Motherhood Quote by Siobhan Fahey

Fahey’s gripe isn’t just about bad PR; it’s a snapshot of how pop culture polices women’s identities to keep the product legible. “They said I was a married mother of two” lands like a label slapped on a shrink-wrapped CD: a biography turned into a branding constraint. In that framing, domesticity isn’t neutral trivia. It’s a signal to the industry about who she’s “for,” how risky she is, and whether she can be sold as desire, rebellion, or relevance.

The sting comes from the mismatch she points out: “the record sounded like an indie album,” yet the marketing machine didn’t have a pre-cut template for a woman making left-of-center music while also being a grown adult with a family. That’s the subtext: genre is supposed to be about sound, but it’s often about story. Men get to age into “serious artist.” Women get shunted into “mom,” a category that reads as finished, unsexy, and therefore unprofitable.

Her punchline - “they didn’t know how to market it!” - is doing double duty. It’s exasperation, but it’s also an indictment of an industry that treats its own lack of imagination as the artist’s problem. When she widens the target to “this country” and “the music and media industry,” she’s connecting the dots between cultural sexism and commercial decision-making: gatekeepers don’t just reflect bias; they operationalize it, turning prejudice into rollout strategy, press angles, and radio choices.

The line feels contemporary because it names the trap bluntly: women are asked to be authentic, then punished when their real lives complicate the fantasy being sold.