Every other talk at Saturday’s XOXO was amazing

Is that a clickbait title or what? And it’s not even fair, because what I really mean is that I skipped a couple of the talks because [I had something else to do/my knee was playing up from sitting and I needed to walk around the building/various other reasons/like coffee]. Because I knew I’d be able to grab transcripts later (thanks Medium!) I ended up missing just about every other talk today and not being so worried about it that I couldn’t enjoy the ones I did see. So I’m sure all the talks were great. But, even though I didn’t set out to do so on purpose, by the end of the day, my experience of today’s guest speakers was “It was amazing women being amazing, and I guess there was some other stuff, too, but someone else can talk about that. I get to talk about AMAZING WOMEN.”

In fact, I’m going to H2 that and start this piece off with a new title:

Amazing Women Being Amazing

There we go. That’s better.

This piece mentions online harassment towards women, including some paraphrasing and quotes. I have kept those mentions deliberately vague, but you know your own comfort levels best, so please take care of yourself.

The first speaker of the day was Heather Armstrong. I guess she’s a big deal in mommy-blogging, but I have dogs, so I certainly didn’t go into the auditorium expecting much in the way of career advice. (I was, however, already 100% ready to give her a lot of support because, like me, Heather is a recovered Mormon. In the ranks of “shared-experiences make natural allies,” ex-LDS is a pretty tight crew.)

Not even halfway through Heather’s talk I found myself thinking “well, this lady’s awesome”— life’s thrown her some absolute BS, but she’s made cowpat lemonade and kept her sense of humor about everything. She also seemed pretty darned tough — it takes more than a little oomph to be honest and awesome when you’re standing in front of a screen with larger-than-life unglamour shots of yourself projected on it.

Heather: “I didn’t want to decorate the everyday and the ugliness of it. I wanted to celebrate it, and I wanted to write it and move you and make you laugh.”

I nodded along while she talked about going up against big corporations and listing to “professional” criticism (scare quotes intended) thinking “good job, you tell ‘em.” But when she got to the part where we got to listen to some of the comments she’s received over the years for, you know, basically just being online— “Get over yourself, you’re not important, you’re ugly, you’re pitiful, I hope you die” — and her voice cracked on some of the more painful words… it took all of my self control not to yell in the otherwise dead quiet auditorium, “those people are wrong. I don’t even know you, but they’re wrong.”

But everyone that was in the room with us already knows they’re wrong, so I managed to stay quiet until she could finish her talk, at least. And it turned out that although the personal attacks are painful (surprising no one), they weren’t the end point of her talk at all. She bounced right back out of that painful moment to talk about her career and family, and the choices she’s made about both.

HA: “Mommy blogging is not dead. My desire to do it the way it is being done is.”

Only, I couldn’t get those personal attacks out of my head. We live in a world where a woman can repeat cruel things that have been said to her as an aside to a conversation about nonconstructive criticism. As if it’s pretty much expected that if someone has something nasty to say about how you’re doing your job, they’re going to throw in some crap about how you look, too (spoiler alert: it is expected, there’s no “as if” about it). I found myself (possibly selfishly) needing to be a voice on the opposite side.

I had thought what was important to me was that we were both in the same club for a while, because that’s the only place I was aware our life really intersected. Instead it turns out that, oh that’s right, we both live in the world where people get really viciously nasty when they don’t agree with something. So, as soon as Heather wrapped her talk and Andy Baio came out on stage to announce the next speaker, I excused myself to go out into the lobby in the hopes of catching Heather to say, “keep being amazing, because anyone who says you’re otherwise is incorrect.”

And that’s how I missed the second speaker of the day.

I promise I’ll catch that and the other talks I missed today on YouTube when they go up, but I was busy adding one more tiny voice of support to a woman that’s out there doing what she wants to do. Because that’s what I want to do — I can’t fix really big problems with how humans deal with each other, but I can at least say I disagree with the voices that say nasty things for the sake of nastiness.

Anyway, you better believe I was back in time for the second talk, because C. Spike Trotman is a pretty huge part of the reasons I signed up to go to XOXO is the first place.

She did not disappoint.

In fact, the (unofficial?) XOXO motto of “lower your expectations” should really be changed to “your expectations could have been at LEAST 400% higher and Spike still would have blown them away.”

Spike: “You heard about million dollar podcasts and million follower mommy bloggers. It’s time to think small. Just bring the bar back down here.”

No can do, Spike. Because you spent the next half hour telling us how every time someone tried to tell you where the bar was — for comics, for creative teams, for porn(!), for women , for women of color— and that you couldn’t hit it, you said “eff you” and then surpassed that silly little bar like you were stepping over a crack in the sidewalk.

(Aside: I’ve worked in comics for, pfft, nearly ten years now — not all that long, but I’m not new, either. But, in case anyone who was listening was wondering if Spike was playing up some of the… let’s call it “nonsense” to keep this family friendly… she talked about for dramatic effect, I can tell you she really only mentioned the teensiest sliver of ice at tip of the iceberg, or we’d have been there all day. I mention this only so you’ll understand that every wall she mentioned hitting, you need to visualize that wall being twice as thick and three times as tall. However awesome you think Iron Circus’ success story is, multiply that by a lot more.)

