In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Things One Might Want To Know When One Reads My Blog

Lauren

1.) I have been writing on the internet for close to ten years, and maintained a blog for nearly five. Over this time, I have been called every name in the book, received idle death threats, been contacted at my home address and phone number, and had my son and my parenting skills insulted, berated, chided, and belittled. Chances are, if you have something nasty to say, I have not only heard it before, but have heard it several times. Thus, if you intend to hurt my feelings, please be creative.

Let me help you get started. Here is A Helpful Guide to Words and Phrases That Do Not Hurt: feminazi, socialist, Marxist, ugly, dyke, man-hater, man-eater, misandrist, frigid, sexist, bitch, slut, whore, etc. in all their various incarnations and related terminology. I will be more insulted if you badmouth one of my favorite bands than if you revert to name-calling. Really.

2.) This is not a feminist primer. I assume that my audience is well-versed in feminism, feminisms, and has a critical mind intelligent enough to argue in an intelligent manner without resorting to sarcasm and the above-mentioned insults. If you believe I am in error, please state so, but only if you are interested in a civil debate.

2a.) I am not interested in meeting feminist standards of card-carrying feminism. If you read feminist literature, it is likely you have run across the term “feminism(s)” or read that “there are as many feminisms as there are feminists.” If I do not meet your feminist standard, I heartily apologize, but do remember that I and my comrades are complex individuals in a complex world that have taken on a complex label belonging to a very complex theoretical tradition. Feminism is not composed of a bullet-point list of talking points and behaviors. If you don’t understand that, chances are you are not operating from a viewpoint educated on the subject.

3.) If you address me with sarcasm, I likely will address you with the same. One cannot expect a thoughtful and intelligent answer to an unthoughtful comment.

4.) If you have a question about my theory, I have probably addressed it before. Please refer to the search box on the sidebar. If you cannot find an answer, please email me.

5.) Unpaid solicitations and advertisements are unwelcome. If you have a legitimate request for contributions from me or my readers please send it to the email address provided. Otherwise, I have handily set up a Paypal account where you can reimburse me with the amount of bandwidth your text uses.

6.) Solicitations to cover stories or link your blog may also be emailed to me at the address provided. Whether or not I actually respond, link, or cover the story is not indicative of how much I like or dislike you and your work. Most likely I am busy or have other content I would like to cover. It ain’t personal.

7.) Please do not attempt to derail a comment thread. Stay on topic and, again, be respectful.

8.) Do not assume that you know everything there is to know about me simply because you read my weblog on a regular basis. Any judgements you make will be based on the information I have provided you about myself, which is probably vague, incomplete or embellished. If this subject offendeth thee, please refer to narrative and autobiographical literary theory. It ain’t that unusual.

9.) If I did not personally provide you with my URL, this is probably because I may not want you to read certain things I might write about you or others you care about, in order to spare your feelings, avoid drama, or maintain their privacy. While I try to preserve others’ privacy and anonymity, I may slip up now and then. Again, communication is important. Discuss your feelings with me, but do not be surprised if I am miffed.

Also, if you see something you don’t like remember you are free to stop reading at any point. I continue to keep this site because I feel compelled to write, not to please another. That I do manage to please a reader now and then is what makes it extra special.

As I’ve written in an earlier post, I’ve spent several years now writing on a daily basis, sometimes about big things and sometimes not. But I’ve been writing, and that is important to me. As a child I wanted very badly to be a writer, spent hours writing in notebooks, kicking around story ideas, and writing horrible poetry about my teen angst. I get flack from some people around me for “not writing,” as in not writing creatively, but one thing I’ve learned since I dropped the notebook for the keyboard is that writers write. Writers write every day. They do it even when they don’t want to, just like I sometimes don’t want to write here.

Blogging upped the ante for my thoughts and my writings. Once I started to gain a larger readership, I was no longer able to make decisions about my beliefs and opinions by pulling my own heartstrings and seeing where they took me. If I make my opinions public, I am held accountable for them. I have to own my words, be willing to take responsibility for what I have said, admit flaws and quibbles in my rhetoric. I have to pay attention to the particulars of language, how punctuation and word choice can shift an entire argument. I have to be my own editor, personally and publicly.

