The Jewish Home | AUGUST 4, 2022
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The Price of #reallife By Rivky Itzkowitz
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ver the winter, I gave birth. That was the purposely vague announcement I made Mother’s Day of this year. I’m a frum female businessowner which, in 2022, is synonymous with Instagram personality or “influencer.” As of this writing, I have 8,627 followers on Instagram and about 5,000 monthly podcast listeners, none of whom knew that I was even pregnant. The unusual decision to aggressively hide my pregnancy started out as a practical one. I use myself as the fit model for
my line, which means that I try on rough versions of the clothes as I design. The day after I found out I was pregnant, I sat down and mapped out all the styles that I wanted to release over the next year and got to work designing them in one batch. If I wanted to keep my design process the same, I needed to create everything that would be released over the course of my pregnancy and 3-month maternity leave before I started showing. As is required of small businesses in 2022, I closely document the process of creating my designs and post those be-
hind-the-scenes looks as I work. Which is where pregnancy created a problem. Since I had to create designs months in advance, I was creating the associated work-in-progress videos months in advance as well. If I appeared visibly pregnant one day and not at all pregnant the next, viewers would be understandably confused and most likely concerned. I didn’t see any reason to cause a stir and certainly didn’t want to field dozens of messages a day asking if I’d miscarried. And so, I hid my pregnancy. I pre-recorded videos I knew could be used in a few different ways, hired other models, framed videos to crop out my ever-growing belly, and used several clever camera angles to disguise the (literally) huge changes happening in my life. Originally, I wasn’t sure if I would eventually announce my pregnancy, or birth, but the longer I hid my pregnancy, and by extension the entirety of my personal life, the more confident I became in my radical decision. In 2016, at 21 years old, I made the decision to not be anonymous to promote my company. Looking back, I can say with complete certainty that I did not fully understand the implications of that decision. At the time, and even more so now, having a company meant having an Instagram account. Once I had the account, it felt required to showcase my family, then just me and my husband. So that’s exactly what we did. Instead of posting solo pictures wearing my dresses at a family simcha, I posted the couples shot. I used photos of the two of us on vacation to announce times when the website would be closed. New styles were launched with a photo of me wearing the new design sitting next to my husband in a coordinating tie. Over the next few years, as I spent more time in the online space as a viewer,
I noticed myself becoming uncomfortable with the way personal lives were shared. Bloggers would ask their audiences not to approach their children in public because it scared the kids. Tantruming children were videoed and posted with #reallife. I began to wonder whose fault it was that thousands of strangers know what a child looks like and feel comfortable enough to approach them on a playground. And what would happen next time that child gets a little upset and a video of him having a complete meltdown flashes before his teacher’s eyes? I recognize the dichotomy here. For every person cringing while they can’t take their eyes away from this type of content, there’s someone who takes comfort and feels seen. To be clear, I don’t think that social media is an inherently bad thing. I believe that for our community especially, it has been a net positive. For it to continue to be that way we need to get honest with ourselves. We need to be honest about the fact that as consumers we feel entitled to lives of the women we watch online. This is simply not reasonable. No one is entitled to details of anybody else’s life, no matter how much they post or share with the public. As creators, we need to take responsibility for the normal human reactions people have to our content and adjust accordingly. Recognize that a majority of your audience see you every single day, scrolling late at night in bed while lying in bed next to their spouses. It’s a highly intimate relationship that you profit from. Frankly, I don’t believe creators have a right to be upset when they are on the receiving end of advice, suggestions, comments or even awkward real-life in-
