bloggerie looney bin
So my acquaintance Lena Chen over at Sex and the Ivy, flushed with shame at getting the boot from some pretentious-ass Crimson finals club, wrote a post extensively detailing the drawbacks of personal blogging. I read it with a nod and a smile, for her experience parallels mine—when I first started Quake, when I first came out as a sexually articulate woman in a society that is still scared of her power.
As is typical with any lament about the drawbacks of fame, Lena has drawn her fair share of critics, claiming her “exhibitionism” and “attention-whoring” display a pathological persona. So, memoirists and essayists who touch on their personal lives are terminally disturbed narcissists? Well, slap my ass and call me Sally! Let’s throw David Sedaris, Erica Jong, and Joan Didion in a looney bin which would make Ken Kesey proud. Mayhaps I’ll resurrect Samuel Pepys from the grave and plop him on a shrink’s leather couch. Anais Nin could inhale Zoloft with Sylvia Plath; drop acid with Suzanna Kaysen for good measure. (I’d put James Frey in the mix as well, but creative recollection ain’t equal to being a diarist, folks. Besides, didn’t Dr Phil already get to him)?
The naysayers in Lena’s peanut gallery tell her that she “brought this on herself”—ergo, she has no right to be pissed. To be sure, as a libertarian gal, I totally agree that Lena, me, and every other sex writer/public blogger out there have rendered ourselves into public figures, and we’re fair game for the slings and arrows of the public. I can’t wave my magic wand and change the fact that the sexually explicit still causes people to squirm in their seats. Yet just as it’s perfectly OK to lambast us to your heart’s content, it’s certainly Lena’s (or my, or anyone’s) prerogative to lament the social conditions that have placed us in this awkward position.
And curiously enough, the numbers speak for themselves. Hundreds of thousands have read Lena’s blog, and plenty o’ people at Penn have admitted to nabbing a copy of Quake when no one was looking. It’s easy to trash smut peddlers in public, but in private? Well, the hits on Lena’s site speak for themselves. You may hate her, but you’re going to read her. Were blogs financially lucrative, I’d imagine Ms. Chen would be laughing all the way to the bank.
I think any chick who chooses to openly discuss sex gets scorched. And the funniest part is, I think most of us are totally ignorant as to the history of this phenomenon—the bashing of the “public” woman as lewd, crude, and obnoxious. Any student of 18th and 19th century literature—of medieval history, even – will tell you that Western society has often equated female performance with brazen sexuality. The stage was verboten to the XX chromosomed for centuries—and the few female actresses who “made it” before our “enlightened” 20th century existence were seen as sluts, harlots, tramps. It was not uncommon to call said actresses prostitutes, or to think that they actually were prostitutes. Female authors like Aphra Behn, who wrote bawdy, explicit poetry, were seen as social pariahs and as sexual psychopaths. Some (male) diarists at the time even compared the fountain pen to an erect penis—equating masculinity with the public, with media, with the only acceptable public gender. Is the penis mighter than the broad? SNL’s Sean Connery impersonator could have a field day with that one.
I’m not trying to say that criticisms of bloggers as narcissistic are totally unfounded. (As Stephen King says in his brilliant memoir-cum-writing manual On Writing, “Show me a humble author and I’ll show you a liar.”) However, I just want to point out—for Lena’s sake and for the sake of other smart ‘n sassy sex bloggers—that our criticism of them as dizzy attention whores kinda reeks of internalized, er, sexism. Plenty of the bloggers are brilliant writers—they just happen to focus their writing attention on the flagrante delicto.
And is that so bad? After all, all of us have sex. And you like to read about it. So why not respect the openly sexual female author? Maybe then Ms. Chen can drink in a finals club in peace.
Comments
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Robert, Nov 13, 09:26:
I’ll admit that I know naught about the Crimsons, but from what I surmised about them and this incident, seemed and sounded that Lena’s gender had pretty much zero to do with their ‘distaste’ and what she does – curious as to what made you attribute it to that? I mean, there are issues like that of a generic nature, I just really couldn’t see anything that they did or that she described that they’d have found it more ‘acceptable’ were she to have a Y chromosome….?
Lola David, Nov 15, 11:08:
Scoot over…I’ll get on that soapbox with you…
Nicely put [in their place]...