the ch!cktionary

    31 Jan 2012

    Sex Week 2012 At Yale

    Whew, it was great to see my mom in LA, but now it’s time to play catch-up with work. I just flew back to Boston yesterday, and I’m only going to be home for a hot second. This Sunday, I’ll be in Connecticut for a talk at Yale. After overcoming some conflicts with the administration last semester, Sex Week is now officially on and I couldn’t be happier to be a part of it.

    Here are the details for my event:

    “WRITING SEX”: A PANEL ON SEX-POSITIVE WRITING @ Sex Week 2012
    Sunday, February 5, at 6:00 PM

    Featuring Riese Bernard of Autostraddle, Lena Chen of The Ch!cktionary, & Miriam Zoila Perez of Radical Doula.

    Let’s be honest, talking about sex can be really difficult. Talking about sex in an inclusive, sensitive, and informative way is even more difficult. This panel, made up of prominent feminist and queer writers who tackle the world of sex with their words on a daily basis, will provide a space in which to explore the question of sex-positive advocacy through writing, a highly relevant issue for many students on this campus. Panelists will offer their own experiences of the challenges and successes of writing about sex, and then enter into a discussion of relevant questions: what is sex-positive writing? How can we write in sex-positive ways? And, perhaps most importantly, how can writing about sex be a form of activism in and of itself? This event is co-sponsored by Sappho, MEChA de Yale, CAUSA (Cuban American Undergraduate Student Association), Despierta Boricua, Asian American Cultural Center, the Women’s Center, and Q Magazine, which will be moderating the panel.

    [RSVP on Facebook]

    I’m very excited to see my awesome co-panelists. Miriam and I have spoken together before, but I’ve never actually met Riese, even though Autostraddle is one of my favorite sites (and one of the few I bother reading regularly). You guys always ask me for sex-positive and feminist blog suggestions. Go check this one out ;)

    (For the full Sex Week schedule, go to the official website. Bostonians, mark your calendars: Harvard’s having its inaugural Sex Week this March with many events open to the public. Stay tuned for more details!)

    2 Sep 2011

    Freelance Friday: My 2011 Media Goals

    So, after the completion of the Progressive Women’s Voices program, the participants were asked to submit three “specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic” media goals to accomplish before the end of this calendar year. In December, someone will be checking in with us to see which goals were achieved. The pressure is on!

    I’m going to post my goals on this blog as well, so that I’m doubly accountable — both to the Women’s Media Center AND to all my readers. (I haven’t yet decided which of these two groups I find more intimidating!) Here they are:

    1. Publishing my first op-ed. While I do want to make progress on memoir writing, I definitely need more serious work to my name. An op-ed — short and straight-forward — seems like a fairly painless entry point.
    2. Adding a regular column to my portfolio, likely for an online teen or women’s publication. I’ve done plenty of “sexpert” type gigs, though I wouldn’t mind expanding that beyond the typical “I have this weird sex question”/”Don’t worry, you’re not weird” set-up.
    3. Presenting at (and attending) more conferences related to my areas of interest. I’d be particularly interested in going to BlogHer, Netroots Nation, and South by Southwest, where I have a panel (Sex In The Digital Age) up for consideration (Today’s the last day to vote for SXSW panels — click the above link to vote for mine!)

    Any tips or leads? Suggestions? (Especially conferences — I really haven’t done the conference circuit at all, since I don’t have an employer who will cover travel expenses.) Do you find goal-setting effective in your own career/life?

    19 Aug 2011

    A Confession & A New Blog Feature: Polls On Every Entry!

    First off, a confession: I broke my commenting system on this blog three weeks ago AND NOBODY TOLD ME. I just noticed this yesterday and have been trying to fix it since. Thankfully, the fine folks at Disqus have been communicating with me via Twitter and email and I finally resolved the issue this afternoon.

    Breaking my own blog is probably the worst example of my tech incompetence. (One time, when I was running SexAndTheIvy.com, my entire site went dark for two days or so because I moved some folders around on my backend.) Buuut there’s all kinds of little things — like messing up the comments system — that don’t constitute full-blown catastrophes but still cause inconvenience. And whenever something pops up, I have to fix it on my own. So when you guys offer helpful suggestions, such as, making my site more Blackberry-friendly, I do appreciate it, but I can’t always implement it. (Just in case you’re wondering why I haven’t gotten around to fulfilling this much-requested tech fix.)

