\u00a0 Etc.! Not lying around in my PJs with my mom! But . . . why? Why is a drunken argument about Infinite Jest or getting my butt rubbed by a tipsy \u00e2\u20ac\u0153WOO-girl\u00e2\u20ac\u009d while Sir Mix-a-Lot booms at a deafening volume somehow better \u00e2\u20ac\u0153living\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than spending time with someone I love? I have never understood that. So my feelings on this particular issue may be somewhat biased, owing to years of self-defense against those who judge me for how I choose to spend my free time.<\/li>\n
- Confession #2: I would love to be a SAHM. Well, OK, not a stay-at-home MOM, exactly, because dude, my kid is four. People talk about the Terrible Twos, but honestly, I feel like the amount of time I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m able to tolerate unlimited exposure to him is inversely proportional to his age (a trend I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure will reverse at some point, but so far I feel like I was a much more patient Baby Mama than I am as the mother of the 4-and-a-half year-old Endless Inquisitor With Attitude that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s become). So ideally, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d get to take him to preschool about three days a week, and spend that precious time writing, cooking, and cleaning. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right; I LOVE TO COOK AND CLEAN. In fact, recently SkipFitz was considering applying for a (pretty lucrative) job that would have taken him out of town three whole days a week; and while I was initially hesitant about the whole situation (contrary to what he believes, I do like having him around most of the time), it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take long for the fantasies to kick in about quitting my job and spending my days organizing our pantry, vacuuming closets, shining my husband\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dress shoes (oh, yes\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI make a mean bootblack, Baby) and planning and preparing five-star meals for his weekends at home. And OK\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmaybe spending a couple of summer afternoons a week at the pool with the boy . . .\u00c2\u00a0 but I digress.) The point is that one could perceive me and my love affair with Mr. Clean as about the most anti-feminist sentiment there is. I still maintain that feminism is simply about women being able to choose\u00e2\u20ac\u201dtheir lifestyles, their careers, their healthcare options, what they do for fun, their shoes, and for God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake, their Facebook profile photos\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfor themselves. But your mileage may vary.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
And, in the words of Forrest Gump, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all I have to say about that.<\/p>\n
*Last weekend, the boy, his father, and I spent the day at a local amusement park. This was the boy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first visit wherein he was tall enough to eschew the super-duper-slow-moving kiddie rides and enjoy some of the more intermediate rides (with an adult). After he and his father exited a ride most frequently known as the Octopus, I asked him if it had been fun; he informed me (LOUDLY) that it had \u00e2\u20ac\u0153made all the air come out of [his] penis.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been looking for a way to work that into this blog, because come on; that is poetry, right there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, not really. But a friend posted a link to an article called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Disappearing Mothers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on her Facebook page yesterday, and wanted to know how other parents felt about it. I posted a comment in reply, but found myself going back repeatedly to either edit what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d said, or add more to what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d said … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m Mad As Hell, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m Not Going to Take It Anymore!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233,"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}