Is There an Echo in Here?
scrappybadger January 1st, 2009
Here I am returning again for what I hope will not be a brief, bi-annual visit. I’m a bit dizzy, and my computer screen won’t be still for me after scrolling through 377 spam comments that have been in moderation for who knows how long. I won’t bore you, if indeed there still is a ‘you’ out there after all this time, with the usual excuses for not having blogged in forever. What I will do is cut myself some slack, remind myself that blogging is something I’ve always wanted to do for fun and personal development rather than as an obligation.
Excuses aside, I do think it is important to look at one of the reasons why I’ve been absent for so long. I am afraid of you, Gentle Reader. I know, it is absurd. You’ve never been anything but kind to me in both incarnations of my blog, yet I can’t help but worry. I suppose it stems from that goddamned need to be liked and to do what I’m supposed to do — the same one from which so many women struggle to free themselves. I imagine myself armed with all the feminist theory in the world, but it amounts to little more than a paper shield, cardboard at best, held up against the persistent onslaught of armored Angels in the House, dragging behind their horses the ragged corpses of all the other women who have unsuccessfully fought against the urge to be liked.
Being a feminist, and I mean actively resisting patriarchy, requires one to let go of the need to be liked. It’s that simple. So what do I do? How do I reconcile the two? How do I resist feminine martyrdom? I’ve trained for it my entire life, and I am pretty good at it. Heck, I’m being modest; I’m really good at it.
You may be wondering what this has to do with my blog exactly. Let me explain. I spend a lot of time talking about audience with my freshman composition students. I explain to them how important it is that they anticipate both positive and negative audience reactions. I urge them to think about what their audience wants and needs before they ever start writing. In short, I train them like the world trains little girls. I teach them to put aside their ideas until they can figure out how best to make their readers happy. What woman, with any ability for self-reflection at all, can say she hasn’t done that hundreds and thousands and millions of times? As Woolf puts it, the Angel “sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it.”
Now one part of me says that’s just good writing. How can you be expected to have an impact on anyone without figuring out what s/he needs? The other part of me wonders if, like so many other aspects of writing, this is yet another patriarchal idea that has become so ingrained in our consciousnesses that it just feels like fact. After all, there have been many women who have broken through the traditional “rules” of writing — women who say fuck it to a conflict-climax-resolution model of storytelling, for example. Why not, then, examine this other rhetorical strategy, this idea of reader as God? Oh, but it is scary.
This brings me back to my blogging. It is this anxiety about audience that makes blogging increasingly difficult for me. What do I have to say that is new? What can I say that is different? that matters? The very kinds of questions that I’m raising, though, remind me of something else. I am again prioritizing someone else over myself in my own life, a life of which I am the primary actor. I am the leading woman, not a character actor, not a supporting actor. Why, then, should it matter what a reader thinks? After all, this blog was a gift to myself.
For now that realization feels really helpful. Now I’ll just need to reread this post once a week.