    So back to the comments. This entire past month, I’ve been like, no comments? Ever? My inbox has been full of sad :( That said, I know that not everyone likes leaving comments*, so I’m testing out a new(ish) feature: polls! You may have encountered Urtak polls on some of my previous entries (such as this, this, and this). I’ve found them to be a really effective way of getting reader opinions, particularly on controversial issues, and I’ve gotten hundreds of responses to single polls on entries in which there are only a handful of comments. That’s not so surprising; people find it easier to click a yes or no button than to leave an entire paragraph of their thoughts.

    Starting today, there will be yes-no polls attached to every one of my text entries, right above the comments section. Each post will have its individual poll, and anyone can submit a question for approval, though most will include questions written by me. This particular Urtak feature is not yet public, so there are still some kinks to be worked out, but please let me know if you encounter any issues. I know the Urtak founders from college, and they’re asking my readers and me to test it out, so any and all feedback will be forwarded directly to them.

    Hope you enjoy the new feature. (And yes, you should be able to start leaving comments again — warn me next time this happens!)

    * If you do leave comments on this blog, a quick reminder to use a handle or stay anonymous :)

    25 May 2011

    This Is What Slut-Shaming Looks Like

    I’m astounded by all the kind emails, tweets, Tumblr notes, and Facebook messages sent my way. Thanks, guys. Indeed, as many of y’all have noted, the comments to my Salon piece are mighty scary. But I’m surprisingly unfazed by them … even though I think I would have been pretty bothered just a year ago. Maybe this means that I’ve sort of begun to make peace with the past.

    Writing that essay took a great deal of emotional energy. What got printed looks absolutely nothing like the initial draft, which was far more feminist-y and deconstruct-y, but not at all what a personal essay should look like. It was not, in other words, actually about me. My editor (the awesome Sarah Hepola) told me after I turned in the first version the following:

    Instead of talking about it in academic terms, instead of using the words “society” or “dichotomy,” I want you to put it in personal terms, tell me what *you’re* scared of.

    And I thought, fuck, what the hell am I supposed to do now? I’ve never had to do a rewrite of a personal essay before. I’ve had to do this for various reported articles, but never for anything first-person. I don’t think that’s because I’m such an awesome writer, but rather because I have an intuition for what is needed for a story to feel complete. There’s an element of honesty to personal writing that is totally unrelated to the quality of the writing itself, if that makes sense, and good editors can tell when it’s missing. I haven’t done personal writing in years (which is probably why it’s been so damn hard to get my memoir proposal off the ground), and I knew when I turned in that first draft that I was holding back something. I guess I sort of hoped that no one would call me on my bullshit. That I wouldn’t actually have to be honest after all and instead could hide behind intellectual arguments that I knew to be true. True or not, nothing exists solely in the abstract. What do double standards actually look like in real life? What does a so-called “slut” look like? And how does said slut deal with harassment?

    Not by hiding behind textbooks, that’s for sure. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple years. I write about sex, sure, but not about my own experiences. I write about reproductive access, healthcare, abortion, contraception, all things I’m passionate about. But what I really, really want to do is not possible anymore. At least not online. And this is an explanation of why.

    A lot of the commenters over at Salon seem to think that I was either faking my naivety in not expecting consequences for writing about sex (which, okay, you don’t have to believe me, but if you’re not going to take my word for it, then there’s no point in engaging in a discussion at all) or that I am merely whining because there are people who judge me. I’ve heard this before. I’ve been told at various points in my blogging career that I’m essentially “asking for it” by sharing personal details about my life. And when it was just me and a laptop and random insults about my sure-to-be-single-and-lonely future, I took the criticism mostly in stride. Sure, no one likes being made fun of, but it’s something that I learned to live with and ignore.  And I don’t expect everyone to agree with all my opinions! That’s why I have a comments section, after all. (And by the way, I don’t even moderate it unless someone says something truly horrifying and racist or attacks another commenter.)

