On a regular basis, I receive messages telling me that I could improve my blogging, acquire more popularity and gain allies if only I started writing less aggressively. There have been so many of such messages over 2,5 years of blogging that I now have a separate folder for them in my blogging mailbox. I save them because, more often than not, they are extremely aggressive which makes them even more hilarious.
Fellow blogger Z shared that she also has received similar exhortations. So I decided to conduct a poll and find out whether “if-only-you-could-be-less-aggressive” messages have anything to do with the gender of the blogger who receives them.
The poll is located in the right-hand panel of the blog. Please vote!
Clarissa's Blog 
Suggestion: female/male infers non-trans, et. al.; add buttons for trans* bloggers to the survey.
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Good idea! Thanks.
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Controversy brings readers. What do you need “allies” for? You’re not fighting a war.
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Yes, I have also been accused of seeking “cheap popularity.” 🙂
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I voted in your poll; I’ve never been told to tone my writing down, but then my style is already really toned-down.
On posts where I do voice an opinion about something (usually reproductive rights — I have made the (both apparently very controversial!) statements that 1) women (or anyone else with the capacity to become pregnant) should have the choice not to carry a pregnancy to term, and 2) people with disabilities who want to have children should be free to do that — people will leave very vehement comments about why they think I am wrong, and also immoral, for believing those things, but they’ve never told me I’d win over more people to my side if I were less aggressive.
Maybe my tone is too boring for even the Tone Police to handle …
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I’ve had two types of that response on my blog/in personal correspondence with readers. One type is usually people telling me, “Oh you are so smart and write so well, but you are so mean sometimes, you’re hurting people’s feelings! You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!”
Type II is much more unusual, where readers will infer a lot of (mis)information about my personal life from my “tone”, such as, “Oh, you are such a miserable cunt I bet you just need a good deep-dicking to set you straight,” “You’re too angry, if you keep this up you’ll die of a heart attack before you hit thirty,” and “You’re so miserable and cruel, no wonder nobody likes you!”
Truth be told, I mind type II a lot less, because they tend to be a lot more amusing and, for a lack of a better adjective, rather earthy. Type I is just smarmy and syrupy though, which I can’t tolerate.
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I get the smarmy type most often. And I even had the flies and vinegar platitude addressed to me. 🙂
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Another thing working against them: They’re smarmy, sure, but they are also apparently unaware of the wonderful invention known as the flyswatter. Silly folks.
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I never knew why people would want to attract flies … that has always bugged me (ha) about that metaphor.
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