Women’s Blogs

We went to see The Post and then stopped at a diner to get fries afterward.  While we were driving to the diner, I checked my email on my phone and saw that VOTY (Voices of the Year, in case you haven’t been to the BlogHer conference) winners had been announced.  I’m not going to BlogHer this year, but I usually have a few friends on the VOTY list.  I wanted to send them congratulations in the morning.

But the list description was confusing.  Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea Clinton?  Were they having multiple presenters this year?  (For those who haven’t been to BlogHer, a few years ago, they started having a celebrity presenter at VOTY vs having one of us* present.) I clicked on the list and became even more confused.  The honourees were… celebrities for lack of a better word.

They were organizers of the Women’s March like Linda Sarsour.  Or the founder of #metoo, Tarana Burke.  They were Gwyneth and Chelsea and Jodi Kantor from the New York Times.

They weren’t us*.

I keep using that word — *us — and maybe it’s because it gets to the heart of VOTY.  Voices of the Year was the community keynote.  It was a time in the conference when we didn’t have a celebrity or expert tell us how to live or think or feel.  I mean, those main keynotes were great, but this was OUR keynote, the regular blogger’s keynote, and 20 or so women would get up and read a piece that had been chosen by the judges for inclusion.

It was democratic, and I’ve been on both ends of the process.  I had a piece chosen for the second VOTY.  What you can’t see from the video is that I wore the merry widow-like contraption on the stage, and I hiked up the skirt on the other side of the podium when I got to that point in the story.  I was TERRIFIED, but I knew that every single woman in that room would get it.  So I did it.  I was sharing a funny story, but it was also a very emotional story for me because… it was about not feeling like a woman.  Not being able to do this thing that women do.  And trying to take back one tiny piece of control in that situation.  Hearing the reaction from the audience as I read my story made me feel like I was being cushioned by thousands of other women’s hands.  Held up.

And I was a judge for two other VOTYs.  It was an honour that you sometimes got when you were chosen for VOTY — you turned around and got to invite other people into the community keynote.  I read hundreds of posts and marked my favourites, and then got to attend and listen to them aloud.

The community keynote was always the highlight of BlogHer, a true reflection of my daily work at the BlogHer site.  For nine years, I read every post that came into my section and chose the ones to push to the front page.  Most of the time I didn’t know the woman.  They were chosen because they wrote something great and we wanted more people to read it.  But I got to know them because once they were chosen once, they kept coming back and writing other great things.  I met so many people through BlogHer.

BlogHer was — for women — the site where regular people (us) wrote their reaction to the daily news or life events.  It was honest and raw and confessional and conversational.  And then the Internet flooded with similar sites and everything changed.  But I got to be there for nine years, part of this incredible community of women.

There’s this line in The Post where the men are discussing Katharine Graham, and one of them points out that if a person is told they’re incompetent and their voice doesn’t matter enough times, they’ll believe it and it will inform their actions.  Or something like that.  And when we were watching that part of the movie, I was thinking about how Katharine Graham’s story is really every woman’s story.  Girls receive an outsider message over and over again, and it sometimes becomes the way we view our work and our voice and our words.

But BlogHer was a hugely successful space that took back that narrative and said EVERY WOMAN’S WORDS MATTER.  Not just the ones that bubble up to the top and break the surface, becoming newsworthy.  That every single woman, famous or not, has something to say.  And we should all listen.

So if I cried reading the VOTY news, it was because I was thinking about what was lost.  Those women like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea Clinton will continue to have their voices heard, even if they’re not in VOTY.  They’ve broken the surface and become newsworthy.  If SheKnows, who now owns BlogHer, had called it something else, it wouldn’t have bothered me.  But VOTY was the community keynote, a time to celebrate voices that weren’t heard otherwise.

The same night, I read the Washington Post article about how women’s blogs have become a glossy magazine of perfection and sponsored content.  And, yes, there is some truth in that statement when you think about the early days of the Internet when we wrote just because we wanted to write without any understanding of what blogging could be.  But that article missed the fact that the old style of blogging still exists.  Every day I read blogs that are confessional and conversational, with nary a product placement in site.

At the same time, I don’t blame those women who do write sponsored content.  I celebrate them.  Blogging has been a way to make a living, and I am glad they have found a way to be financially compensated for their work.  Some people write because they want to write.  And some people write because they get paid to write.  And both are valid paths to putting words into the universe.  And sometimes they are one and the same; confessional, conversational, and compensated.

I miss the old community.  I also know that a large chunk of the old community is still alive and well because I see them in my blog feed every day.  And I see new people join us, all the time.  I read stories every day that are confessional and conversational, the same as the early days of blogging.

Thank you for keeping it real.  Thank you for continuing to write.  Getting your voice out there is important.  I promise.