    But that’s not all that happened to me. It’s not just about hurt feelings; it’s about the fact that there were and still are people absolutely obsessed with ruining my life for no reason other than the fact that they couldn’t stand to see someone — especially an Asian woman! — fuck and write about fucking without being punished for it. It’s not “whining” or naivety to express shock and dismay at my family and friends being outed on the Internet. A few questions:

    1. Was I suppose to just take it in stride that random pervs found out where my little sister went to high school and speculated about whether she, too, would become a “whore”? An anonymous asshole emailed her last fall asking her that. Don’t tell me that’s normal criticism.
    2. What about the manufactured “scandal” that Internet vigilantes began in hopes of getting my boyfriend kicked out of his Ph.D program? They decided to email the entire sociology faculty list. I was a junior at the time in the same department. Do you have any idea how incredibly difficult it is to force yourself to graduate when your professors have all read about how you’re supposedly being “raped” on a regular basis? That is not criticism.
    3. Is trying to get me fired also normal? In 2009, when I was working for an education non-profit during my time off from Harvard, someone wrote a fake article about how my employer was so embarrassed to have hired a “porn blogger”. There were made-up quotes from “company reps”. They disseminated it online, not realizing that I actually told my boss about my blog during my initial interview. (He emailed me the article and totally had my back. It was one of the most touching things I’ve ever experienced from an employer, no joke.)

    And last but not least, as recently as this spring, my readers — that is, the folks leaving comments here and “liking” my posts — were being outed and falsely accused of being reprimanded by their educational institutions and fired by their employers. Not for writing about sex themselves but for reading about it on my blog. I have at least 50 emails sitting in my inbox from people who are completely freaked out about how their names and emails and various affiliations were discovered and printed on the Internet and I have no answers for them beyond, “Folks are fucked up! I’m so sorry!” I haven’t blogged anything intimate about my relationship since 2008. It’s been THREE YEARS. I stopped sex blogging because of this shit, but that’s not good enough! They want me to stop writing altogether, I suppose, because they are not only STILL going at it, but they are intent on turning as many people into collateral damage as possible. I now write about feminist dating etiquette for god’s sake! This would ALMOST be funny, ALMOST, but if you think about it a little harder, it’s mostly just weird and scary. Because think about it: my various stalkers through the years have spent inordinate amounts of time tracking down individuals who know me personally or follow my writing, and then they try to ruin their reputations. They obsess about Lena Chen even more frequently than Lena Chen herself. (And trust me, that is hard to top.) I mentioned all of this in the Salon piece, but I guess it’s really easy to just skip over those parts. ‘Cause then I wouldn’t be a whiny slut anymore. I’d be a woman concerned for her personal safety and the well-being of her loved ones. That’s slightly more complex-sounding and harder to stereotype.

    I’ve written about all of this before, and to be frank, I was and am afraid of writing about it again. Sometimes, readers ask, “Why do you pay so much attention to this stuff?” Answer: because it astounds me! Doesn’t it astound you? I can deal with people calling me names on the Internet. But what I have never been prepared for? The twisted, sadistic attacks on people I care about and on people I don’t even know (like my readers). I guess my stalkers thought that if they couldn’t hurt me anymore, they’d just start aiming for the closest targets. And that was something I never once anticipated. Each and every single time it happened (and the attacks became progressively worse over the years), I was deeply surprised. I didn’t even know that people were capable of this kind of malice. This is not criticism. This is not disapproval. This isn’t even bullying. This is harassment and intimidation. How does one get over the fact that this is the consequence of writing about sex? That another human being who doesn’t even know you in real life can hate you this deeply?

    That’s the reason I stopped SexAndTheIvy.com. Because I didn’t have any recourse or protection (legal or otherwise) and I was sick of being constantly afraid for myself and those around me. So I adjusted accordingly and made myself as non-controversial as possible in order to not attract this type of attention anymore. And even that didn’t drive them all away. The haters won. If you were expecting a happy ending to this entry, I’m afraid there isn’t one. I wake up everyday hoping they haven’t decided to target someone new. When I turned in the second, more honest draft of my essay to Sarah, I was scared, not just of the reactions from readers but of the potential backlash. Because I know the second I start to feel safe, the moment I start to believe that I’m flying under the radar, that’s when it’ll happen again. This is what slut-shaming looks like. It’s not just a slur, a curse word, something uttered and forgotten. It’s about breaking your faith in humankind. It’s about reminding you of the depths of people’s malevolence. It’s about instilling fear so that even if you have a voice, you shut yourself right up because you know what happens when you use it. And at some point, you become so paranoid and terrified that they don’t even need to police you anymore because you start to police yourself.

    24 May 2011

    "I was the Harvard Harlot" | Salon

    As promised, here’s the link to my personal essay for Salon on learning sexual shame from my sex blogging days in college. It only took an hour before I got my first “You will never find a husband comment”! That’s got to be a record, right?

