Why I Didn’t Delete Tiger Beatdown
by Sady Doyle
I really like blogging. I really like blogging, a whole lot. I have met several of my closest friends through it. I met the guy I’m currently dating through it. Blogging has improved my life to a tremendous degree, and given me self-confidence and something to look forward to and care about, in a way I would not previously have imagined possible.
I also think deleting blogs is bad, because it’s a way of denying accountability.
HOWEVER. I struggle, on a more or less daily basis, with the urge to delete this blog. While I can no doubt be a jerk and a bad person at times, sometimes on this very blog, I don’t want to erase that. I would just go and do it somewhere else, anyway. And I like being called out; I like being held accountable. I was raised Catholic, so I believe a regular dose of guilt and penance is good for the soul. If no-one ever chastises you, how will you know what you screwed up? But I also don’t feel, given some of the people and forces I am currently interacting with, that it is a good idea for me to have shared so much information regarding my past abuse and sexual assault via blogging. Or, for that matter, information about my family. Which is why I want so badly to delete this blog and never look back.
I wrote the whole blog, and everything else I wrote, on the assumption that nobody would ever be interested in me in an actively hostile way (well, not again; there was one scary thing, a long while ago), or on the assumption that, if someone took that sort of interest, they would be an isolated individual (as in the case of the one scary thing). That was a stupid assumption to make. Because when I wrote this blog, I forgot about what happened to Kathy Sierra.
Or Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte. Or Jessica Valenti. Or, like, basically anyone else whose name I know: When feminist women reach a certain critical mass of readership or influence, then mass negative exposure and harassment invariably comes their way. Sooner or later, there are just too many people who know about you, and the threats become credible: Blacklisting, hacking, smear campaigns, invasion of private property, maybe even straight-up bodily harm. At a certain point it goes beyond grudges or trolling or sarcastic comments or even just isolated scary dudes; it becomes a large-scale Thing, and it attracts its fair share of people who operate without anything even vaguely resembling a conscience.
I knew this happened a lot, and I even wrote about it, because it’s an important issue, but for some reason, I was able to avoid it or was sheltered from it for a very long time, relatively speaking. I made it past the two-year mark, and well into year three, before it hit me, and our readership got pretty large beforehand. So I figured it wouldn’t happen to me, because I wasn’t important enough as a target, or because people were just being weirdly nice to me - Harriet J had to shut down Fugitivus temporarily after, I believe, writing one damn blog entry about Google Buzz that was less than flattering; it happened to Annaham and FWD over one blog post criticizing AN AMANDA PALMER SIDE PROJECT, for chrissakes - and I didn’t take appropriate precautions. And then it happened. Because it always does.
I mean, let’s review just a few of the more famous cases. They often have something to do with women approaching positions of power: As we all know, when Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan were hired for the John Edwards campaign, there was a national and frequently televised campaign aimed not only at getting them fired, but at making them functionally unemployable. It went on for a long while, it was vicious, and it involved Bill O’Reilly, which is never fun. Furthermore, Jessica Valenti was accused of slutting it up with Bill Clinton because she was in a room with him along with some other people, and there was a photo of all the people in the room (including Jessica Valenti and Bill Clinton), and she was standing with one shoulder forward in the photo, so: You know. Clearly some hot, slutty Clinton action happening there. In each case, this happened because the women were getting too close to power: A President, a presidential candidate. The idea that these women might be doing politics, not “just” gender politics. That was enough to set it off.
Read the rest at Tiger Beatdown
I really like blogging. I really like blogging, a whole lot. I have met several of my closest friends through it. I met the guy I’m currently dating through it. Blogging has improved my life to a tremendous degree, and given me self-confidence and something to look forward to and care about, in a way I would not previously have imagined possible.
I also think deleting blogs is bad, because it’s a way of denying accountability.
HOWEVER. I struggle, on a more or less daily basis, with the urge to delete this blog. While I can no doubt be a jerk and a bad person at times, sometimes on this very blog, I don’t want to erase that. I would just go and do it somewhere else, anyway. And I like being called out; I like being held accountable. I was raised Catholic, so I believe a regular dose of guilt and penance is good for the soul. If no-one ever chastises you, how will you know what you screwed up? But I also don’t feel, given some of the people and forces I am currently interacting with, that it is a good idea for me to have shared so much information regarding my past abuse and sexual assault via blogging. Or, for that matter, information about my family. Which is why I want so badly to delete this blog and never look back.
I wrote the whole blog, and everything else I wrote, on the assumption that nobody would ever be interested in me in an actively hostile way (well, not again; there was one scary thing, a long while ago), or on the assumption that, if someone took that sort of interest, they would be an isolated individual (as in the case of the one scary thing). That was a stupid assumption to make. Because when I wrote this blog, I forgot about what happened to Kathy Sierra.
Or Melissa McEwan and Amanda Marcotte. Or Jessica Valenti. Or, like, basically anyone else whose name I know: When feminist women reach a certain critical mass of readership or influence, then mass negative exposure and harassment invariably comes their way. Sooner or later, there are just too many people who know about you, and the threats become credible: Blacklisting, hacking, smear campaigns, invasion of private property, maybe even straight-up bodily harm. At a certain point it goes beyond grudges or trolling or sarcastic comments or even just isolated scary dudes; it becomes a large-scale Thing, and it attracts its fair share of people who operate without anything even vaguely resembling a conscience.
I knew this happened a lot, and I even wrote about it, because it’s an important issue, but for some reason, I was able to avoid it or was sheltered from it for a very long time, relatively speaking. I made it past the two-year mark, and well into year three, before it hit me, and our readership got pretty large beforehand. So I figured it wouldn’t happen to me, because I wasn’t important enough as a target, or because people were just being weirdly nice to me - Harriet J had to shut down Fugitivus temporarily after, I believe, writing one damn blog entry about Google Buzz that was less than flattering; it happened to Annaham and FWD over one blog post criticizing AN AMANDA PALMER SIDE PROJECT, for chrissakes - and I didn’t take appropriate precautions. And then it happened. Because it always does.
I mean, let’s review just a few of the more famous cases. They often have something to do with women approaching positions of power: As we all know, when Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan were hired for the John Edwards campaign, there was a national and frequently televised campaign aimed not only at getting them fired, but at making them functionally unemployable. It went on for a long while, it was vicious, and it involved Bill O’Reilly, which is never fun. Furthermore, Jessica Valenti was accused of slutting it up with Bill Clinton because she was in a room with him along with some other people, and there was a photo of all the people in the room (including Jessica Valenti and Bill Clinton), and she was standing with one shoulder forward in the photo, so: You know. Clearly some hot, slutty Clinton action happening there. In each case, this happened because the women were getting too close to power: A President, a presidential candidate. The idea that these women might be doing politics, not “just” gender politics. That was enough to set it off.
Read the rest at Tiger Beatdown