Mind the Gap

I’ve decided I want to blog quite a lot less, for several reasons.

One is that it takes up so much time and energy, that could be going into other projects. All the energy that is spent on giving a fuck about who’s fighting who in the feminist blogosphere, or even what George Galloway or Peter Tatchell has said lately, could be far better spent on other stuff. And by that I don’t mean engaging with the local lefty-libertarian blowhards.

It’s also frustrating that blogging is about building your own personal brand above anything else. Whenever you write something, it doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is who wrote it. When I’ve posted something, I care about whether it was a good post, and whether I can re-read it without cringing. That makes me question how honest my writing is, because for me that’s not the point of writing at all.

The feminist blogosphere isn’t somewhere I particularly want to be completely honest about my political opinions or anything else. I am honest as far as I can be, but I adjust what I post about to who I think might be reading it, who I might piss off, or who might actually like it. I’m not interested in being a blogging superstar, or even a good blogger, or even a blogger. I’m interested in writing, and in feminism.

And to be honest, this blog is far too much all about me. It’s not representative of the group as a whole, and I feel that I’m misrepresenting the group.  

I also think the feminist blogosphere has some pretty big flaws, if the biggest thing people fight over is their identity as feminists. It’s pretty stupid. Why do you care who said you weren’t a feminist? How old are you? Whenever I link to something I actually care about, I feel like I’m raping it by involving it in this clusterfuck.

Likewise, I find it very, very stupid when people equate ‘troll’ with ’male’ and ‘anti-feminist’. For a start, quite a lot of trolls are female, and I should know, I’ve done it before. I don’t mean the ‘let’s argue with a *insert political stripe here* and win’ type of trolling, I mean the posting lots of nonsense that’s deliberately engineered to piss people off kind of trolling. It’s something to do when you’re bored. There are LOLs to be had in it. However much time trolls spend doing their stuff, they take it a lot less seriously and invest a lot less in it than the people they’re trolling. That’s why it works, because people react, go and find them, and try to defend themselves when they could have just ignored it. And it’s not ’abuse’ or whatever, because people can turn off their computers at any time if they want and fuck off outside.

The internet is a bunch of servers run by a bunch of libertarian businessmen and businesswomen. It’s not an arena of free political expression at all, and we should stop treating it as such. Cybernetic woman, my arse. Women from all over the world communicating with each other on an equal basis, triply my arse, for many blindingly obvious reasons. Radical? Too many my arses to mention. It’s a business opportunity for a bunch of rich people. For that reason alone, I feel like an idiot using it to communicate political opinions. And to whom? All those wonderful people out there in the dark?

If anything, blogging atrophies feminism, because whenever something pisses us off, we go and blog about it and feel like we’ve done something. You know, with the Google logo right there at the top of our  posts, or whatever. What’s worse is that ‘feminist infighting’ gets reduced to internet infighting, and we see the trolls or the anti-feminists or whatever as our political opponents, when for a start they don’t give a fuck about what you think. You know, how do we smash ‘patriarchy’ (another word I never used before coming to the blogosphere), if even ruining someone’s internet seems too naughty?  You know, whereas physically shouting at and shoving OAPs about for having a wrong opinion seems absolutely fine?

Seriously, if you give a shit about feminism - and I naively believe a lot of you do - think about all of this.

As for me, I’ll probably be blogging again by next week just by virtue of being bored at work. But there are so many feelings and alarm bells I have to suppress to do this, I really don’t know if it’s a good idea to continue.