There’s no success without criticism. Heather’s talk — about finding and choosing her own way, and getting (nasty) comments about it — was still fresh in my mind, and it hit me in the middle of Spike’s talk that she was working in an almost entirely different medium with an almost totally different demographic… but she had heard some of the exact. Same. Crap.

CST: “The goal posts for unprofessional will always move to disqualify you if somebody doesn’t want you there.”

Spike chose to focus more on the “professional” criticism than the personal — although I’m sure she could have shared plenty of BS she’s heard about what she looks like, and probably some very creeptastic commentary about her sex life — but I think her response would apply to both flavors of nonsense: “You can sit [online] and talk yourself into that what I’m doing doesn’t count, but you are verifiably wrong. You are on the losing side. I know what I’m doing […] And that’s really all I fucking care about.”

And then we all stood up and applauded so much that, after Spike left the stage, Andy Baio needed to call her back out so we could applaud some more.

And then we broke for lunch.

When we all got back to the air-conditioned auditorium after toasting for two hours in the unseasonably-warm-for-Portland weather, there were some folks from Suck.com on the stage, including Heather Havrilesky and Ana Marie Cox. But that era of the internet was a titch before my time, and I believe quite a bit of it went over my head, so I’ll let someone that knows what they’re talking about do that write-up. Besides, I want to move on to the talk that made me laugh the hardest I’d laughed all day (and I apologize to whoever was sitting next to me, because I laughed loudly).

Mallory Ortberg from the Toast managed to break the theme of online criticism (can two people make a theme? It felt like a theme, by that point) by instead talking a little bit about… criticizing ourselves. She didn’t come right out and talk about the “Self! You suck! Stop sucking!” sort of self-criticism — instead she spent a lot of time talking about how she got where she is, and making the things she did “wrong” into the punchlines.

Mallory: “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you’re going to be okay and then you’re going to die and so am I!”

But almost every time we all laughed at her self-deprecating comments about the steps she took along the way from effectively nowhere to somewhere she wants to be, Mallory added a new step, until a really clear picture started to emerge — and she’d been moving forward the entire time. Maybe not in the traditional way, or a way that would work for anyone else — but it worked for her. She made it work. And it’s worth noting that none of the steps were “be really hard on yourself and then give up.”

I want this section to be so much longer, but I spent so much time laughing — especially when she pulled out some Toast content — that I’d have to paste the full text of her talk to respond to each moment. Suffice to say that the transcript of her talk has to break for (Laughter) 40+ times, and that’s just when we got so loud she had to pause. The only time the laughter wasn’t as loud was when she pulled out the murderous introvert jokes… in a room full of introverts. It’s possible she didn’t think that through. Although I suppose it’s equally possible she was establishing motive.

Either way, when Mallory’s talk comes to YouTube, I’ll update this piece with a link, and you will want to click it.

MO: “You guys can mess up so much and still turn out okay!”

The last awesome lady giving an awesome talk of the day was Zoe Quinn — and by typing that I’m pretty sure I’ve set this post up to be google searched by people I’m not excited to meet. Which is… well it’s not fine, but I’ve been writing about “criticism” that’s really harassment for this many words, so I’m in it, now!

Zoe: “I heard XOXO was a good place to give something pretty personal. […] So I’m going to get a little personal, a little vulnerable, I hope that’s okay.”

Zoe talked about a lot of stuff you’ve probably already heard about, in one way or another. A lot of it was not good stuff. It was cruel, and it was hurtful, and it was professional and personal attacks on a stomach churning level. I’d imagine it was a little difficult to even read some of her slides for some folks in the audience.

It’s also nothing I care to repeat, because if you were there (or watched the YouTube vid in the future), you already heard it — and even if you weren’t, very little of what she mentioned on the negative front was news.

What I do want to talk about are the parts that were good . And I’m not talking about quality —that was all good — I mean emotionally good, for everyone in the room.

I want to talk about a woman who’s been under pretty constant attack for over a year, who can still stand in front of a room full of people and talk about being kind to others. Because that’s kind of a big deal. Zoe talked about things she believed when she was younger that she doesn’t believe any more, and encouraged the audience to remember that we’re not always talking about bad people when we talk about the bad things people say.

It’s another talk, like basically all of them I’ve already mentioned, that I encourage you to check out when it goes up on YouTube. But, this one especially, you might want to ignore the “related content” that pops up in the sidebar.

ZQ: “Try to be kinder.”

I haven’t even looked at the speaker schedule for tomorrow beyond a quick glance (this weekend is almost going to fast to keep up with!), and I need to go to bed if I’m going to be back up in the morning to watch the talks, anyway — but if today was any indication, you can expect another “oh my gosh let’s talk about the awesome” post, soon. And that’ll be before I even backtrack to talk about the first two days.

More soon, I’m sure. Sorry, Andys — my expectations have always been the opposite of low. I’m also the opposite of disappointed. What’s the word for that? “Satisfied” doesn’t seem to quite cover it. Let’s call it “XOXOed.”