I’d rather foolishly have my words public and widely-read and be accountable for what I say than be content to make a fool of myself in obscurity. I want to be a part of the discussion. That’s why I started this whole endeavor. In the meantime, the primary rule is one of respect.

Related Commentary:
Thoughts on Blogging, Metacognition, Pedagogy and Ethos
How Blogging Has Changed Me As a Writer
Bits of this diatribe were taken from the README Disclaimer.

20 thoughts on Things One Might Want To Know When One Reads My Blog

  3. Since it’s too late for me to be out of bed -I will continue reading tomorrow; and I will recommend this blog to my daughters. Believe me I just love the way you express yourself -It is beautiful. By the way I’m linking your blog to familiablog.blogspot.

  4. Congrats on an amazing post on the ethics of blogging, of writing, of relating to your reader. I’m translating a couple of your sentences into Portuguese and linking you tonight – I want a few Brazilian bloggers to get a chance to read this post. Beautifully done.

  5. I started reading this and got lost on various side posts. You may or may not be aware that there is a new movie just out that is a ‘documentary’ on the Making of Deep Throat. The guys who made it will be interviewed today(?) on NPR’s Fresh Aire, I think. They contend it was a ‘seminal’ flick (pardon) that helped kick the porn industry into high gear. Sadly Linda M. is no longer with us to offer her much needed perspective, as you have noted previously here. I fear that line of inquiry is being lost in the hussle over the film (Again) and the characters it ‘created’. Sad all around really.

    I’m not sure I share all your apprehension on the issue of porn, but I do think that everyone needs to view such material with their eyes wide open and with fewer misconceptions & myths to play with here. Everyone does have teir own kink, and there’s bound to be a market for it in this brave new world. There’s no stopping it really, perhaps the best thing that can be done is to make certain that a.) no children are being used or exploited and that b.) everything else is wholly consensual and about as equitably compensated as possible. In a capitalist system, this is about the best we can hope for realistically, without the usual brown shirts ‘protecting the women folk’ with plenty of moral strictures and right wing tactics that have little or nothing to do with preventing violence against women.

  7. How funny that you should post this. Just yesterday, my mother found her way to my blog and was extremely miffed that Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian was in my Current Reading list (along with Aristotle, a book about Zen, and Mrs. Dalloway, none of which she took offense to….), and that I had a picture that looked like I was “smoking something.” I assume she meant cigarettes or pot. I told her that it wasn’t me smoking anything (actually, it was, but only a hookah).

    My mother is sort of a sad case. I have more people than I’d like trying to dictate the direction of my blog’s content, even people who should know better.

  8. Yeah, right, like I’d ever address you (or anyone) with scarcasm. Please.

    In honesty, I dig what you’re saying here. Especially the “Also, if you see something you don’t like remember you are free to stop reading at any point. I continue to keep this site because I feel compelled to write, not to please another.” That always has been the tenet for me. I’d include other things like “I’m sorry if there’s not a new post every day. I’m fairly personally invested in what I write about and sometimes that means it takes a little while for the idea to steep properly.”

    And then of course, you went on to passingly mention your humbling readership. Yeah, well, the trees of our compulsion bear different fruit. 🙂 But you’re exactly right… it’s the need to jot things down (and hopefully make someone thing or make someone’s day by sharing) that is why blogging gets done. And it’s the satisfaction of starting to really develop a style and see the improvement in quality over time that keeps me going.

    You are doing something right. Keep kicking ass and taking names.

  9. For the record, “scarcasm” is a subclass of sarcasm that comes exclusively from the inner bitch and cannot be developed through practice.

  10. This is a very thoughtful and well written post. I’ve noticed that many writers have developed blogs to help maintain the discipline of daily writing. Particularly writers who have temporarily decided to take a break from their fiction writing and just want to focus on writing effectively as expression.

  11. Promoting some kind of laws of fantasyland on the internet, and then claiming accountability & complaining about people who break real life social rules – all at the same time doesn’t really make much logical sense, does it?
    You can’t have it both ways.
    I’ve learned one thing in this life – I can’t control other people’s behaviour or thoughts – I can only determine my own, and hold others accountable when they’re on my property, in my home, or on my blog.
    If you want people to treat your on-line journal (blog, whatever) as they would treat a private diary hidden under a mattress… The strategy is simple: Don’t publish it on the world wide web; Hide it under a mattress. (Or at least password protect it. Get a friends-only LiveJournal or something.)

