Learning Day: Moms! On The... Net!?

The year the internet became widely available in the small village where I was raised, it brought along with it a flood of divorces. A friend of mine's mother moved to England to marry a man she met in an Elton John chatroom, a great place to meet tons of men. The instructional VHS Moms On The Net begins with a warning, "This video will help you unleash the power of the internet," and I think women at the time took that warning seriously. The internet clearly released some intense emotions in women of the early nineties. You can see it in their desperate gaze.

Moms On The Net is primarily an ad for a website called MommyTimes.com, but it's so much more. It's a historical document from a time when everyone's Mom was a wine mom because women couldn't be alcoholics. It imagines a world where things could be better, but first, it begins with the status quo.

The presentation begins with a little skit where two women are overwhelmed by their responsibilities. Picky children, cartoonishly inept husbands, a monster that lives in the basement feeding off their torment, all of the typical trappings of a regular '90s housewife. What can save them from this domestic drudgery? They refer to it reverently as "the power." Picture this, ladies: What if you could continue to do everything for everyone, but sometimes, a website that takes fifteen minutes to load will suggest baby shower themes to you?

What's a Fiesta Shower, and is it problematic? Probably, but not as problematic as letting whoever wins the baby shower name the child. They made the Name Our New Baby Shower theme illegal in 2001 after three women were hospitalized in a game of baby bottle bowling that got way too intense. And the baby they named grew up wrong. Chardonnay Swayze has killed seven people and is still at large.

Ok, maybe there are a few more things the internet can do for women. The video introduces us to the two women from the skits in the beginning, now successful momtrepreneurs, wild-eyed Trish and gloriously coiffured Deb. Trish is the owner of MommyTimes.com, and Deb is a computer consultant as well as the owner of Deb's Webs, a website design company. Deb deeply hates Trish.

These are two women on the net. The internet is helping them thrive, so they need an idiot friend to explain the internet to; enter: poor Melanie. Poor Melanie gets no fancy job titles. She has nothing, not even an email address. They made her hair smaller than Trish and Deb's as a nod to her tiny little life without the power of the internet. When they try to bring Melanie the gift of the internet she says, "Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets?" Foolish Melanie.

The Moms on the Net talk about the internet as if they are imparting secret knowledge about actual witchcraft. Unfortunately, all they're actually doing is defining URLs, information, by the way, that you don't really need to use the internet. What they are actually teaching Melanie is not to be afraid of the internet. They're gently coaxing her toward new technology like a medieval peasant who's terrified of a dishwasher. Did women ever really fear the internet this much? Probably. My grandmother looks at a printer like it's an eldritch terror. This amount of caution was necessary. You can do it Melanie!

There are a lot of aquatic metaphors in this video that feel like they're geared toward midwestern housewives. "Imagine the internet like a giant octopus, with its many arms extending outward on their own," Trish tells Melanie. A giant information octopus is way scarier than the internet. "When it's time for real action, we surf, surf the net!" Trish assures Melanie. So now we're surfing with the giant octopus? Congratulations, I'm afraid of the internet now.

Trish and Deb show Melanie some example websites, including one that has you Rate Your Child's Street Smarts. I guess that's for if you want to teach them to pick pockets like the artful dodger. That might be useful to '90s moms. They're also careful to sneak in a little subliminal shot of mommytimes.com, which has an extremely haunted little boy gazing out from the computer at Melanie. I'm surprised that didn't scare her off. Melanie might just make it to the end of this video with her life and a fiesta-themed baby shower ready to go.

The camera lingers for a while on The Mommy Times website. What exactly the site provides is never explained. Maybe they were hoping to get women curious enough to conquer their fear of the internet and check it out for themselves. They thought the best way to convince them was this freaky little cartoon of a baby sucking down a bottle. Or maybe they hoped mothers would want to rescue the milk carton baby on the cover of the Mommy Times newspaper.

Even though the Mommy Times gets a lot of attention when Trish explains how to click a link or what a graphic is, Deb's Webs gets no mention outside of Deb's initial introduction. The power struggle between Deb and Trish is palpable, and Trish clearly won this battle, but guess what? Deb won the war. Mommytimes.com no longer exists. It's possible that Trish sold out during the dot com boom and now owns a doomsday bunker on Mark Zuckerburg's private island, but Deb's Webs is still going strong to this day. Eat shit, Trish.

Deb's Webs has expanded from website design to hosting, domain registration, and Alaska travel reservations. You have to diversify on the modern web, and our internet queen, Deb, knows that. She's been teaching Melanies how to use email since before the EPA banned her hairspray.

Melanie learns how to order flowers from the internet. Trish and Deb assure Melanie that it's okay to give pretty much any website your credit card information because it's all encoded, which is a lesson Melanie will have to unlearn sometime before the invention of Facebook. There's also a brief mention that children should be supervised on the internet due to unspecified dangers. No details are given because women can barely use the internet; what do you mean children are going to use it? How will they understand the octopus metaphor?

Now that she can email, order flowers, and give anyone who asks for it her credit card information, Melanie has learned everything Deb and Trish have to teach her. Trish adds a last-minute complaint that if she uses caps lock, readers will interpret it as yelling. She seems annoyed by this, like she just learned it from Deb, and now she has to figure out how to turn the caps lock off, which she is NOT ENTIRELY SURE HOW TO DO.

Suddenly, someone knocks on the door. Who could that be? Trish and Deb wonder. It's a hunky discount Fabio with flowers for both of them. Who ordered the flowers? Was it their husbands? Have they finally noticed? Do they see all of the labor that Deb and Trish put in to cook, help the kids with their homework, and run their damn haunted baby business? Can Deb and Trish finally forget the internet together? Maybe they'll move to a little place deep in the country with no internet connection at all. They're thinking of escaping their lives and living a new reality. You can see it, but alas, the flowers are from friggin' Melanie.

Melanie has the power of the internet now! What will she do with it? She's going to fuck the flower delivery man. I'm so proud of her.

A woman learned how to use the internet, and the terrible knowledge she gained helped her bang a flower delivery man. I hope someday all of the other Moms On The Net get to follow in her footsteps. I hope Trish did sell Mommytimes to a diaper mogul. I hope Deb never had to speak to Trish again.

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