A thorn in the bouquet that was BlogHer, 2006 version.

At the inaugural BlogHer last year, Ambra Nykola, a conservative blogger, lobbed an odious stink bomb at another BlogHer attendee, Koan Bremner.  Ambra expressed her displeasure of Koan's presence at BlogHer in a harsh, insulting and disrespectful blog post.  She dismissed Koan's humanity by reducing her to mere body parts, with no consideration for Koan as a thinking, feeling woman.  Koan's offense to Ambra Nykola?  At the time of BlogHer 05, Koan was months away from her lifelong goal - sex reassignment surgery, transitioning from male to female.  Ambra was not interested in the rigors and demands of this process nor did she feel it necessary to understand Koan's deep need to alter her physical form so she can achieve bodily consistency with her female heart, mind and soul.

The dynamic of this incident, described in greater detail and with extensive commentary in this post, was not dissimilar to the events surrounding this year's odious stink bomb, this time tossed by a
BlogHer attendee who objected to the presence of mommybloggers.  Their offense?  The mommybloggers were discussing their children.  The offended blogger's perspective, from her blog post:

I don't want to hear about how many times a day your retarded kid poops or stabs itself in the eye with its own foot. I don't want to hear about how it was extracted from your smelly, overstretched vagina. I don't want to hear about how you're "more famous than Dooce" when no one at your fucking table has ever even heard of your stupid blog. And I certainly don't want to see pictures of your bigheaded, cross-eyed, nappy-haired spawn shoveling sand into its face at the beach last summer. Is this really all you have to say for yourself? Did you trade in your personality, brain and...well...life when those cells started multiplying in your womb? Join the fucking PTA, the garden club, the SAHM club or whatever other useless fucking club you need to in order to validate yourself, but stop pretending the rest of us give a fucking shit.

Go home already and let the rest of us eat, drink and be merry.  And blog about it.

I did not include a direct link to this blogger's website for many reasons including not wanting to provide this person further references to her blog as the additional linkage may yield some benefit to her blog's stature.  I will, however, refer you to BlogHer co-founder's Lisa Stone's estimable blog, Surfette, where she links and comments as follows:

What truly worries me about BlogHer '06 is the few people who attended who aren't blogging in the same spirit, and the damage they can and are doing to our community. Take the hatred in this post made the night before the conference. Now, swap out the word "mommy" and substitute it for another group -- say "black" or "lesbian" or "men" or "developers." Appalling, isn't it? A post Mel Gibson could be proud of.

This hate-filled post came to my attention prior to the "Mommyblogging is a Radical Act" panel.  As an enthusiastic participant in any discussion regarding the lives of mothers and children and, as an unapologetic feminist I was compelled to mention this and other issues during the session.   What was most important to me was to out the elephant in the room, even though some in the audience thought that the hate-filled post should die a quiet death.

This brought up another issue - do we lend our energies and attention to such bigotry?  Should we avoid creating a forum for this blogger?  I was admonished later by a mommyblogger I respect greatly that my mention of this incident was podcasted and that this, in effect, tainted the proceedings for perpetuity.   

As to the deeds of calling out the offense in a public forum and confronting the offender in blog commentary and posts, I respectfully ask those who ask for restraint and silence to avoid censoring those who wish to respond.   Keeping quiet and avoiding confrontation is a painful option for many, especially for women who have spent whole lifetimes "looking the other way" while they are diminished by destructive people.  I am one of these women who will not sit quietly, and I have trained myself to call out the bullshit.  I have also trained myself to utilize this energy effectively.  As much as I want to throw a pie in Ann Coulter's face, and as amusing as it was when Coulter did get pie-pelted, I know that this is not nearly effective as promoting intelligent discourse in regards to issues regarding neo-conservatism and how it hurts our country.

I hasten to add that speaking out and confronting is a preference, and that those women who choose to distance themselves from this incident and/or will not participate in the discussion are well within their rights and entitlement, just as I am with my right to confront.   Mutual respect and regard for these choices is essential to maintaining a healthy community, as we all hope to achieve within BlogHer.

Another level of this incident, and perhaps the most critical, is the blatant disdain, and self-hatred, for womanhood.   To denigrate mothers and their lives with their children, is to diminish womanhood.  This is not to say that womanhood is defined and validated by motherhood.  Certainly, bearing and caring for children is one of the central and biological roles of women.  However, it is not the only crole, but it is within the rich experiences of female lives. 

