A fellow blogger, female-identified and feminist, sent me by email the comment:
Take care babe, and thanks again for all your brilliant contributions to the blog debate. Allies like you are gold dust...
Which is incredibly lovely and all, and yet -
I'm not supposed to be in it for the cookies! Stop giving me cookies! That's not why I'm here! (Oh, go on then, I will have just one more, got to watch my figure...)
It's not that I see feminist/feminist-ally blogging as a rewardless task, or one that should be without reward. On the contrary, I do it because I get a lot out of it, which just follows from the sort of person I am anyway - to me, it's a worthwhile and enjoyable (at times) activity. But there does kind of get this cognitive dissonance going between knowing I'm not supposed to be doing it to win approval, and yet here I am, winning approval. It's kind of, approval I don't know what to do with, in a way. And the thing is, it's not of the class (and nowhere near the degree) of "I finished my dissertation and got an 'A', yay me" and everyone going "phwoar, you've got great tits!" - the approval is appropriate to the "achievement", it's just somehow completely not what I was looking for. If you can picture a QB who has just led his team to an improbable comeback to win in the 4th Quarter, and him standing at the press conference and everyone gushing over him and congratulating him, the press asks "how does it feel to be rated one of the greatest QBs of your generation" and he just looks embarrassed, "I don't do it for that. I play the game, I do my job as well as I can, that's enough. And sometimes winning is nice too."
I get like that when people say nice things to me about my involvement in feminist blogging. I should let it go by just as easily as all the other stuff, have no reaction one way or the other, but no - I still get the cookie-guilt.
I suppose this blog post in itself is displaying a huge "it's all about MEEEEEE!" privilege thing, so now I get to have privilege-guilt as well.
Ho hum, it's
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