A close friend asked me the other day whether I worry about posting so much personal writing online – or publishing any writing at all, really. ”You make yourself a target,” she said. “There are sick people out there who can track you down.”
The truth is, I do worry, but for me, that is not a reason to quit; on the contrary, it is a reason to keep going.
Back when I wrote columns for a small local newspaper, people recognized me everywhere I went. They approached me in coffee shops, at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, and even in the bathroom. They invited me to lunch, asked personal questions, stepped into my personal space, and occasionally hugged me. Sometimes, they blocked my path on the sidewalk, and I never knew whether that was intentional.
Then there were the letters. They arrived addressed to me personally, not to the newspaper. One man described his knife collection in alarming detail, inviting me over to “view” it. Another told me he wanted to pry open my mouth, wire my jaw wide open, and dump alcohol down my throat – by the gallon.
I never reported the letters to police, although I double-checked my door locks at night.
None of the men writing columns for the same newspaper received letters of this sort, and so while I felt threatened, I also felt an obligation to keep going. I would not let the letter writers (men, all of them) silence me. The irony here was that in order to start a writing career, I had to put myself out there, and yet, male editors, friends, and acquaintances constantly expressed “concern” that it was not safe for me to publish. Women writers, apparently, were not allowed on the playground. They should stick to journals and diaries, or at the very least, write about “fluffy” subjects and get a nice pen name (and maybe even a phony profile photo).
My blogs feel different – not any less risky, but perhaps a bit more distant. Maybe because they aren’t printed in a local paper, they tend to attract readers from far-flung locations, so any “threats” seem less plausible. Most readers would never run into me at the grocery store or on the sidewalk (or at least, probably not know if they did). Then again, I lived for several years under near-constant threat from an online stalker who filled my inbox with self-righteous rants about how I “shouldn’t” write about certain things. Distance or no distance, I felt violated. So it can happen with my blogs, too.
When it comes down to it, people who ask women to stop writing (for their own safety, for their own protection) ask them to become the very thing most feared: missing persons. They demand women disappear from the public discourse in the hopes that they will never literally go missing. Women, meanwhile, are expected to hop on this hamster wheel logic and run without ever actually going anywhere.
When you spend a lot of time reading about missing people, as I do, you know that missing persons come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders (and I am not limiting that term to just male or female). They disappear from parking lots, crashed cars, sidewalks, driveways, and even their own beds. Sometimes, they run away. Sometimes, they commit suicide. Other times, the worst possible violence wipes them from this earth. And then there are kids sold into slavery of all forms. The list is endless.
The media, however, obsesses almost exclusively over missing women – white women in particular. Media critics rightly charge that white damsels dominate the airwaves because a white-dominated, racist media is more interested in white victims. While this is definitely true, it does not necessarily explain the obsession with female victims. Something else may be at work at the same time – an undercurrent of sexism so deep it expresses itself as expectation: expectation that women will go missing; expectation that they will lock themselves away from the terrifying world and keep quiet. When the media insists on showing woman after woman who simply vanishes, it begins to feel like that is what women do when they dare go out into the world: they vanish. The news becomes a control mechanism, even if not intended as such. Let this be a warning swims, jaws-like, beneath the surface.
Case in point: Why didn’t the case of missing prosecutor Ray Gricar attract more attention? After all, he was a prominent member of his community, and he simply vanished into thin air. His image should have been flashed nightly on all the major news programs, but it wasn’t. Visit any cold cases or missing persons site, and it becomes obvious that men not only can be victims, but many are. And yet, in our culture the very notion of a missing man strikes even a violence-drenched media as strange. Men are not victims; women are. We (meaning, we as a culture) are comfortable with the idea that women are always in danger, always potential victims, always in need of rescue. And so the media feeds us precisely that.
Media coverage a few years ago about some missing Boy Scouts out in the wilderness was a rare exception to the damsel-in-distress syndrome, but like so many exceptions, it served mainly to prove the rule. These boys, after all, went missing out in nature. They were not “victims” so much as brave explorers who headed into rugged terrain and got lost. And, of course, it was not their “fault” for “putting themselves in danger.” Contrast that with the recent case of a woman kidnapped while out walking on a country road for some exercise. Her kidnapping has inspired more than a few talking heads to ask, “What was she doing out there, walking?” A woman walking on a paved country road is asking to go missing; Boy Scouts running amok in the wilderness are brave kids exploring their inner “wild man.”
I have also noticed: When the Boy Scouts went missing, the media kept calling them “missing Boy Scouts,” whereas women are rarely referred to by profession. You rarely (if ever) hear, “the missing artist …” or “the missing doctor …” in relation to a missing woman. The one exception is when a missing woman danced in a nude bar or worked as prostitute or model of some kind. And, of course, if she was a mother. Then the media will make sure to let you know, repeating it over and over.
And yet, in spite of all this, if women hide from the outside world, they are branded as paranoid, oppressed, unambitious, or even lazy.
“Why doesn’t she get out there and run? I see she has gained a few pounds …”
“She spends all that time journaling and the house is a mess.”
“Can you believe she shut down her blog because of a few threatening emails?”
That last one is the literary corollary to the old prude-slut trap: If you dare to put your writing out there, you are asking for danger; if you keep your writing to yourself, you are a coward. Or worse.
So to answer my friend, I have to say: If a strange man’s knife collection could not scare me away, a double-edged sword will never succeed, either. I am not going anywhere.