    I also got this comment earlier today on the blog, likely in response to the article:

    Hello Lena. I am writing this anonymously since I really don’t feel like filling out forms and registering on your site. I will gladly email you my personal info if you feel like you want it after your read my post. I doubt you will and I also feel like this will not be replied to or put on your wall.  Keep reading after the next line and trust that it’s all going somewhere and isn’t simply a blasting of you or anyone.

    You are whore and disgrace to women.

    The fact that I am not a misogynist and do believe in female empowerment is why I say this.  Having had sex with more men than one could have fostered any sort of meaningful relationship with is crude, empty, and vulgar. Note* I didn’t attach a number to such things but rather a character quality.  What does it say about someone who pops their dick in any woman’s mouth? Note* I just switched genders on this.  Man or woman it does not matter. There is no double standard. Men who sleep around are also seen and prejudized against as “pigs,” “hustlers,” “players.”  Girls having sex as  young as 13 will start even younger and those blowjobs to a different guy each day during recess will cum (pun very much intended) more readily the more such behavior is glorified or made okay. I personally and many if not all of my friends would have no respect for a woman who has slept around or even “Sucked” around men who she hasn’t known on a deeper level for a year or so. No one wants to marry a whore or have children with a whore.  No one wants the mother of their child to have had such little sense of worth and self respect for themselves.  If woman want empowerment it starts with respect.  Have some for yourself though it’s too late in your case. You sound like a rape victim or molestation victim with severe unresolved psychological issues to be blunt.

    Now. Why would anyone in the world leave a comment like the above? This is something I’ve asked myself over and over and over since I started blogging in 2006. If you read the comments over at Salon, there’s enough chastising to last an unrepentant harlot a lifetime! (Note to readers: do not actually read comments to Salon article lest you become triggered/incensed/completely disheartened by the state of humanity.)

    You know what the above sounds like to me? “You are a whore and a disgrace to women and will never find a man to marry or inseminate you BECAUSE MY FRIENDS AND I THINK SO.” Sorry, dude, but opinions are like assholes! Everyone has one and yours is a bit … narrow, if you know what I mean. Theodor Adorno once said, “The idea of the free expression of opinion, which indeed cannot be separated from the idea of a free society, necessarily becomes the right to propose, defend, and if possible successfully champion one’s own opinion, even when it is false, mad, disastrous.” Poorly supported Internet arguments are a great example of how freedom and opinions can actually lead to appalling displays of ignorance.

    Here’s the deal: I don’t typically engage with comments like this but the multiple LOGIC FAILS pain me so greatly that I’ll address this one. You don’t get to say “Everyone believes X” by using you and your friends as proof. You don’t get to say “Women are only empowered if they do X” by using your personal preferences as a gauge for where one’s individual liberty begins and ends. You don’t get to assume things about my psychological history when you do not know me and are not my therapist.

    Speaking of my mental health, I will gladly admit to being ALL KINDS OF CRAZY, because, hey, I don’t think I need to be ashamed of the fact that I was incredibly unhappy in college, but in my history of therapists, none of them have ever implied that my blogging is the result of “unresolved psychological issues”. If anything, they agreed that Harvard quite literally drove me nuts and that the World Wide Web and my classmates were judgmental pricks who likely caused the depression and anxiety I suffered through undergrad. It is completely possible to determine that sexual morality is repressive and harmful without having experienced any of the trauma that random Internet people have suggested that I’ve suffered. But whatever, go ahead and make offensive generalizations about survivors of sexual assault! Isn’t that just way easier than rational thinking? (On the off-chance that the sarcasm doesn’t translate, I am being 100 percent sarcastic.)

    One thing that the above commenter asks strikes me as particularly illogical: “What does it say about someone who pops their dick in any woman’s mouth?” Answer: THEY CLEARLY LIKE BLOWJOBS! That’s it. That’s all that tells you. One’s eagerness to place one’s penis in a mouth does not say anything about whether one pays taxes on time or remembers to call home for Mother’s Day or tips well at dinner. You can draw almost no generalizable conclusions from a predilection for oral sex. Nor can you draw any conclusions about a person from their number of sexual partners or their sexual history. You don’t know them. How in the world can you think that you know their motivations for doing anything in life?