The celebration of my own femaleness has come at a price.  I am a childhood and teen incest survivor, the perpetrator was my biological father.  The result of this carnage was to hide my femaleness, both as a child who wanted nothing to do with girlhood with the knowledge that girlhood and having a vagina came at a terrible cost; and as a teenager, who was made to feel ashamed of her womanly form by a devastatingly dysfunctional set of parents as well as the culture at large.  It was only until I left my parents' home and found my power as a rock climber and mountaineer and then as a self-sufficient young adult who supported herself through university, that I could claim my being without shame or doubt.   The process was not without incurring grevious errors as I was reckless in relationships, particularly in my two failed marriages.  Yet, I was able to achieve a fulfilling life, which exceeded my own expectations and certainly the expectations for many female incest survivors, women who struggle with the profound obstacles of addiction, eating disorders and deadly low self esteem.

My background is essential in discussing this as I was able to transcend my womanhood to another level altogether when I was pregnant and gave birth not only to my daughter, but to myself as a mother.   This sealed my female power for eternity.  This gave me keys to what I shunned and then sought - access to the full force of my womanhood. Becoming a mother completed me as a woman.  Becoming a mother informed me of the nuance and rhythms of womanhood, the deep messages from nuance and rhythm that I disregarded as a girl and adolescent.

I realize I opened a huge can of big, lively worms here.  There's more to this discussion,  but I wanted to get this online for your thoughts before I head off to mother my kid and take care of myself.  (I happen to be bleeding heavily today, kind of an ironic twist as I explore this multi-layered topic.)

Peace to all of us,
Grace

Comments

[Jo]

What a truly amazing post, from an amazing woman. I'm proud to know you. This is so deeply felt it just vibrates on the page.

Now drop and give me forty! (heh)

[Ceece]

Grace, Damn it sister, you freaking rule.

When I read the aformentioned post, I was just shocked, and as the author has pointed out many times, it is her opinion and she is entitled to it, but I just can't help but wonder why she would be so pissed off about something in which she should have taken her own advice and moved on.

The horrible "mommybloggers" that she talks about were at another table all together and not in anyway tried to engage her in coversation.

I'm bummed that she felt such disdain for a group of people that she could potentially have much in common with.

This is the second post that I've read today that talks about motherhood and relishing in the fact that they enjoy staying home and keeping their families happy and their home clean and it being a blow to feminism everywhere.

While being a homemaker is not a skill that I come by honostly, to me the greatest part about feminism is the ability to be able to work full time or stay at home full time and be comfortable in whatever they decide to do.

Bleah I've probably rambled and inadvertantly pissed some people off, but I'll shut it now...

[coolbeans]

When I heard someone say something like, "...we're also giving her a huge forum/audience" on the podcast, I became tense. I immediately felt bad for calling attention to that post and for emailing two friends (who emailed two friends who emailed two friends). I wanted to not feel guilty, but I couldn't help it and before now, I couldn't have told you exactly why.

"Keeping quiet and avoiding confrontation is a painful option for many, especially for women who have spent whole lifetimes "looking the other way" while they are diminished by destructive people."

Well, that would be me. Right now I can't see the brighter side of my journey, but it's good to know it's there.

Thanks, Grace.

[stayathomemotherdom]

An excellent post. I don't think there is anything wrong with discussing it openly. However, we do need to be cognizant of why we are discussing it

...is it to try to change attitudes or is it to sensationalize it? I know that you are serious about changing attitudes, but many people "just want to get in on" the hoopla. That can be damaging, too, as the writer of the post is getting exactly what she wanted. Traffic and attention.

[byakko]

Wow.

What if (go with me here for a minute) some fictional, stereotypical, mommyblogger wrote similar prose about the fact that the fictional, stereotypical, non-mommybloggers were *gasp* drinking, and shouldn't BlogHer only allow tea, etc? What about the children, and other such Simpson-isms.

But then, was the post sincere, or just written to shock and garner hits? Yes, I'm just that cynical.

[Bethiclaus]

I don't know where to begin. I feel like I have so much to say on this topic and also nothing at all.

Simone de Beauvoir said that we were enslaving ourselves to men and children in the act of procreation, and while I don't think that is true for everyone, I sometimes if it isn't, at least in some small part, true for me.

I love my daughter and, like you, feel that I have learned a lot about what it is to be a woman through carrying her and giving birth. Yet I also see that many of my goals have been sidelined in order to take car of this helpless little girl.

Seeing your work has really inspired me that it will be possible for me to remain a feminist intellectual while also being a mother, but some days it just seems so hard to make both those identities coexist.

