Chanel Dubofsky responds to the recent outing and harsh criticism of an anonymous blogger who pokes fun at parents who over-share online.
Very recently, one of my favorite (OK, maybe my only) anonymous bloggers, Blair Koenig from STFU Parents, revealed her identity. STFU Parents, if you’re not familiar, is a blog that mocks the curious phenomenon of parent over-sharing on the Internet. The blog is submission based (you too can share what happens on your Facebook feed if you know how to take a screen shot) and hilarious. I once plowed through the entire thing in one afternoon, feeling a strange combination of horror and glee. Blair and everyone who comments is sarcastic, relentlessly funny, which is a relief in the face of posts like this.
Not surprisingly, since Koenig came out as the brains behind STFU, she’s been facing some intense backlash. Much of the critique that’s been thrown at Koenig in regard to the blog is around the fact that she’s not a parent. (Why is it compulsory to divulge information about ourselves in order to have an opinion about something?) Koenig has said that she does want to have kids some day, but in the meantime, her non-parent status doesn’t exempt her from having opinions about the folks who post pictures of their kid’s poop—literally—on their Facebook walls, tell their friends that they won’t know what love or fulfillment is until they have children, and claim that anyone who isn’t a parent is probably just running around getting drunk and being useless. (Because, you know, that’s the opposite of having kids.)
It’s clear that Koenig declaring that she someday wants kids isn’t stopping people from saying virulent things about her. There are plenty of comments on the blog from folks who openly declare their childfree status (childfree being different than childless in that childfree folks do not see their lives as incomplete or lacking because they don’t have or want kids). What would happen if STFU Parents turned out to have been created by a childfree person? How would STFU readers receive a blog about parent oversharing from someone who not only doesn’t have children, but doesn’t want them?
I’m not interested in the arguments that are focused on whether or not it’s OK to criticize people’s Facebook choices, because as far as I’m concerned, the attacks on Koenig and the blog are not about that. The choice to parent in a certain way or not parent at all is public property, apparently, and the existence and access to social media has made our decisions even more vulnerable.
It’s not surprising that much of the critique directed at Koenig is also about gender. In the latest blog post on STFU, “My Childless Blog Manifesto,” Koenig includes a comment she received from “Jake,” who asserts that she’s just jealous, in addition to being ugly and incapable of finding someone to impregnate her. It’s not the only comment in that post that attacks based on physical appearance, which of course leads to me to speculate that if she was a man, these comments would have a very different spin. A male blogger might also be accused of jealousy, or of not being “manly” enough to father children, but both of these comments on virility, attractiveness, etc., are deeply rooted in sexism (and by extension, homophobia) and stem from the assumption that being critical of parents in any capacity—Koenig has characterized the blog as more of a cultural observation than a critique—is somehow contrary to the nature of humanity.
The response to STFU Parents, along with the fact that it exists in the first place, is noteworthy, and not only because of the phenomenon that we’re all privy to because of the Internet. It’s another illustration of how we deal with information that’s unpleasant or contradictory to how we’ve been socialized. Sexism is apparently an excellent tool for coping.
Chanel Dubofsky is a writer in Brooklyn, New York, and the creator and editor of the Marriage Project, an interview series about marriage in imagination and reality. She has published essays in the Forward, Tablet, Gender Focus and The Pursuit of Harpyness, and fiction at Monkey Bicycle, Matchbook and Quick Fiction. She blogs at Diverge (www.idiverge.wordpress.com).
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