The new breed of primate mother
For the superrich, bringing up baby has become sheer hell
ANTHROPOLOGISTS living among alien tribes will probably all have had their Heart of Darkness moment in which they wonder, appalled, if the experiment can continue. For some it will be witnessing female circumcision, for others, cannibalism.
For Wednesday Martin, the field worker living among the superrich of London and New York — the most bizarre and extreme group of mothers in the world — it was black-market disabled Disney guides.
“What did you say?” Martin asked her source, an extravagantly wealthy mother on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, when she first heard her whisper it. The idea of paying disabled people to pretend to be part of their family so they could jump queues at theme parks did not seem credible because it was such an abuse of wealth and decency.
“This so distilled everything specific and often off-putting about this world that I was going to call my book Black-Market Disabled Disney Guides.”
Instead, Martin’s book is called Primates of Park Avenue. It is an anthropological examination of the “rules, rituals, uniforms and migration patterns” of the superrich mothers of London and New York, and it is surprising in two contradictory ways.
First, the ridiculous extremes that we assume are apocryphal turn out to be true. Martin talks to me on the phone from the Hamptons, to where the alpha species of Manhattan migrates in summer. I laugh at what she says, then, a second later, I have to check: “They don’t actually do that, do they?” Despite being lauded in the media, in private this group’s choices would mark them out as criminal or insane if they lived among us. Martin leaked the story of the scam to get into Disney World earlier this summer, and it was confirmed by an undercover television investigation. A scandal ensued and Disney had to tighten its rules.
Second, the reality of these women’s lives is the opposite of their media image. They are frenetic and worried, not idle and self-satisfied. They are so busy preserving their status that they cannot enjoy it.
“The lives of these rich women I observed, whether on the Upper East Side or Notting Hill, are always portrayed as indolent. Instead, I found women who are incredibly busy with remarkably high levels of anxiety.”
The third sociological point is that the child is a marker of adult status as never before. The mother feels stress because she deems herself entirely responsible for the social and academic trajectory of her offspring. And that, in turn, is her method of social ascent.
“The status of one’s child and your own reflects and builds on one another. It has become mutually defined,” says Martin.
The Disney revelation was not the first time Martin had misgivings about the life she was living. She had a humble up-
Not for nothing is Gwyneth Paltrow the figure we love to hate, a perfect example of these mothers: ludicrous and aspirational, derided and influential
bringing in the Midwest, then went on to earn a PhD in social anthropology and taught at Yale — but never felt she had found her calling in fieldwork. That is, until she married a Wall Street banker and felt forced to learn codes of behaviour that seemed more perplexing and morally uncomfortable than anything found in less manicured jungles.
“It was only when I had a child that I said to my husband I’m feeling very strange — I think I have culture shock,” Martin tells me. When Martin was pregnant, a woman in a boutique implied that she was a bad mother for not buying an expensive gadget to strap to her belly that would supposedly give her baby a jump start in the literacy section of the school application process. Later, another mother mentioned that she could hire a “play-date con- sultant” for $400 (about R4 000) an hour if her toddler was so overtaxed by academic consultants that he had forgotten how to play. Another parent engaged a personal stylist to make sure that she wore the correct attire to pick up her child from school. Martin realised she was not in Kansas any more.
She could not commit personally to this risible existence and so she committed professionally, becoming what anthropologists term a “participant-observer”. The Western world has in the past decade become fascinated with the parenting of the superrich. Not for nothing is Gwyneth Paltrow the figure we love to hate, a perfect example of these mothers: ludicrous and aspirational, derided and influential.
Despite all the attention, no one had analysed this world from the inside. Other field workers may have had to eat termites and wear leaves to earn the trust of natives; Martin bravely had to drink almond milk lattes and buy Lanvin shoes. “I never lost sight of the fact that this was a wholly foreign culture to me — my background is worlds apart from the world I married into. It was fieldwork.”
Nearly three decades ago, in Bonfire of the Vanities, a merciless portrait of exactly this class in 1980s Manhattan, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase “social X-ray” for the ultra-rich women, “so thin . . . you can see lamplight through their bones ... encasing their scrawny shanks in metallic Lycra tubular tights for their sports training classes . . . to compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to dress designers”.