[squid]

Is that moronic bitch twelve years old?

I'd love to drop her in the middle of Darfur for a little context on what kind of people deserve to be hated.

For the record, my r-bomb son never stabs himself in the eye with his foot.

And furthermore, Grace, thank you for this post.

[Heidi]

"I respectfully ask those who ask for restraint and silence to avoid censoring those who wish to respond."

Grace, you conveyed this so beautifully. I understand people not wanting to direct any attention to this topic, similar to how many bloggers handle "trolls" who leave inflammatory (or just plain not nice) messages on blogs. But you felt the need to speak up about it, and you did. My respect and admiration for you has grown even more greatly.

[Mir]

I hope I didn't admonish, my friend. I asked you to help me understand, and you did (both then and now). I see and respect your point of view, just as I believe you see and respect mine; we don't have to agree on everything (thank goodness). And that, dear Grace, is what makes you someone I am so proud to know.

I only hope I did not somehow leave you with a bad taste. I can only say that I walked away feeling much clearer and understanding more, and I hope that it was mutual. If not, I apologize.

[elswhere]

Grace, thanks for writing this. At the very least, you have cleared up the mystery for those of us who missed BlogHer and were wondering what all the cryptic references were about. You've done a lot more than that, of course. But I'm grateful to know what was going on!

[la dolce vita]

Yes, I agree with Elsewhere, thank you for clearing up what the anti-mommyblogger references have been all about! I am appauled by this person's comments and at the same time I feel sorry for her. I am at a loss for how someone can feel and spew such hatred. I wouldn't want to live in her head and I am sad for her that she has obviously never felt the love and power and all the AMAZING that we mommybloggers experience. It makes me cringe to think what that woman is working through in her life that has brought her to such an unhappy state.

I totally agree with not rewarding negative behavior, but I do think that the community at large shouldn't let it go without response. Once again, thank you for an awesome post, insightful, and eloquently stated...as usual.

Peace to you too beautiful woman.

[Elayne Riggs]

It's the same-old same-old. Every little community thinks not only that it's the only one of its kind but the best one. Doesn't matter if it's political bloggers or comics bloggers or sports bloggers or music bloggers or parent bloggers; other genres of blogging are Less Important Than Yours and that's that. And before it was blogging it was message boards, and before that it was Usenet, and so on and so forth. We're all still so friggin' fragile and insular, when we should be building bridges and community!

I will never know the joy of being a mother. So when I read your posts about your lovely daughter, or Kath David's posts about Caroline, or Michael Bérubé's about Jamie, or any number of my favorite bloggers' posts about their kids, I get to live vicarously through your happiness. Anyone who doesn't appreciate that is a selfish twit and not worth bothering with.

[leahpeah]

yay for your brave post, grace. brave for many reasons. i hope to get to know you much better sometime in the near future. you are amazing to me.

[Kvetch]

I have never visited your blog before. What a day I picked! I did not attend BlogHer and do not know the incident(s) of which you speak so eloquently. What I do know is that perpetual disdain for other women - the roles they choose in life or the paths they follow - benefits no one - least of all the woman doing the condemning. Motherhood is a part of womanhood, as you expressed. One part of many. I hope your post will help others see that.

[samirah]

wow. that was all kinds of fucked up. I absolutely cannot stand when people take their own predjudices out in public. To tear someone down for wanting to be happy in their body or even for enjoying their kids is just so ridiculous and sad. Those people must have really empty lives.

And I like your idea of not giving them any more attention and calling them out when necessary and you stated everything so eloquently but really, sometimes you just need to smack a bitch.

[Margaret]

This kind of stuff makes me not want to attend the conference. Are there lots of cliques? Would I not fit in? Would people be so wrapped up in their issues that it wouldn't be any fun? I'm all about meeting people, and having a good time--why spend the money and time otherwise?

[laurie]

I'm not a mom, but I read Grace's blog (and several other women who happen to have children) because she is intelligent, warm, funny and interesting, and I always come away with something of value that I didn't have going in. Isn't this what it's all about? Many of my friends and relatives have children, and they're an important part of my life. My best friend from high school has two children I adore. How can I reject her, or she me, without rejecting the bond that's carried us through 20 years? I'm a teacher and a counselor. I take care of people. I have an amazing mother of my own. Why the divisiveness? It makes no sense to me.

I also attended Blogher and it was great for me. I was truly inspired, and would be very disappointed if anyone used this one incident as an indicator of the vibe of the whole conference. This is just not true (at least not from what I saw. I'm often wrong. ; ) ) I can't say what anyone's experience was or should have been. I went knowing no one and not having any idea what to expect. We take these risks in life or we die. I have no interest in cliques or controversy, and to tell the honest truth - I don't believe that the vast majority of the people there did, either.

