I Blame Dooce
Posted on | July 25, 2009 | 15 Comments
This weekend I’m identifying as lesbian. Without the having sex with women (or womyn) part. Though according to the magnificent Deb on the Rocks, there’s a campaign among the BlogHer lezzies to get a tongue in one of my orifices. Deb is so charming and kind and beautiful and wonderful and famouser than I am and so she’s the lead in this little contest of wills. Also I think she’s putting me on.
I’ve spent the whole conference with the lezzies. Except for yesterday when I squared my shoulders and told Kathryn (Recovering Straight Girl) that I would stop hiding behind the skirts (worn, baggy jeans) of the lezzies and branch out on my own. I would find my own people. I would hang out with straight women.
Lunch rolled around and I chose a table with some friendly-looking women. I sat down and put on my best friendly Portland face. Ready to make some conversation.
Let me explain something about BlogHer. It’s very well organized and like all events, the amount of money people pay doesn’t match up to the expenses. I know. This is my favorite misconception about Back Fence — that we’re making money hand over fist because 300 people attend the event and pay $10-12. It’s pretty easy math, but what’s less easy is calculating the behind-the-scenes costs. BlogHer is no different. So there are sponsors to make up for the loss.. The sponsors take over the whole bottom floor and have booths full of laundry soap and MaryKay makeup and more laundry soap.
And every single time slot has a session on Mommy Blogging. Mommy Blogging. These Mommy Bloggers own this conference. As I’ve overheard the conversations of these women, they say Mommy Blogger without a touch of irony. I’m confused. But whatever.
So I sat down with some friendly looking women. The woman next to me was a PR person for a laundry soap company and as I sat, she asked me, “Are you a Mommy Blogger?” And I said, “Well, I have a child and I also blog, but I wouldn’t call myself a Mommy Blogger.”
After that, not a single person at the table engaged me in conversation. I tried to chat with the other women at the table, who were, by the way, wearing t-shirts that had some variation of Mommy and Blog written on them. In pen. I tried. And I was totally iced out.
I finished my food, put my plate away and sat down with the lezzies and joined right in the conversation. They know I’m straight and they never bat an eye. I went to the lezzie party and had a blast. And now I’m sitting with the lezzies for the lezzie keynote speech. From here on out, I’m identifying as lezzie.
Just until Sunday when I leave. For Portland. Home of the lezzie.
Comments
15 Responses to “I Blame Dooce”
Leave a Reply
July 25th, 2009 @ 11:35 am
We welcome you into the fold. We’re nice like that.
July 25th, 2009 @ 4:52 pm
You’d think mommy-bloggers, like the ice-queens, would be dying at the chance to interact with new, interesting, different people, so you know, they might have something fun to blog about…Either way, its good that you’re making every effort to fit in with the other kids.
If necessary, I recommend doing the Thriller dance in the main lobby while simultaneously bellowing out some liony roars. Go get ‘em!
“Night creatures calling, the dead start to walk in their masquerade…”
July 25th, 2009 @ 5:15 pm
As a mom who also blogs, I must admit I neither understand mommybloggers nor do I want to meet any.
My womb has been inhabited twice. I have wiped butts and handed out juice boxes. That doesn’t make me some kind of heroine, and it doesn’t necessarily make for good blogging material.
Mommybloggers wouldn’t exist if there were not corporations willing to use them to promote their products.
Some day, mommybloggers will go the way of momjeans. And until then, I’ll stay over here with those who talk, write and think about things beyond the womb.
July 25th, 2009 @ 5:33 pm
Those mommy bloggers… I don’t know about them. Really. Seriously.
And it’s not because I don’t think they like me either.
July 26th, 2009 @ 2:25 pm
I think you found your group (& the mommy bloggers don’t know what they missed)
Have fun!!
July 27th, 2009 @ 9:18 am
My dear friend and roommate at BlogHer, Kali, burnt her leg terribly on one of the lights in the lunch room on Friday. We went off in search of a first aid kit and found the Johnson and Johnson booth. SILLY ME, but I thought they might have some bandaids because there was a GIANT first aid kit sitting on their table.
Anyway, the girl sitting at the table asked us, “Are y’all Mommy Bloggers?” And, I said, “We don’t have kids.” Then she asks, “Well, what do y’all write about then?”
So, I am closing my blog because I do not have a baby and therefore have nothing to write about.
July 27th, 2009 @ 12:06 pm
Women are only allowed to blog about food or babies. What else could possibly have to talk about?
July 27th, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
WE.
we.
July 27th, 2009 @ 4:42 pm
I’m really glad you ended up hanging out with us. It’s too bad that Blogher is so heavily marketed toward mommy bloggers that anyone outside of that mainstream category becomes immediately othered.
On that same note, I was thinking about our group less as a bunch of lezzies and more just as a group of cool queers/artists/writers. I was wondering why you used the word lesbian, especially since I didn’t think our group even had much to do with sexuality–it was more that we were not mommy bloggers.
Hope you had a nice flight back to Portland. Stay in touch!