That much is still true. The most obvious marker for this tribe is women starved to extreme thinness by excluding major food groups and a series of punishing exercise regimens, currently ballet and boot camp.
For reference, see Paltrow, as above.
Martin managed to gain access to the most sought-after ballet exercise class in the Hamptons, where she saw the richest women in the world act like baboons in the African savannah. Scrawny millionaire moms duelled with their massive cars for a parking place; once they secured entrance, “I saw arguments break out over territory — who gets what spot. If someone gets shut out of the class, there is often a big display of aggression.” Martin does allow herself a snigger at this point.
“What I saw in London and New York were punitive, gruelling exercise practices, almost like being tortured. That is an index of the lives of these extremely rich women, who literally hurt themselves. It’s extreme in a way that going to an aerobics class is not.”
Yet Wolfe in his novel goes to great lengths to describe what social X-rays are not: maternal. As he wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities , there were no women in the 1980s Greed Is Good scene who spoke of “hot food ready at six and stories read aloud at night and conversations while seated on the edge of the bed, just before the Sandman comes. In short, no one ever invited . . . Mother.”
Martin’s analysis shows how this has reversed. Decades on, the comparative women are like the mothers of dauphins, their ambitions realised through and with their children. For a mother to enter the most exclusive social circles, her child must get into the most exclusive schools. This requires Olympian displays of school fundraising, donations, coaching and lobbying.
“What’s happened in the past 10 years is the fascination with rich, glamorous women’s preg- nancies and motherhood. The magazines that feature them are symptomatic of our fascination and build it at the same time. Most pregnant women feel bloated and unsexy. What these women present is a fantasy: that with enough money and commitment to the project you can still wear Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo and be chic throughout child-bearing.
“You can see why marketers love it, and for competitive women it creates a bar of excellence, a professionalisation of motherhood that allows them to feel successful if they achieve it.”
However, appearance is a minor stress when compared with their progeny’s development. Like primitive people, they don’t have the same relationship to money as the rest of us, which is a problem in its own way. It is well documented that too much choice makes us anxious, and these mothers suffer from an excessive array of consultants, tutoring and paid experiences for their children.
It starts early: Martin has even heard of a “crawling consultant” for a baby that was developing entirely normally, to give the infant a leg up. They are using specialists who were once employed to help disabled children on normal children. Or perhaps you could say children who are disabled by wealth.
From then on it is miserably competitive. Martin shadowed one London mother for a day, witnessing her sending 14 school-related e-mails, part of her determination to impress and gain a good reference for the next school. Martin heard about the woman who gave the director of a sought-after nursery a gift of a £5 000 (about R75 000) Birkin bag. The driver was the fear of being excluded, which every tribal person knows is social death.
“There’s a tacit understanding, sometimes explicit, that the more involved you are at your child’s school, the better chance that the administration will speak well of you,” Martin says.
“These women don’t stop talking about it in their sleep; they worry and work incessantly at it. It’s nothing compared with not being able to feed your child or your child being sick and you not being able to pay for treatment, but one of the main features of their lives is anxiety. We have this big debate about what helicopter parenting is doing to children, but what damage is this doing to the mothers?
“Because they have the resources to engineer better lives, they never stop. They have an infinite number of experts they can hire to improve their family, but it translates into greater stress and unhappiness.”
She sounds so sympathetic that I have to make the worst accusation that anyone can level at an anthropologist: Has she
Scrawny millionaire moms duelled with their massive cars for a parking place
gone native? At no point has she packed up her family and run screaming for her blissfully ordinary Midwest. Instead she has made small changes, such as moving her children out of the fastest lane of Manhattan’s elite schooling, and laughing a lot more.
“Anthropologists always have these very vexed relationships with their native informants. Many times, yes, I would struggle with going native . . .”
Here she pauses, contemplating the sacrifices of academics who brought up their children in rare tribes. “I wanted a Birkin bag very badly.” — © The Times, London