I also really hope that this doesn't become the "mommys" vs. the "not-mommys". I've seen that happen in some of the comments and posts surrounding this central issue, and I don't think it does justice to those of us who just like PEOPLE - grown ups, kids, moms, dads, whatever. You're always going to hear from some people who are unhappy or disgruntled or just looking to stir some stuff up. My approach is to keep on keeping on.

I appreciate your words, Grace.

[PandaWriter]

What I find appalling is that these sort of discussions become about the choice made, when we should be celebrating the fact that we have a choice.

As bloggers, we have the power to put our voice out there, in as many blogs as we want. We can have "mommy blogs" and "writer blogs" and "political blogs" and "activist blogs". Or we can have one blog with many different voices on as many days. We don't have to be or have one voice, at one time, in one place, expressing the current political party line or be punished.

We are not silenced but for a single voice, a checkmark in a form.

The power that we have achieved as women is that we have the freedom to make a choice and voice who we are and how we live. We can speak our own truth, and be heard.

Attaching hatred based on the choice to perpetuate the species, and wanting to do it well, is mind boggling.

Don't want to read about poop and see pictures of days at the beach? Find a different blog. There are literally millions. It's not one voice or no voice anymore. Who a person decides to hate - or not hate - says more about the hater than the hated.

I am childless by choice, if it matters. But no matter what the topic, what I enjoy reading when I check out my favorite blogs are the words and thoughts of a self-aware woman, engaged in living her life and trying to figure it all out with love and commitment to herself and her circle of friends and family.

Who she is shines through, no matter if the topic is poop or politics.

[Dori]

That potty-mouthed blogger needs to have her mouth washed out with soap by a mommy-blogger! :-)

Well written post and thougtful comments. Silence implies agreement. When I was younger, the divisiveness was stay-at-home vs working mom (I guess it still is). Since I don't have children, I don't relate to mommyblogs, so I don't read them. What I do read is blogs by women who happen to be moms. One of my very best friends is not only a sah, home-schooling mom, she's also a born-again Christian. I am not(!) and yet we've been good friends for years because we respect each other.

One of the AA meetings I go to is for women only and there are a lot of younger women with small children. We provide child-care so that the mother can attend a meeting. Another woman I know, who is in her mid-50s, stopped attending that meeting because she didn't want to listen to "cute things my kids do." I think that has to do more with where she's at, then the fact that the women talk about their kids. Same with that potty-mouthed blogger--it's not about the mommyblogs, it's just where she's at.

[wordgirl]

Amen. Discourse is the way to go, though "intelligent" discourse is often difficult with folks of Ann Coulter's ilk...not to mention the awful person responsible for the quote you included.

[Occidental Girl]

Grace, that was well-said. I love you more than my luggage! You're so open and brave to share so much of your life. It gives such a full picture of womanhood, of personhood.

What confounds me is how women have this power to band together - and more often than not, do - but then from somewhere comes this awful competitiveness. It comes through in the hateful blogposts and comments against one group or another.

I hate to think that we are subverting ourselves, but that is exactly what is occuring. When we as women think about the struggles in life to be taken seriously as a person, whether it be as a woman, a lesbian, a mother, or in a career, one of the struggles we encounter is the negative competitive subversion from other women. That is disheartening and completely unnecessary. It shouldn't be that way.

I think the power of the blogging community is overwhelmingly positive, but those negative vibes are there perpetrated by women against women, and that is outrageous to me. A group that hates its own members is a group that will not grow in wisdom and beauty nor move along in the universe to the next Great Thing. It also leaves that group more vulnerable to attacks from the outside.

The positive, supportive community needs to be louder than the negative factions. I think speaking out against it is one way to call it out, and then to spend most of our energies into love and support for one another.

It's simple to stop this vicious cycle: go somewhere else! Write about what you like and visit blogs whose topics are that in which you're interested. There's no reason to wish death and destruction upon those with whom you disagree. Go where you want to go, create your own forum and leave the hate behind.

It's such a waste of energy to hate.

[bitchwhoblogs]

I am not a mommyblogger, not a want of trying, but avidly read many blogs including a slew of the mommies. I love this media because of the access it offers for voices not typically listened to, heard, or recognized in other forms of publishing. I use the same discretion reading blogs as I do other media - if I like the writing and find the prose entertaining or provocative I read on. Sounds like to me someone was trying to be clever and garner some traffic...

