Feministe Feedback: Blogging About Your Personal Life

Feministe Feedback: Blogging About Your Personal Life

Category

Blogging

I have a feminist blog that I update pretty regularly, and of course people close to me end up in it from time to time. Anyway, I made a post about an argument my friend and I had, and she ended up reading it. She accused me of selling her out in order to get more hits for my site; in reality I was pretty distressed by her arguments and was writing about them as a discourse on arguements that I commonly face against feminism.

Well, after I found she was upset, I apologized and took down the post.

My real question is where do you draw the line about possibly hurting those close to you and standing your ground? I still feel very strongly about this and the arguments I made, but really, my relationship with her matters more to me.

Any suggestions?

This is one I struggle a lot with. It happens often enough where something happens in my personal life, or in my family, or among my friends, or with the boyfriend, and I think to myself, “This would make really interesting blog fodder.” But usually, I err on the side of not writing about anything personally — and it’s been a hard lesson learned. I’ve never written anything about a friend or partner that’s gotten me into trouble, but commenters can be tough when you write about your personal life — and they can be especially tough when you write something good. So I don’t write about the negative things because those usually involve other people and I don’t want to violate their privacy, and I always hesitate to write about the positive things (or even the neutral-but-personal things) all that much because someone inevitably has to come in and say something nasty, or someone feels the need to make you justify whatever decision you made.

But that said, many of my favorite blog posts ever have been personal ones — just not written by me. Lauren, Feministe’s founder, is one of the best feminist writers out there when it comes to taking personal anecdotes and translating them into broader feminist lessons. I wish I had the talent (and the stomach) for that.

So what do you all do? How much of your personal life do you blog about? Where do you draw the line? How do you write in a way that is true to your experience, but that doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy? How do you justify using your own experiences in your writing when those experiences might include (and potentially hurt) other people?

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/04/18/feministe-
feedback-blogging-about-your-personal-life/