(This is an excerpt from one of my other blogs about my overall career as a writer, but this part pertains to the Journal.) I bring it up again now after reading about what a terrible time women in technology and online game playing and development are receiving on the Internet by the trolls who just can't stand women achieving anything they themselves cannot.
For 11 years I owned a monthly newspaper about local music that did not do puff pieces or advance stories. We just did reviews. We liked bands or disliked bands. I never printed more than 2,000 copies a month. I doubt I had more than 800 readers at any time, and the vast majority of them were the musicians being reviewed. Nobody influential read it. We did not make or break any careers. We could not help anyone get a record deal, or even a gig. We did not help anyone make any money, and we made no money ourselves producing the newspaper. The money we took in from advertisers went almost entirely to the
Ashland Herald-Progress because they printed the paper. I paid reviewers $5 a review. I did not receive a salary from the paper. It just paid for itself.
What we did do was we liked some bands that other bands didn’t like, that other bands hated, and it infuriated them that we cast their enemies in a favorable light from time to time, even if the glow from that light meant absolutely nothing in the scheme of things. Musicians can be extraordinarily jealous and bitter people because so much of what makes one band reach the top over all the others is just sheer luck.
So the embittered would take out their wrath on me. Abusive personalities by nature, it was comfortable and easy for them to abuse me because I am a woman, an easier target, and they would do so the way men abuse women…by calling me fat, ugly, a skank, whore, bitter, desperate, unlovable, the c-word (and I don’t mean Cat Lady, but that c-word, too), all the insults used to bully and debase women. I am convinced to my very bones if a man had owned and edited that newspaper, they would not have persisted in their abuse as long and as viciously…or even at all.
(Isn't this the basic premise of the old TV show "Remington Steele," that for a woman to be a successful private detective, she had to pretend a man owned the firm, or why J.K. Rowling used only her initials, because the publishers did not think the Harry Potter books would succeed if written by a woman?)
Yet at the same time that I was being called all these horrible things, still -- in their minds -- I possessed the power to make something in their life better, to right some wrong for them, to elevate them to where they thought they should be, and I didn’t -- wouldn't -- do it. That was the perception. And for that I must be punished. It doesn’t matter how many times or how convincingly I explained that nothing I did or didn’t do would have made a difference in their lives.
I ceased publishing that newspaper in 2004 when I no longer had the time or interest to devote to it, and a couple of those characters continue to stalk me online, a full decade later, with all the same complaints and bitterness. It is now 20 years since the very brief period when the paper was actually a little popular, and this is still going on. In the past year, I received a message through Facebook that one of them intended to shit on my grave. I reminded my husband that I have no desire to be buried in this town, for other reasons than this -- but now also for this -- because even if I live another 30 years, this person will have this mission to accomplish because that’s the only goal he has left that he might be able to fulfill, fame having eluded him. That is the terrible nature of fame, even in my most pathetic case.