[Lin]

Good post, babe.

When I dropped out of college, pregnant with my first child, moved to England and married a stranger (I'd known him for three weeks), most of my friends were horrified that I would trade all that I had for the unknown (forget my parents' reactions, please!). I am now 58. My daughter is 37, my son 32 and my beloved granddaughters are 7 months and almost 5 yrs. Most of my friends' children are in their late teens because most of my friends decided to wait until they were older (like my daughter) to have kids. If you hang with a more academic circle, it is almost guaranteed that if you're in your 20s, most of your friends won't have kids and so your life is enriched by your peers (puzzled though they are by your offspring) and older moms. My life and my childrens' lives would have been much poorer had it not been for these 'older' moms. They taught me patience and joy and acceptance and because they talked and talked and invited me to talk and talk (about our kids and politics and our kids and religion and our kids and money and our kids and our husbands), I became a better mother.

Part of the joy in celebrating the fullness of being a woman is accepting our differences. The angry writer of whom you speak needs to learn to love herself because the vitriole spilling from her fingers is disturbing.

And hey, move fucking over if you don't like what you're hearing.

[tish grier]

Hi Grace....

well, at the risk of getting my head handed to me, I'll say I understand the blogger's underlying frustration--although I do NOT agree with the manner in which she expressed it.

Nor did she bother to turn it around and look at what she could do to change things *for* *herself* as a blogger...like finding peers rather than focusing on others. It's real easy to point the finger than to do the meet-and-greet thing, but can certainly make one miserable!

Although I also heard from a few other women bloggers--rather quietly and more tactfully--a bit of frustration about the emphasis on mommyblogging. We talked about how--as we know the way that men think about women in blogging in general-- we feared that all women bloggers might get more narrowly categorized and pushed even further from hardcore blogospheric conversations on how this thing is evolving *if* the drum of mommyblogging drowned out other conversations. We talked about the little knots of powerful men in journalism, tech, and business who use any lame excuse to marginalize women and knock all of us out of any meaningful conversation.

We know how the emphasis on "too personal" conversation can get women quickly ostracized from all sorts of places--and are worried that any trump-card could set back the progress women as a whole have made.

What I find interesting in your post, Grace, is what you said about how giving birth to your daughter gave you a certain female power. With me, my family dysfunction made it so that I did not want family at all--so I cultivated other things. For me, what makes me a woman is not just my ability to hold my own in intellectual debates with men, but also knowing some of the deep-dark secrets that men keep. Men's secrets, to me, are gifts that give me a unique insight into human nature that continues to inform not only who I am in the grander scheme of culture, but also who I am as a woman writer (so different from a man in many ways...).

Still, how might we address the issue of this barrier between women? What I'd really like to see is for a bunch of us to talk about what has made us women. I'd like us to talk about why that one particular thing more than any other is what we feel was our defining and transcendant moment. And, rather than nodding our heads in agreement on common ground, acknowledge the uniqueness of each of our journeys.

Because, when it comes down to it, even mothers don't totally have the same journey any more than us non-moms.

[Lisa Williams]

I went to both Blogher I and II, and if I recall correctly, the session on mommyblogging at Blogher I was not a formally organized thing, but ended up being an incredibly powerful hour of women talking. So powerful, in fact, that mommybloggers returned in force to Blogher II to do what I thought was one of the best sessions at the conference.

People have issues with mothers being in power.

Marx said that racism and classism were all about getting the little people to fight with each other instead of Fighting the Man. I wanna testify that at BlogherI I made a lot of friends, and since that time we have helped each other get ahead, not just in helping us get our heads together, as vital as that is, but in the Big World outside our head and our house.

I got to go to New York and help a brand-name magazine learn how to blog, because of people I met at Blogher. There is no way in hell they would have known about me with my blog and my two kids working out of my house if it were not for other women bloggers. This year I brought a young woman starting her career in citizens' media to Blogher, in hopes that it would help her career.

The people in that network that helped me and I'm using to help other women? Mothers, not mothers, got little kids, got kids out of the nest, straight, queer, stay at home, big career, all of those are represented.

I think if you're buying society's pressure to stay in your own little group and hurl rocks at that other group over there? Guess what? You're in a big open-air jail. Not only that, you're acting as unpaid jailer to others. My advice: wise up and stop being a chump.

I got stuff to do. And some of the stuff I got to do is helping other women with stuff they're here on earth to do. You know what that feels like? It feels like freedom.