LuLaRich docu-series exposes the anti-woman mission of one of many insidious MLMs.
I knew from the very first time I saw a teaser for it that the Lularich documentary would be of the extra juicy variety. When I was a young teacher in Eastern Washington, all of these different MLMs were making the rounds — true to form, teachers jumped on board with them alongside the stay-at-home moms in the community where I lived and worked, which was more religious than most. As a child I heard about MLMs like Amway, Mary Kay, and The Pampered Chef. The sight of a pretty invitation in the opened mail always made me perk up.
“Just another Pampered Chef party,” my Mom would say, annoyed she’d even gotten one. As an adult, my invitations came in the form of Facebook messages, usually from people I barely knew or hadn’t spoken with since high school. Our MLMs were geared for our generation — durable fingernail stickers that went out of fashion about as quickly as they came in, books for the young children a lot of us had at home, jewelry, and even sex toys. My social media, which at the time was only Facebook, as I was a late adopter of Instagram and a never adopter of Snapchat, was filled with people sporting whatever they’d snagged at the latest “Facebook party.” I was added to these groups for parties more quickly than I could delete them until people began to realize that if they didn’t want ill will for whatever brand they were peddling, they needed to start asking first. Soon after Facebook made it so invitations had to be accepted before you could be added to a group (a gift from Zuckerberg, God of our Facebook universe himself).
The first time I saw LuLaRoe I was extremely confused. “These leggings are the softest things I’ve ever worn!” read the captions of pictures of bright, gaudy leggings and dresses that just didn’t seem like they quite checked the style box for me. I understood the appeal of a few of the things I saw, especially for people with special interests. There were Disney leggings, bird leggings, math symbols, elephants, all kinds of wild prints. These prints transferred over to the dresses too, and the tee shirts.
While many of the products were harder to resist the closer to me the person selling them was, LuLaRoe held almost no appeal for me. I certainly wasn’t alone, but the thing about these leggings was that the people I knew who loved them REALLY loved them, and the people that sold them HUSTLED for their dollars. Some of the women I knew even set up LuLaRoe shops in their homes, so friends could come over and see and feel the products in person. At one point, jonesing for a baseball tee with floral print sleeves (I still love a baseball tee) I asked one of my friends who sold LLR if she had anything like what I was looking for in the size their chart said I should be.
She didn’t have what I wanted, but she had one that seemed pretty satisfactory so I made the purchase. The sizing was horribly off. Or maybe all of their clothes are supposed to be skin tight? At any rate whatever size it was, fit more like shirts I still had in my closet that were two or three sizes too small, and I handed it off to a friend, who generally wore a few sizes down from me in women’s, and it was only a little roomy on her. The sale left a bad taste in my mouth, as have all of the handful of purchases I’ve made from MLMs, and I never bought anything else from them again.
It was hard, though. These women had a legitimate problem, and I had the same one: We didn’t have enough money or enough time. Whether we were stay at home moms or working women, we had young kids at home that sapped our energy, households we were trying to manage, and those of us who were gainfully employed were doing work that barely covered the cost of childcare and our kids’ clothes and shoes. It was hard to say “no” to someone who I genuinely wanted to help in the same ways I needed help myself. I really wanted to support them in trying to make a living, but I also understood that MLMs were rarely as lucrative as my friends were led to believe, and relied on a base of people who “lose” to make those at the middle and the top successful.
What me and my mostly conservative friends didn’t understand at the time, though, is that what we needed was economic independence, and there was one reason we didn’t have it: Patriarchy. Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Gloria Steinem, and many other leaders of the second wave women’s movement understood that women would not be liberated until they were economically liberated. Somehow, this message of my mother’s era of feminism got convoluted and watered down in a way that only really served white women and women with relative economic privilege. For them, the ability to enter the workforce, if wanted, felt liberating. Never mind that the jobs they occupied were not competitive in salary or benefits with the jobs men were occupied, and never mind women without economic privilege for whom being able to stay home and care for their own children, rather than going off to care for somebody else’s children, would have felt like liberation. It felt like a step in the right direction to many of the women in closest proximity to power, but ultimately even the women who benefited from it were still underpaid and doing more than half of managing their households even when they were partnered.
Real liberation comes when women have access to economic independence. When they have access to child care, food, and shelter so they can go to school, they are more likely to be able to enter higher wage jobs. They also have the opportunity to care for their own children full time, if that is what they choose. They need access to paid maternity leave so they don’t have to derail their careers when they have kids. For many women, economic independence means the opportunity for physical safety from abusive partners, and the ability to choose when and with whom they have children. If you want fewer abortions, then providing women with economic independence is a great way to reduce them!
What really sickened me to the very core in the LuLarRich documentary was the way the Stidhams saw this need for financial stability, for women to have economic independence, and they exploited it for their own financial gain. At one point, Mark Stidham talked about how stay at home mom’s were an “untapped resource” in the job market. I heard what he said between the lines though — stay at home moms have untapped bank accounts and friend groups who they can convince to empty their bank accounts also!
Mark and DeAnne promised to save these women from a patriarchal quagmire, and instead they pushed them farther into it. They took their money. They took years of their lives. In some cases they split up marriages and ruined friendships.
If you are pissed as hell about what these people did (and continue to do), then I hope you will recognize the conundrum of women everywhere that leads them to be targeted by people like the Stidhams, and join the women’s movement. Support candidates and local laws that give women access to greater economic independence, which includes being able to choose when and with whom they have children. You can get off to a good start by joining the women’s march in your area on October 2nd . In the mean time, check out Feminism is for Everybody by Bell Hooks at your local library. It’s a quick read and about a four hour listen, and it lays out the objectives of the women’s movement.
I was happy when I realized LuLaRoe had mostly faded away, mostly for my friends who no longer felt like they had to hustle even more than they already were. Now I’m old enough that I think most of my friends who had a penchant for buying into the MLM game have either been burned or been close to someone who was burned by a “direct sales” gig, and the invitations to Facebook parties have nearly disappeared all together. Many of us, too, have moved left in our ideology as we get older, and as we learn to think more critically about the world around us. In our thirties we found out we don’t need to be legitimized or our skills and power “tapped” by someone or something else. We hold inside our quieter, middle-aged confidence the ability to speak, and with our words, we are precipitating revolution.
