Why The Outrage Over ‘Mom Of The Year’ Completely Missed The Point

Congratulations, gals; we did it! We beat the Final Boss on the way to complete liberation from the bounds of the patriarchy and the confines of our own sex, and found that the grand prize is womanhood’s propensity to toxify our own freedom.

For what brings about this celebration? Motherhood, of course. Not just any old run-of-the-mill mom. Mother of the Year! She goes by “Erika,” and she, her daughter, and her (apparently total deadbeat) husband attended the September 25 San Francisco Giants game versus the Minnesota Twins.

What was a normally innocuous family outing turned into the Rorschach test of our deranged, post-sex society. Erika was caught on camera returning from concessions to her seat, juggling a tower of food in both hands with her toddler strapped to her in a carrier. The on-air broadcast team proceeded to narrate an imaginary scenario in which Erika was doing all the things — juggling the kid, food, and navigating safely to her seat — while her husband flippantly greeted her and chowed down on the grub, leaving his wife to act as the holder of child and dinner. How rude!

Mom of the year https://t.co/nUTgAhr0nr

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) September 24, 2026

Naturally, the ultrafeminists swooped in, circling the family as they writhed under the white-hot glare of the social media spotlight.

What Erika had to explain to the TikTok toxic feminist crowd and conspiratorial online busybodies (after she had to prove to a handful of weirdos that she was an actual person, not some AI manifestation) is that her husband was carrying the weight of the death of a beloved and longtime friend. Wives might know him as “that guy” — your husband’s friend who he’s had since before you were even dating, the guy who has the childhood/grade school/college stories that may or may not end with someone in jail, the guy who you felt like you had to ask for your husband’s hand in marriage, and who, after marriage, felt like an adopted part of the family. That kind of friend. And Erika was doing her part to lighten some of that weight.

This pile-on is an indictment of the online mob that thinks so highly of itself and its worldly wisdom that it can judge an entire marriage and family dynamic from a one-minute clip narrated by two dudes in a broadcast booth. But in our TikTok age, where social contagion and relentless judgment join forces from behind the unblinking eye of a cellphone, this is the price of admission.

To me, an actual run-of-the-mill mom, this is another day that ends in Y. Not because I’m a slave to my husband or broken under the weight of my three young children or there’s some nefarious network of men conspiring to keep women under the heels of the patriarchy. This is a case of a mom working at maximum efficiency. It’s what we do best. And if the harpy crowd of permanently insufferable suffragettes had any sense of the world, that’s what they’d see, too.

It’s been 106 years since American women gained the right to vote through the 19th Amendment. Since then, women have been welcomed into the workforce, athletic playing fields, politics, entertainment, the arts, organized religion, civic organizations, the military, and media. Heck, even the Boy Scouts, which by its very name seems pretty cut-and-dry about who it accepts, made space for us. But it just isn’t enough, is it? There must be some explanation about why women are more unhappy than ever, why we just can’t shake off the chains of oppression that must exist despite us having surpassed all of these benchmarks of equality and freedom. After all, we can even have babies and kill them for any reason or no reason! and men will just shrug.

We can strut all the slut walks we want and demand not to be treated like sexual objects. We can dress provocatively and then screech about toxic masculinity when the male gaze is offered in our direction. We can climb to the top of corporate ladders and complain about work-life balance. We can insist that women are strong, independent people who hold agency over our lives and get drunk and claim victimhood when we have an unfortunate sexual encounter. We can do it all and then complain when we “do it all.”

But the point these “liberated” women miss is a lesson about love. And it’s an underrated and underdiscussed topic in an era where coupledom is dwindling, marriages are suffering, and babies and children are scarce. Because despite feminists’ insistence that old-fashioned “Happily-Ever-After” tales are unrealistic and trade on false promises, they seem to think that’s what real life should be, and are in a perpetual state of anger and resentment that it isn’t (in that strictly storybook way), and eventually that ugliness catches up with them.

The truth is that love can look like a fairytale, and look like the mom juggling more than she thinks she can to give her husband a break when he needs one. One minute, one hour, one day does not define a marriage; it can’t. And just as the pursuit of love exposes us to vulnerability, the comfort and assurance of love give us strength — for ourselves when we need it and for our partner in their time of need. But in a culture where everything is about what other people can give me, what my truth is, my trauma, and what perfection and grace I demand, there is little room for what giving love can offer and the uplifting consequences tied to it.

So it’s unsurprising that Erika and her husband received cruel and vile comments about this snapshot in time because they cannot understand what true love entails: that you can’t have it all, at least not all at once, but you can have a partner that helps fill in the missing parts.

And hopefully, by showing the world what real moms (and dads) do for each other and their families, it normalizes acts of love in a world that desperately needs to see it. Even just having their young daughter out in a public space, enjoying the evening, cheering the hometown team, might now be considered an act of defiance in a society that debates whether children should even exist in public spaces or whether having kids is incompatible with a social life, or that somehow having a family is the end of your life rather than the beginning of it. Erika isn’t just “Mom of the Year,” she’s “Wife of the Year.”

So, congratulations again, ladies. In your rush to liberate women from the confines of kids, marriage, and flourishing relationships in the name of Choice! Freedom! and Independence! and disprove the old clucking hens-mean girls stereotype, you’ve become just that and chained yourselves to a world where your happiness extends as far as your own navel-gazing discontent.

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