July 27th, 2009 @ 4:53 pm
Also to add: More that we were not mommy bloggers and, instead, we were women thinking about the larger implications of having a womens’ blog conference so heavily marketed towards a stay-at-home mom who blogs about having kids. It makes me think of the now-cliched 1950s housewife who stays at home with the kids and gets bombarded with marketing campaigns for new household appliances through TV, radio, and direct marketing. The new wave of mommy bloggers, in many ways, seem like an updated version of that 1950s housewife–except now the mommy blogger has a “voice” online, on her blog and on Twitter, and she has an online instead of in-person “community.” I think of the neighborhoods of the 50s versus the fractured networked society we live in where neighbors dont talk to one another much.
That said, I think our group was not only women thinking outside the norm about the flaws of our healthcare industry–especially as they relate to women and women of color–but also about body image, anyone who doesn’t fit the mainstream middle-class successful white woman prototype, the politics of food, and the need for more local, sustainable businesses like Wolfbait and B-Girls.
I think that most of us in this group happened to be women who sleep with women is besides the point–our coming together had little to do with sexuality, and more to do with our politics, ideologies, and creativity. I wish you had spoken about that in your post rather than boiled it down to the simple fact that we weren’t straight. It seems to me that we were all queer–not in terms of sexuality–but rather ideologies, and that this queerness sets us apart from the mommy bloggers and brought us together for a really enjoyable weekend.
July 27th, 2009 @ 7:14 pm
I love hanging out with lesbians! I’m always nervous when I say it that way because I don’t want anyone to confuse that love for the straight douche guy sexual objectification sort of love for lesbians. I like lesbian “culture” for lack of a better way to put it.
I would hang out at the e-room more often if I didn’t get so many suspicious/dirty looks.
The “mommy blogger” people. I just don’t have words to frame my contempt. Motherhood is difficult, admirable, and certainly a big part of a person’s life. But why the fuck would you want to simply melt yourself down to that and throw everything else about your identity out the window?
July 27th, 2009 @ 7:39 pm
Though I was not at Blogher and like you, am straight, I’m glad to hear that there would have been a crowd for me. I love blogging because I love to help people find more time for creativity. While I do accept advertising from those in my community, I have zero interest in trying the latest overpriced laundry soap and blogging about it. Plus, I don’t understand who really wants to read that kind of writing, no matter how witty. I know I don’t have time for it! I want to learn from my internet consumption – not be marketed to.
Sorry to ramble on here – I just wanted to say thanks for this post and I’m glad to know there were cool “others” at ‘09.
July 28th, 2009 @ 7:19 am
Perhaps, mommy bloggers circle their wagons and ignore anyone outside their clique as a protective measure against those who would denigrate and deride their choice of blog topics over more women empowering topics like health care and why spending a lot of money at Ikea is more socially responsible then buying a crap table at Wal-mart because you know the kids will write all over it.
Cliques happen for a reason.
My favorite saying is only poets read poets (Well sometimes the friends of the poet read their poems that that’s iffy.) I think this applies to everything.
Only mommy bloggers read other mommy bloggers. Only writer-bloggers read other writer-bloggers. Only lesbian bloggers read blogs written by other lesbian bloggers.
Since you aren’t a “mommy blogger”, but a mom who blogs about “writer-blogger” stuff, you weren’t the target demographic for that those “mommy bloggers”.
Yes, they could have been nicer. I guess the last thing I can say is another cliched adage: People don’t care what you know until they know you care.
Or in many cases, they don’t care if they know you don’t care. For example, if one group of people spent time discussing how they didn’t care that sponsorship was heavily focused on a different group of people, this underlying attitude could possibly contribute to the circling of the wagons behavior.
Of course, the sponsors willing to be sponsors could be blamed wanting to focus their marketing on the folks who might actually buy their product and talk about in their blogs. They should realize that sponsorship is about paying a lot of money to be dissed by people who think they’re being too commercial.
Sorry for the cognitive dissonance. Sorry that the other groups weren’t more welcoming, but it’s that 65% of communication is body language thing. People can tell when you’re looking down on them. Even the ones who you don’t think are that deep because they’ve chosen to blog about their kids.
July 28th, 2009 @ 10:53 am
i’ve got nothing to add but the fact that i’m a motherfucker and proud of it.
July 30th, 2009 @ 1:33 am
We ended up with a similar gameplan of ‘if nothing else, we know we’ll find our people at the Queerosphere’. And we did. (Consider us charter members of the Deb On The Rocks Straight Girl Outreach Program.) We didn’t have any experiences quite as bad as what you described, but we did find ourselves feeling the need to say stuff like ‘I’m not a mommyblogger but I do write about my daughter sometimes’ and ‘I don’t have kids but I’m a godmother with two awesome little goddaughters’ a lot because it was just easier to give certain people some kind of kid connection than to keep trying to explain what Evil Slutopia is all about.
That said, we thought you were awesome, and we’re loving this new conference idea that you’ve got cooking. Let us know if we can do anything to help!