Jenny Mollen‘s recent social media post with her son sparked some conversation on The View on Wednesday, though Whoopi Goldberg admitted she didn’t really get the hubbub around the post.
“I don’t understand any of this, so I’m just going to say what’s there,” Goldberg prefaced before continuing to read the teleprompter. “Actress and writer Jenny Mollen is defending herself over a social media post embracing her 12-year-old son in bed, along with a now-deleted caption, ‘Your eldest son will be the most toxic guy you’ll ever date.’”
Goldberg said that people online commented that the post and its caption were “inappropriate,” reading that Mollen defended her post by claiming “it’s just her hugging her son” and that she blamed “her separation from actor Jason Biggs for making her a target because she’s ‘not protected by the institution of marriage.’”
“I didn’t understand the picture,” Goldberg reiterated. “So, I’ll just throw it to y’all.”
The rest of the Hot Topics Table came to Mollen’s defense or felt fairly indifferent about the matter, with guest co-host Kara Swisher telling the table, “I don’t care.”
“We just said, mind your own business and you won’t be minding mine,” she elaborated. “Now, she did put it out on public media, essentially. Look, she’s hugging her son. So what? I hug my kids, my boys, all the time, and one of them’s 6’5″, so it takes a little bit to do that.”
Sara Haines teased, “So you’re really hugging his waist.”
While she noted that people feel like “we have to dunk on everyone for everything they do,” Swisher urged critics to “leave her alone.” Meanwhile, Haines explained that the May 25 post arrived “on the heels of a beautiful essay” that Mollen published on Substack earlier last month.
“Jenny Mollen is deliberately provocative,” Haines shared. “She’s trying to get your attention. There’s this beautiful, transparent authenticity to her that makes her so endearing and loving. She wrote an essay specifically about moms and sons just a couple weeks ago, and it was about letting go. How she now understood why her mother-in-law may have looked at her a certain way because she was letting go of her baby boy.”
Haines insisted that Mollen was “addressing” the “universal, perennial truth that if you’re a good parent, you’ll raise them to leave you” in her post.
“So that was an attention-getting title,” she added of the caption. “This is Jenny Mollen being Jenny Mollen.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin said that she is “already weighing” what she shares about her three-month-old son on social media, noting that her son is “an individual with agency” who will have to deal with whatever “headlines” or “Google Images” of him surface on the internet.
“It’s no judgment of her, but I think parents should weigh that because they’re individuals in their own right,” Griffin said.
Swisher introduced the co-hosts to the term “share-nt,” which she said her son previously called her before she “stopped” sharing so much about him. Sunny Hostin, who is also a boy mom, teased that she is a “share-nt” who “share[s her] boy with everyone.”
“I adore my son. Everybody knows that. And I didn’t have a problem with the picture at all,” Hostin said. “I mean, if that were a mother hugging her daughter, would the reaction have been the same?”
While Griffin and Hostin agreed that the “grabby caption” was likely what caused the uproar, Hostin argued that “there is nothing wrong with loving your boy.”
The boy moms at the table continued to chat about the matter, though Goldberg remained puzzled, and was not afraid to admit that as she closed out the segment.
“This explained nothing to me,” she declared. “I still don’t understand it.”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.