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  13. Expectations are funny things… They often lead to disappointment when they involve other people’s thoughts & actions.
    Lauren can ASK people who know her to let her know that they read her blog, but there’s no way to enforce it. And she can’t tell others how to perceive it, or how treat the information.
    (Unless Lauren’s come up with some kind of Thought Mind Control Device. haha.)

  14. I love the different ways people respond to various posts like this one. Me, I begin to wonder what it was that drove you to write this. Someone’s comment, most likely. I stress over whether it was one I posted, and think back guiltily to comment thread hijacks of the past (they weren’t very active threads! I protest mentally). Then I read other people’s comments and realize that we probably all respond in similar ways. But I think you probably get so much more of the negative commentary than I do– I get lots of sometimes unsolicited advice. It’s the different style blogs.

    But anyway, it sucks that this has to be said AGAIN. I’ve heard you say this in various incarnations in the past.

    Here’s hoping for fewer trolls, and more rewarding ideas. 🙂

  15. Chloe, I agree that the diary analogy isn’t the best example – that was part the the original Midge Disclaimer that I borrowed from and I think it’s problematic, especially in the context of the rest of the post.

    What is relevant from the rest of the statements is that this space is, in some ways, sacred to me, as I can express myself here in ways I can’t otherwise in the real world. I’m a bad speaker and often lose myself in thoughts and ideas – the ADD at work. If anything begins to impede my expression, I would leave here and start again even more anonymously (I’m not that anonymous here) with some regret. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

    And Kim, I had started this post a long time ago and never finished it. I figured it was about time as I seem to be getting exponentially more hits each month. Nothing personal to anyone.

  16. Lauren, it’s not you though. Some people are cretins! haha.

    I mean, at least some of the people you’re probably talking at with this post. Like there are some people who are just not right. Either emotionally stunted, immature, or just plain unwell mentally. Or people who seem to think social mores are suspended on the internet. So they just don’t “get it”. They may actually LIKE the sandbox that you might find distasteful.

    And that’s what’s problematic about the whole get out. You’re talking to people who don’t hear you, I’m afraid. haha. Those of us who do understand, and do behave in a mannerly courteous way, wouldn’t be harrassing you or bothering you. Those that don’t get it, don’t get it because they won’t.

    That was another thing I found RIDICULOUS about that README… “Don’t be a psycho stalker.” Yeah, that’s going to stop someone who’s psycho. haha.

    You simply can’t tell other people what to do or think. You can just either accept their behaviour or reject it.

    And this IS the real world. The same rules can & do apply.

    What I’m shocked at is that you don’t seem to be aware of your own power. You have the power to delete any comment on this blog that you choose. If you don’t like it, think it’s inappropriate, or whatever – you just poof, and it’s gone.

    I treat my blog like my home. Guests are to behave like guests. My home, my rules.

    And anyone who tries to tell me how they should be allowed to behave in my home, can stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine. Nobody’s going to manipulate me into compromising my own standards, my own ethics, my own limits. I get to say how people treat me.

    If someone wants to think ill of me, they’re free to do so.
    But they can take their rude expressions elsewhere.
    If someone complains about having their comments deleted – I tell them – go get your own blog and you can say whatever you like about mine there – but I don’t have to read it, and I don’t have to host one kb of someone else’s rudeness towards me any more than I would allow them to carry on that way in my own home.

    I’ve learned that you can make rules right out of Emily Post’s Blue Book of Social Etiquette until you’re blue in the face. Rules just give some people incentive to beat the system or argue, sadly.
    I’ve found I’ve had much better results with these people by simply deleting & ignoring their comments, rather than responding to them. If they don’t get any response at all, and their comments get deleted, they don’t bother to come back. Because they didn’t get a rise.

    I guess what I’m saying is, “Don’t throw pearls to swine.” 🙂

    But I’ll tell ya what, I’ll write something for y’all that explains how I protect my pearls and keep out the swine. 😉

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  19. Wanted to let you know — I LOVE the blue boomarang background of this site, and have co-opted it for use as a background on my own baby blog (Live Journal, actually). Is this an OK thing to do? I have given credit to your site for the background (entry dated 3/28/05, 8:08 pm). If this is not kosher, le’me know and I’ll go back to my previous, low-rent background!

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