Thank You For Sharing: For women, blogs are becoming as essential as lipstick
Toward the end of a wearying day of caring for two active children and getting ready for Christmas, Emily Becker reached into her cupboard for a granola bar.
Instead, a jar of chili oil fell out. Its lid popped on impact, sending a slick orange pool sprawling across her kitchen floor and under the refrigerator. Already tired and hungry, Becker had to summon the energy to fight another battle. As she grabbed her paper towels and Windex, she had one consolation: “At least I can write a blog item about it.”
The next day she typed out a few paragraphs on her computer and shared her misery with the world on her little corner of the Internet, called What Went Wrong ( whatwentwrongnow.blogspot.com).
Instead of gritting her teeth or trying to track down a friend to vent to, “I can share this unfortunate thing and people will be slightly amused, or commiserate,” she said.
Women have always liked to talk. In other eras, those conversations might have taken place while washing clothes at the river or waiting to fill buckets at the village well. Today, women –from teenagers to great-grandmothers –make blogs a part of their everyday lives. It’s not an exclusive technological cult anymore, but just another tool of self-fulfillment, like a personal trainer or a reading group.
Over half of blogs authored by women were created in the last two years, according to a recent study commissioned by the BlogHer media network. About one-third of American women are active blog readers, posting a response at least weekly, or publishing blogs themselves.
“It’s a good release,” said Becker, who has been composing her weblog from East Amherst since 2006. “Sometimes I have a day where I just have to go through the numbers and list all the bad things that have happened to me.”
There are women who focus on a particular subject, like gardening, independent music or breast cancer treatment. There are women who focus on their children and parenting, politics or Buffalo Sabres hockey. And there are women who just want to be themselves.
The main reasons include convenience, freedom and instant gratification. Sharing episodes and observations on a blog isn’t as private as a phone call, but you’re not limited to the hours or minutes or times when another person is ready to listen.
If you share your difficulties or dilemmas with your readers, you never know when a stranger will have a useful bit of information or a suggestion. Plus, your potential audience is essentially unlimited, giving sharers a chance to redefine the concept of friends.
Today, with the rise of blog software like Blogger and WordPress, blogging is free to anyone with an Internet connection. Blogging software has become so simple that fourth-graders use it.
Or, a great-grandmother. Dorothy Stahlnecker is a vice president of commercial real estate at M. J. Peterson, and co-author of Grammology ( grammology.com ). On the surface, Stahlnecker’s blog features the advice of her and co-author Linda Davis about children, and life in general.
On a deeper level, it explodes notions that people over 60 can’t cope with these newfangled technologies.
It wasn’t always easy, Stahlnecker said, but she and Davis were determined to say their peace to the world. So with the help of Davis’ son Miles, they learned to tame the computer beast.
“I used to sit at my computer in the middle of the night and cry and swear,” Stahlnecker remembered. “I was miserable, because I’d sent things out into cyberspace and they’d disappear, then I’d call Miles in the middle of the night, and he’d talk me through it.”
The authors try to teach what they’ve learned about life, Stahlnecker said. “Nothing is ever lost when you’re teaching. You give what you can. You try to do it in a nice way, and hope it has an impact.”
The mission became even more urgent last December, when Stahlnecker was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Through an operation and chemotherapy, she’s chronicled her struggles and insights on Grammology. Started in January 2007, it attracts more than 1,000 readers a day.
In a May post, Stahlnecker wrote an ode to her chemotherapy nurses that let readers in on the life of a chemotherapy patient and their helpers. “The nurses cried,” Stahlnecker said. No one had ever told them how important they were.
That proved to her, again, the power of blogging as a tool to do good, said Stahlnecker. “That solidified and validated that I have to go forward and share,” she said, “as much as God gave me the ability to write.”
Online friendships
The Internet has become a virtual coffeeshop for meeting friends and sharing, with supporters commenting on her posts and Stahlnecker speaking up on others’ blogs. Through that medium, developing friendships with people the blog writers have never met is practically commonplace.
“I have at least 10 people who I haven’t met yet who are my blog friends,” said Jennifer Smith, who writes All Things Jennifer ( allthingsjennifer.wordpress.com ). “The kind of friends that you e-mail to ask a petty question, like ‘Oh my God, what am I going to wear for tonight?’ ”
That’s not unusual for regular bloggers. Someone leaves a comment that resonates with you, so you reply with a note, and suddenly you’ve got a friend of sorts, said Smith.
“I need to bounce things off of people,” Smith said, noting that her blogging not only helps keep her from getting over-stressed, but helps her boyfriend Mark, too. “It almost saves my relationship at times,” she said. “My Mark’s a good guy, but he’s not as chatty as I am.”