    For the record, I don’t think anyone or any gender should be shamed for their sexuality. Men shouldn’t deal with policing of their bodies and sexual behavior, but I do bring up double standards because there is a clear difference in how female sexuality has been legislated and policed by both state and community. And while dudes have been subject to some of the same norms as women, the latter — by virtue of reproductive capability — have been much more frequent targets. The majority portion of the negative feedback I receive is based on my gender. (A significant portion is also based on my race. Think: “Me love you long time” type of shit.) In this day and age, I don’t have to worry about being forced into a nunnery for women of ill repute, but I am routinely told that I will never find a husband, that I am not being “a lady”, that my self-worth is tied to my vagina’s ability to appeal to potential suitors. Men do not get anywhere close to this sort of criticism, in part because no one assumes that a guy’s primary goal in life is to get hitched but also because the white, male body has not historically been a site of repression. Men who do get harassed for their sexual choices also frequently exhibit behavior perceived to be “feminine” (e.g. being sexually submissive in bed, having sex with men, being the receptive partner/bottom, etc.) or possess qualities that society reads to be dangerous (e.g. being of a person of color, a HIV-positive person, etc.). Which is also problematic, but has different underlying causes.

    The single thing the Salon commenters did get right, though? I’m probably never getting married. Fine by me. This ho-skank has been contentedly living in sin since 2008.

    23 May 2011

    Anonymous asked: Hi Lena Chen. First of all, you're an amazing writer. I have two questions, the first is do you have any estimate as to how many different people you've slept with? The second question is, what gives you the courage to answer questions like these to thousands of people?

    Um … masochism?

    Kidding, but seriously, sometimes I want to create a business card that says, “Lena Chen, Punching Bag For Internet Misogynists Since 2006.”

    To your first question, because my younger self was quite the meticulous list-maker, I *do* have a master list, though I stopped updating it a little over three years ago and can’t get into the hard drive of my old Powerbook, in which it’s stored. I mentioned a while back in an issue of Marie Claire that my official “number” is 30, though I have some issues with reducing one’s sexual history to instances of intercourse. (Why do we still consider penis-in-the-vagina sex to be the end-all, be-all?)

    To your second, I answer these questions because I feel like I shouldn’t have anything to be ashamed of, and I wish I didn’t live in a society that shames and inflicts violence on people for their sexuality. (There are a lot of folks who, unlike me, do not have the privilege of speaking openly on these matters.) What does it say about the world that some of my readers are so discouraged from talking openly about sex that they feel the need to anonymously seek the opinion of a blogger, because they don’t know anyone in real life they feel comfortable asking? Don’t get me wrong — I do like answering questions. (And I try to answer as many as possible in my free time, though I routinely fall behind and don’t get to each one.) Ideally though, no one should have to summon up “courage” just to be honest about their own lives. I think that’s a damn shame.

    Coincidentally, a personal essay of mine is being published in Salon on the very topic of slut-shaming. Will post the link when it’s up!

    More burning questions? Ask Lena.

    10 May 2011

    “We had more in our lives than just men; we had our work, travel, friends, Then why did our lives seem to come down to a long succession of sad songs about men? Why did our lives seem to reduce themselves to manhunts? Where were the women who were really free, who didn’t spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man? We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold — Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he’ll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love, which is seldom. And the rest — the women writers, the women painters — most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers … Flannery O’Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O’Keefe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? … Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that where it all led?”
    — Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

    27 Apr 2011

    BUST Magazine | The Naked Truth

    As I mentioned, I’m doing some catch-up blogging at the moment! Here’s a much belated copy of the February/March issue of BUST Magazine, which featured me in a story by Emily McCombs about sex bloggers who have been outed or subjected to harassment as a result of their writing. I’ve already blogged quite a bit about the vicious attacks that my friends and family have suffered over the years, but when interviewed for this piece last fall, I had no idea that some of my online stalkers would also be soon going after my readers. (I’m glad that this bullying has dwindled down the past few weeks, and I’m grateful for all the support that you guys have expressed!)

    Next to some of the ladies in the above piece, I feel downright lucky. Melissa Petro was fired from her job as a teacher when she was outed as a sex worker. Zoe Margolis was relentlessly pursued by a tabloid that outed her. Most recently, Kendra Holliday is being sued by her ex-husband for full custody of her children because of her sexuality. Since I’ve always been self-employed, childless, and public with my identity, I haven’t had to deal with these problems (though I’m not sure “At least I’m not being canned!” is much of an upside to the situation). Nonetheless, it’s hard to explain to people why I continue doing what I’m doing. Isn’t writing about sex just attracting negative attention and bad publicity after all? This is actually  the precise topic about which I’m writing a personal essay right now … perhaps, I’ll share some of those thoughts on the blog when I’m feeling less vulnerable to misinterpretation.

