Feature Article
Bloggi Blenni Blicci Losing One’s Virtual Virginity
By Alison Owings
Usually, I’m not much of an early riser. Only after I know the sun has appeared somewhere in my time zone and the day is unfolding properly do I hazard the beckoning hours, sliding like an omelet onto a plate.
Imagine my surprise, is what I’m trying to say, when I jolted out of bed about five one morning last November and headed immediately to my computer, where in a fury I typed out thoughts that had been gathering heat in my waking and sleeping brain. About two hours later, I leaned back, spent, and stared at the result: a rare (for me) personal essay. I titled it “My Hillary Problem.”
The basic theme was that she and I have much in common—I listed facets of our backgrounds and presumably shared career challenges—and yet for reasons I tried to fathom, she was not my candidate. It was her votes, yes, especially for this horrid war in Iraq, but also a sense of “tsk-tsking from her.” I ended the piece by saying Hillary transcended Womanhood to me, and—this was a late addition—Barack Obama transcended being African-American to my husband, who had just met him.
My last graf was, “I do regret I have a Hillary problem. In ways, she and I were so close.”
Now, what to do with this unexpected morning latte?
Being without benefit of, say, a column in The New York Times, yet too revved to try a round of newspaper or magazine queries and submissions, along with the wait that ensues, one thought stood out.
Blog!
In my freelance editor’s hat, I’d been editing a (forthcoming) book called Be the Media, about do-it-yourself everything, including blogging, so I knew something about the phenom. In general, however, I didn’t even read blogs, much less had I ever written for one. A proverbial stranger in a strange land was I.
Yet, onward. The few politically-attuned blogs I’d heard of included The Huffington Post, so I wrote it a query, blind.
Whole minutes passed without a response. Then whole hours. (How have I stayed sane while waiting to hear from my agent about her or publishers’ reactions to my book proposals and sample chapters? Does some mental hibernation mode kick in?)
Impatiently, I e-mailed a couple of friends, one of whom dug up a contact at Huffington, named Jessica. I wrote to Jessica. She wrote back promptly. Sure, send it.
I did.
One of many things I did not know: The Huffington Post has an anti-Hillary reputation. That is, upon receiving my query, Jessica presumably did not pound on Ariana Huffington’s door, yelling, “You’ll never guess who just wrote us!” Ariana presumably did not gasp, then recount the enormous buzz in the publishing world that I’m writing a book based on interviews with Native Americans, before Jessica delicately chided her to return to the matter at hand, that I am offering—like a gift, a gift!—a blog.
Jessica, whom I assumed to be 14, guided me through the process, as when I wrote her that all is awesome yet I am so like totally unfamiliar with pay scale.
“I just want to make sure you’re clear that all our bloggers are unpaid. Are you still interested?” she replied. “If you are, send me a short bio and a headshot (attached as a JPEG) and I can get this up.”
So much for blogging for dollars. Jessica also assured me that including my website (compliments of the Authors Guild, I might add), which contains my e-mail address, would probably not swamp me with hate mail.
It did not. Swamped, though, was the blog. Holy smokers, as a Lakota friend says.
Insto-bloggo-feedback, I am here to tell those of you who guard your virtual virginity, is not like publishers forwarding packets of readers’ letters.
The blog appeared November 12. Readers’ “comments,” as they are called in a misleading hint of neutrality and civility, started immediately.
The first were lovely.
“Thank you for a beautiful, well-thought-out piece,” wrote MPeter. “You hit the nail on the head,” wrote Curedlib. blueraven was positive and philosophical. “I think it’s a strong piece of evidence that feminism has made inroads when women like you and me can look at the first truly viable female Presidential candidate and decide that she’s not who we want representing the country because of her policies and practices.” mommadona commented, “ You are not alone. Thank you.”
Sometimes amid the encomia I got distracted by a particular nom de blog.
My favorite: vitasackvillewesttexas.
Meanwhile, the lovefest continued. Katiekat489 thanked me profusely. Ebbtide commented that Hillary “has been quite a disappointment to many women. . . . She is operating in that same era, using the same techniques to herd women in, while at the same time, voting like a Republican,” then ended with, “I love your writing, BTW.”
Hey, this blogging thing is great, I thought.
Then comments about other comments started landing. ”I agree so much with this column, Alison,” slc20 wrote. ”I also agree with Blueraven’s post. I very much wish the first female running for prez was someone i could support,” she added, ending with, “I’m embarrassed to be of the same gender as Hillary.” Oh my. I winced.
Something else I didn’t know about blogs: The seduction of numbers. Blogs list how many comments a posting receives, updated in nanoseconds. 30! 74! This was like checking the Amazon sales ranking for my last book, Hey, Waitress! after being on The Diana Rehm Show.
Up the numbers climbed. Past 100! 150! 200!
By now, I had to acknowledge another factor; some comments were negative.
The first was merely risible. From desertdweller: “I’m guessing that you voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.” Then krissymax jumped in: “You are right desertdweller! This kind of criticism doesn’t help anyone except the Repubs, especially Rudy”; nevadagirl called me “sexist. I didn’t hear one thing about issues you agree or disagree with. Thanks for the cheesy psychoanalysis.” CosmicRocker scolded “Grow up!! She’s not running to be your mommy; she’s running to lead this country. jeese.” noorzhassan seconded Cosmic¬Rocker. “Sounds like Ms. Owings may have unresolved childhood issues.” Such as? I wondered, alarmed, as caltech piled on. “So you don’t like her—so what, get over it. There’s no perfect candidate. She’s the dems best bet in 08.” sufi66 announced an “Alison problem,” patsynow detected “a note of envy and jealousy” (disputed by dsigeorge), while mfarrell got “the distinct `feeling’ that our writer here is simply needing to play junior high pajama party night with all her readers. Eeekk!”