If she wants to rant about something, like that light on Delaware Avenue that always seems to turn red when it sees her, “I can just put it up on my blog and release that information.”
For Smith, like most women bloggers, that sense of satisfaction is their only reward. Almost none of the women bloggers reap monetary rewards from their efforts.
The most notable exception is Heather Armstrong, who writes about her life, family and fashion choices on dooce.com. Armstrong’s site is so popular that revenue from ads on its pages has allowed Armstrong and her husband to quit their outside jobs.
Armstrong, who was recently interviewed on the “Today Show” and profiled in the Wall Street Journal, said she’s used to people coming up to her and saying, “This must be so weird for you because I know every aspect of your life and you know nothing about me,” she told “Utah Now.”
“And I guess I’m supposed to feel weird about that, but I don’t,” Armstrong said. “I’ve said this before –I think I’ve always been an oversharer.”
Armstrong’s acerbic wit and raw honesty have won her an increasing audience since 2001, when she won Internet notoriety for getting fired for writing about work on her blog. (A species of firing that’s entered the modern lexicon as getting “dooced.”)
She’s blogged through postpartum depression and a cancer scare, letting readers into these less-than-idyllic parts of her life as well as the monthly love letters she writes to her daughter Leta.
When co-workers found out about Jennifer Wutz-Lopes’ blog, she backtracked and deleted posts that she wouldn’t like read over a conference table. “I didn’t want to get dooced,” said the Lockport mother of one, who blogs at Jen’s 14,221 Thoughts ( jen14221.com ).
But Wutz-Lopes hasn’t held back on much, firing off posts that are by turns endearing and profane. Her son Will is awfully cute in his prekindergarten graduation outfit. Another post a few weeks ago mentioned a woman’s recommendation for a kitchen implement partially disabled people can use instead of toilet tissue.
Her edgy, sometimes uproarious posts have earned her about 100 readers a day, including members of her husband Peter’s family. Her husband isn’t keen on the blog, or impressed by the circle of friends it’s made her, she said. “He thinks it’s silly I write things and I exchange Christmas presents with people I’ve never met.”
In early June, Wutz-Lopes had gastric bypass surgery, a month after revealing her decision on her blog.
“I wasn’t going to talk about it, because I knew there was going to be a lot of people saying, ‘You don’t need it,’ ” said Wutz-Lopes, who works as a computer consultant.
As she thought about her reasons, though, she changed her mind. “I am trying to prevent certain health issues that run in my family that I don’t have yet,” she said. “Diabetes, cholesterol, all sorts of stuff related to the weight gain. I want to be a healthy person, and I want to be around for my child.”
As she predicted, some commenters on her blog thought it was a bad idea, suggesting that she didn’t need to lose weight, or should try Weight Watchers instead.
“I’ve struggled with depression, and written about that on my blog. I’ve struggled with guilt in the past, having a job that entails being away from my kid and my husband, and I’ve written about it,” she said, referring to her consulting gig. “To not write about it was like keeping a secret, and I don’t keep secrets very well.”
The healing, helping effect
Erin Nappe found herself taking her Erin-Go-Blog more seriously about five years ago, after sharing her feelings about a serious breakup.
“It started out just as a way to keep my friends informed without having to tell the same stories over and over again,” said Nappe, a substitute teacher who lives in Williamsville. “It turned into something a lot more than that –something cathartic and healing for me.”
Now, after replaying years of bad dates on her blog for the entertainment of her readers, Nappe is engaged to be married. So she started a blog for that, where readers can count down the days with her, admire her custom-made tiara or pitch in suggestions for appropriate music.
While she started trying to release pent-up emotions, Nappe said, she eventually found that she was also attracting kind words.
“It sort of shocked me when people I didn’t know started reading it,” said Nappe, “but it was sort of exciting. Later it turned into a conversation [with commenters] and not just me typing on the keyboard.”
Emily Becker, of What Went Wrong, found commenters quite helpful when she read a New York Times blog that focused on the subject of migraine headaches.
Having suffered from migraines for years, Becker found comfort – and medically helpful information – in the shared observations and tips of the migraine blog commenters.
“I would never sign up for some sort of chatroom where you just talk about headaches,” Becker said. “But to have that presented to me, and these other people putting in their two cents, was so helpful.”
In fact, they “gave me good ideas for things I wanted to talk about with my neurologist,” Becker said.
For all the big issues that get discussed on blogs, sometimes it’s the little things that seem like pure gifts.
“There was a day that a great blue heron dropped a fish in my backyard,” Becker remembered. “I just found this fish, and had no idea where it came from.”
So of course, she wrote a post about it.
“I was not going to pick up the phone and call my friend in Minneapolis,” said Becker, “but I’m sure she appreciated the post.”
