In my project, I have till now looked at how lifestyle bloggers idealize their lives as perfect, partly through interviewing my mom’s friends to get viewpoints from women who both have children themselves and have more experience than my generation might have, through analyzing two blogs (www.fotballfrue.no and www.eirinkristiansen.blogg.no), and lastly looked at how these bloggers are presented in media.
Earlier, I have talked a bit about how these bloggers seem to idealize the housewife role, and I want to go back to this, as I think this is an interesting aspect of the culture of the lifestyle blog.
According to Wikipedia, a housewife can be characterized as “a woman whose main occupation is running or managing the family’s home – caring for and educating her children, cooking and storing food, buying goods the family needs in day to day life, cleaning and maintaining the home, making clothes for the family, etc. – and who is generally not employed outside the home.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housewife)
In 2012, 82,9% of the male and 76,8% of the female population in Norway were part of the labor force, a number that seems close to equality between genders in the Norwegian workforce (http://www.nrk.no/norge/slik-star-det-til-med-likestillinga-1.11589582). Over half of the female population in Norway is in labor force, so why is Caroline Berg Eriksen (www.fotballfrue.no), a stay-at-home mom sporting the role of the housewife, the most read blog in Norway?
As mentioned before, I think one reason may be that reading this blog becomes an escape from reality; a place to go to find entertainment as the content is light and easy to understand. On the other hand, a recent trend has developed extremely quickly in Norway: an interest in building a perfect home with trendy interior and unique styles. Fashion bloggers have started to write posts about interior design, where they share photos of their home and collages of interior-ideas. It’s hard to tell where this recent shift originates from, but it most definitely has something to do with the Norwegian home-based culture. It may be that women read “Fotballfrue” to find inspiration, but the thought of this platform as a source of inspiration frightens me slightly as she presents the opposite of what many Norwegian women are.