Reply to Dooce /Heather Armstrong

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So on top of all the time spent here, you all really spend a lot of time reading poorly written half truths about women’s lives. I cannot believe how seriously people take bloggers like this. I can’t believe it is therapeutic or helpful in any way. [/quote]

What she did wasn’t really writing, it was preening. I’m so sorry she passed. However, and her lunatic fans will freak — none of her shtick would have worked but for her initial happy life, thinness, prettiness. The writing was never there, she is not Mary Carr or Leslie Jamison. It always required pictures and cool-girl blasé bullshit balanced with meltdowns. It was always stupid and squawking and without much to it, all hat and no cattle. But it gave a lot of ugly comfort to some women, as they were less divorced. Less f’ed up. Less drunk. Less scrutinized. And so forth. It was always gross, but it netted Armstrong a lot of money. I wish she’d found some medication and therapeutic plan that actually worked for her. I don’t actually think she’s more gifted than the banal, stupid Jo from Cup of Jo. But Jo was luckier.[/quote]

Exactly. But Jo also made her own luck!!! She works on her mental health, controls her drinking, writes openly but is not overexposed. Joanna has struck a really good balance and is running a business where the product is women’s interest in each other, not just in HER.

Heather was a prisoner of her attachment to her own physical attractiveness, her wit, her counterculture iconoclast vibe. A mentally ill narcissist who wrought fury and hellfire on her own ex husband, partner and daughters.

What someone else wrote is true. Dooce was a shallow, sick addict who preened for attention, who virtually gagged for it and lived and died for it. She was a grotesque example of the worst of influencer culture and to dislike her is not to be a GOMI troll, it’s to be an adult with one’s own opinion. Quit bringing Alice and GOMI into it! Your obsession with GOMI says more about YOU than GOMI itself. Alice is NOT responsible for these narcissists that overexpose their lives for likes and affiliate link $$!!! [/quote]

Ok, Alice. You can head back to your own corner of the internets now. [/quote]

I'm a different poster who had never heard of GOMI, but the PP is dead on about this Dooce. Why do so many posters here defend these narcissistic, drug-addicted, dilettantes?[/quote]

This is an ugly sentiment and it resonated with me. I don't know a great deal about dooce, so why should I feel anything at all, let alone relate to a negative sentiment about her? Upon reflection, I think it has to do with the narcissism and dilettante description, coupled with the fact that she was famous and, for a time anyway, successful. It feels like an affront to the sacrifices most people make in the name of stability and love for others; particularly as parents and spouses. We stay at home or take grind-it-out jobs, we don't flit from thing to thing, we make the world better for friends and loved ones -- at least in a small way, we don't chase long shot dreams, and our sacrifices generally don't get recognized, let alone rewarded. Meanwhile, here is a woman who seemingly did none of that -- at least not on a sustained basis; and she was showered with riches and attention.

This is a very jaundiced view of the situation; but I think it's what is going through my head when I feel myself tempted to nod at hostile descriptions of a woman I didn't know and could easily avoid reading or reading about. [/quote]

A lot of self awareness here and I think one reason you see a big divide in reactions.

I don't envy Dooce's life at all, including her fame and the positive attention she received. I don't even envy her success as a writer even though I am a writer (who has a day job that pays the bills).

I admire her success in finding a writing voice that worked for what she wanted to share with the world, and I appreciate that she found a way to create her own venue for connecting with readers instead of going through traditional systems, most of which are set up to keep out people who are not already on the inside of the systems.

But I don't resent her or feel anger towards her because I can see she DID in fact make sacrifices for her success. She sacrificed her privacy, and her family's privacy, and she put herself in the way of people eager to tear down people like herself. Why would I envy that? I have intentionally not made those choices.

I also can see that she had mental illness that was made much worse by those choices, and I have enough empathy to understand that she may not have understood how bad those impacts would be, or may have struggled to make better choices. I have people in my own family who have addiction issues and struggle with these choices. I work hard not to judge. I know it's hard. I don't know why it's easier for me to make those healthy choices and harder for them. I wish I could do something to help them make the healthy choices. But I can't. This is life. It's one of the hard truths of life that everyone must make these decisions for themselves, for better and sometimes, for worse.

So I don't get the vitriol. Her story is complicated and it has some great things (her writing helped and resonated with a lot of people who had never had access to her kind of truth-telling about life before) and some sad and disappointing things (her addiction issues, her inability to preserve her children's privacy, her mental health challenges that she never found a way to overcome). Why not recognize the good, recognize the bad, remember that no human being is perfect and wish her family the very best in their grief?

Railing against her and criticizing anyone who saw good in her seems like it's own kind of unhealthy choice, IMO.[/quote]

I am one of the PPs who is being intepreted as "railing against her." But to be clear, I think she was a very big mess of a person who did great harm to her children, but can understand that seeningly she had no control over herself. Who I find abhorent is her audience. I consider them all to be like those who slow down on the highway to see the aftermath of a fatal car crash. By reading her, they did nothing but enable her behavior and put her and her family at more risk. I had never heard of her before this thread, but I cannot imagine spending time reading such a train wreck of a life just so I could feel better about mine. Though, yes, I disparage Dooce, I find her readers to be despicable. [/quote]

You don’t understand the timeline. Dooce was not unhinged when her readership was really strong. The only objectionable behavior she participated in was putting cute photos of her kids online (which a lot of us did too) and putting spaghetti noodles on her dog’s nose (people were apparently pretty pissed at her for that). As far as my reading habits were concerned, she was in the same category as Ree Drummond and Karen Waldrond. Later, her readership dropped and her behavior and writing became more erratic. She stepped away almost entirely for a while, and now we are here. I don’t think that you can say that her readers enabled her. [/quote]

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