Readers such as longislandlol salved my ego with, “Brilliant article,” and lamarguerite put me over the top. “You did it! Articulated what I could not figure out for myself. I ditto everything you wrote about Hillary. Women are known for their intuition. In this case, I’ve got to trust mine, and yours. And also the more rational facts you just outlined.” That was slammed by morris1030, who posted pro-Hillary comments about 10 times. (I wondered if morris1030 has other work.)
Serious Hubert entered the fray. “Ms. Owing’s post is an attempt to analyze the `vibe’ that Hillary gives off. When she says one thing—such as `I care about the middle class’ her body language (especially her facial gestures) say something altogether different. Whether or not we are willing to admit it, emotions play a large role in what we do and how we think . . . .”
So there CosmicRocker, sufi66, patsynow, and . . . Now, wait a minute.
I wrote the blog because I felt compelled to. I was trying to get a handle on, yes, my feelings. Why should I be surprised when others expressed theirs? But were they getting more personal toward me than I was toward Hillary? Or was I more thin-skinned than I had realized? And had I disobeyed the childhood rule (one of my “unresolved childhood issues”?) of “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all,” which was boomeranging back? Did Hillary and I now have something else in common?
No time to think much about any of that; the count kept climbing. 250! 275!
Besides getting seduced by numbers, I did a Google ego search. There I learned 1) the phrase “My Hillary Problem” was not orginal with me (giving me the teensiest bit of sympathy for those accused of plagiarism—if no more than three words are involved) and 2) not all my readers were anonymous. Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz, in a column about people’s “emotional reactions” to the former first lady, wrote, “This Huffington Post essay by Alison Owings captures those feelings as well as anything I’ve seen,” then quoted from the piece at length. Yo, Howard.
And back on the blog, my side was back. Slims mom assured me, “I couldn’t have said it better myself. It is nothing I can put my finger on, but rather a feeling she is playing to the audience and is more interested in being first, than in what she can do for the country.” susaw shouted “Hallelujah!” while daniebordo commented on his, or her, “joy to hear you voice your own opinion.”
But the joyride was short-lived. bjneider found “your review of Hilary to be demeaning not to Hilary but to you. Obviously, you have had many problems in your career trying to break the glass ceiling and achieving your goals as a woman. However, your review struck me as snarky and irrelevant to the case at hand.” mfarrell agreed, in the Briticism that seems to have invaded our shores. “Spot on! Alison Owings’ article strikes me as a great amount of pent up anger being lashed out at Hillary and for what reason? To soothe her own ego?”
More disagreements erupted, now among commenters. “Wow, dude,” wrote Pandorasbox. “Did you actually read the blog? AmandaM chided someone else, “Clearly you didn’t read the whole article. She says pretty clearly that she disagrees with Hillary’s vote to go to war in Iraq and . . . .” Blogging was beginning to feel like being a patient at a teaching hospital, undergoing examination by a group of interns.
Meanwhile, former long lost CBS colleagues took advantage of my website address and wrote. Another told me, to my chagrin, that I erred in thinking myself the third known woman newswriter at CBS. (I’d meant on The Evening News.) A stranger wrote to order my first book, The Wander Woman’s Phrasebook/How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages. (Who says blogs don’t pay?)
Back on blog, the comments kept piling up. 300! More than 300! Was I about to be offered a blog of my own? Jessica grounded me. The “content of the post” matters more than not, she e-mailed, although “our more established bloggers” do get a lot of comments once they have built up a following. “So . . . your experience was unusual but not surprising!”
By now, I began to notice something else. Many of “my” new readers were not exactly mine, but were fighting one another on subjects—Chris Matthews, Tim Russert—well beyond my post. Nippersdad and Mr.Liberal53 got into a fray, revisiting former squabbles. So many inter-comment arguments broke out, in fact, that my analogy changed. I now felt I’d invited everyone to an open house, but at least half the guests skipped the hors d’oeuvres, to run out to the backyard and fight in the sandbox.
Then, one comment hit home hard. KarenZipdrive definitely was not interested in hors d’oeuvres. “I want a bitch in office who will scare the enemy—not with empty words but with the threat of her countenance of forced pleasantry,” she wrote, going on in that vein, before adding, “As a professional journalist, you might want to revisit the SPJ [Society of Professional Journalists] canon of ethics and reread the part about remaining politically neutral under your byline unless you’re an editorial writer. I too am a journalist, but I have the sense to use a pseudonym when I am opining my personal political beliefs.”
Her comment caused me to do a mental checklist of My Life in Journalism, from getting a B.A. in the subject, to being scrupulously fair as a television news¬writer, to remembering my transcriber recently say I’m her only client who relistens to each interview to compare it with the transcript. Call me Ms. Fastidious with quotes and objectivity, I would have said. I thought of how at protests (mostly against wars, but also impending prison executions) I went as an Ordinary Citizen, staying out of camera range lest a viewer think me biased. Did I throw all this carefulness away on a blog? Was my morning bed leap so intense that I will never be trusted to write objectively again about anything?
Or, does it matter?
Just before The Huffington Post closed the comments (at 348, now oddly down to 341 last I checked) to “My Hillary Problem,” susiesorority wrote, “This piece is as worthless” as one on celebrity moms.
dgscol, however, got in the last comment, calling me “very cute.”
So there.
Alison Owings is a freelance editor and writer, and author of Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray, Frauen/German Women Recall the Third Reich, and is currently writing a book based on interviews with Native Americans about contemporary life. She has been an Authors Guild member since 2003, and lives in Mill Valley, California. www.alisonowings.com