    In the meantime, you can read the full story from BUST. (Hint: you won’t be able to click through to the hi-res images on the Tumblr dashboard, so refer to TheChicktionary.com if you’re interested in reading):

    7 Apr 2011

    Hot Mess

    Ever since I got a new phone in January, I haven’t been able to sync my Google Calendar with it. I looked into troubleshooting this back when I was setting it up, but gave up soon thereafter and haven’t really addressed the problem since. As a result, I haven’t had a personal calendar for four months. I’ve been using post-it notes and text documents that contain to-dos and tasks. It’s all over the place and not so great for productivity.

    So why don’t I just fix my damn Google Calendar?

    I don’t know! When shit breaks, I have a tendency to ignore it. Do y’all remember when I wrote back in July of 2010 that I got myself locked out of Sex And The Ivy because I forgot the password and my edition of Wordpress had a broken password recovery function? I STILL HAVEN’T UPGRADED MY WORDPRESS. I haven’t logged into that site in over a year.

    So if it isn’t clear: I am a complete and utter mess. I’m incredibly scatter-brained and would never, ever get anything done if I didn’t live with Patrick. We are, in many ways, embodiments of our respective cultural stereotypes — me, the flaky, disorganized, overly emotional writer and him, the stoic, efficient, neat freak German.

    And I’m not just saying this because it’s so super endearing and oh watch me go frolic in my La La Land of carelessness. It’s actually annoying as fuck that being clean and together doesn’t come naturally to me. Taxes every year are a nightmare because I keep all my receipts in a cardboard box. (And I’m a freelancer. Who has to itemize deductions. FML.) My kitchen counter top has random mini-piles of papers and checks and mail, because I failed to conceive of a filing system. In the short time that Patrick’s been in Germany (less than three days), I’ve managed to turn the apartment into a travesty. I’ve been back from California for a week and I still haven’t unpacked. And I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have a real spice rack if I lived alone.

    And I try! I do. I really, really try. The receipts in a cardboard box sounds ridiculous, for example, but it’s actually an improvement from receipts in a tote bag, which is what I was dealing with last year. And the cardboard box is just temporary holding anyway, because I have previously organized receipts into “travel”, “meals”, “office”, and “other” categories and stored those away in envelopes. (Granted, this system worked for about two months before I stopped filing away receipts in their appropriate slots, but gimme an A for effort, okay?) Also, I’ve gotten much, much better about important documents. I have all my freelance contracts and health insurance information and prescriptions in a binder.

    Anyway, I say all this not to solicit affirmation that I am, indeed, an adult, but to debunk the notion that I am soooo together and soooo perfect and someone to aspire to be. Because occasionally, I meet some lovely people who read my blog and express the above lovely sentiments, and I’m afraid that my online persona does not accurately reflect the reality. Which is that I am not together and not perfect and probably not someone you actually want to emulate. (I mean, really, have you seen my Google results?) And as much as I would love for y’all to marinate in my wonderfulness, I think it’s totally a necessary experience to see someone you idolize fall flat on their face and emerge as a real person, because hello, who needs idols? I’m just a girl with a blog.

    Of course, I would never want for this demystification to occur before your very eyes. This past Tuesday, for example, I ran into someone who read my blog, which almost never happens in Boston because that would actually require that I leave my apartment. I was so totally out of it (typing away frantically on my iPhone and not aware of my surroundings at ALL) that when she asked me if I was Lena, I think my facial expression actually changed to one of complete horror. Because I realized that I was behaving like a fool IN PUBLIC and that this foolish behavior may have very well been observed/mentally documented. The fact that Hamlet decided to stage a hissy fit at this supremely inconvenient time was the icing on my cake of FAIL.

    See? Online, I can pretend to be a lot of things. Dog mommy, domestic goddess, professional feminist, blogger extraordinaire, and occasional wearer of clothes. People tell me, “Oh, you have it so together nowadays!” Um, hello, it’s a total facade. If I actually blogged everything I did/felt/failed at, you guys would be straight-up horrified. And for my long-time readers, I may not be stumbling home drunk off my ass on a Tuesday night but really, not so much has changed, guys. It’s just that I have a roommate to clean up after me these days.

    Like this entry? Regular reader of my blog? Support access to crucial health services? Show your appreciation of my work by donating to my fundraiser to support the local Eastern Massachusetts Abortion Fund, which gets calls everyday from women who can’t afford abortions and need financial assistance for abortion care, emergency contraception, options counseling, child care during abortion procedures, and transportation costs to clinics. Without money, there is no choice. Every dollar helps give women the healthcare they deserve!