When Your Post Goes Unexpectedly Viral
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So it’s been an interesting week.
Earlier this week I noticed an uptick in subscribers to my
blog. (Hi new followers! I’m happy you’re here!) I was thrilled, but I couldn’t
figure out where these new subscribers were coming from, so I did a little bit
of investigating.
If you could just picture me on a random Thursday morning,
sitting at my kitchen table in my yoga pants and Cubs t-shirt, coffee cup in
hand, opening my blog for the first time in, oh, a while. (Sorry, I’ve been
writing a book so the blog has taken a back seat for this season.)
Imagine the little hiccup of surprise and then the groan
that came from me as I realized that a long-forgotten blog post from 2011, a
controversial one at that, had generated 174 new comments and well over a
million (yes, with six zeroes!) views in the past couple of days.
(Let me just say right here that I am SO BUMMED that I never
monetized my blog!)
Anyway, that post. If you’ve been around here since 2011,
you may remember it. It was a post about modesty titled, “How Your DaughterDresses Matters.” Apparently the modesty issue is still around and still
triggers a fair bit of emotion. To say the least.
So just this week, over a million people have read this
five-year-old post and a few thought it necessary to get involved in the
discussion. Except it wasn’t much of a discussion. It was a lot of name-calling
and opinion-shouting directed at me and others.
Thankfully I have the power to turn off comments, which I
did, and I also decided to pull the post for a while. I needed time to think
and pray about this issue and decide what God would have me do next. And I
needed to figure out how to respond.
As I’ve been pondering, two problems come to mind that I
feel I should address.
First, let’s talk about modesty . . . again. Specifically,
let’s talk about my post.
To those who called my misogynistic and who told me that I’m
contributing to the rape culture in this country, I’d ask you to please read
the post again, slowly this time. Because
nothing in that post speaks of hating girls or women. Nothing. In fact, I
am the most pro-women mother on the planet—I’ve raised three of the most
intelligent, strong, independent women I know.
Furthermore, there is nothing in that post that calls out a
certain style of clothing—that’s not a discussion I care to have. I’m not here
to tell you WHAT your daughter should or should not wear—that’s a discussion
parents and children need to have together. I also don’t believe you’re going
to hell if you wear a bikini—I have no interest in that discussion either. I simply want you to think about what you
wear or choose to let your daughter wear and WHY.
[Side note and gratuitous plug here: my book that is comingout next year is based on asking WHY. Any Christian parents who want to think
deeply about instilling important spiritual values in your kids might want to
keep your eye out for it next fall. *wink wink*]
But the second issue I want to address, and one that is much
more troubling to me, is how the discourse in our country has denigrated. The
comments I read this week were far worse than the comments of those from five
years ago. People today seem to get upset so much more easily, blaming others
and pointing fingers.
There’s not much room for conversation anymore.
For instance, many of the comments I received were along
these lines: “Oh yeah? Well, when is someone going to start telling the boys
how to act?” or “I should be able to dress however I want; boys just need to be
taught to respect women.” Finger pointing and blaming.
The problem is, that’s not what this post was about! I could write a hundred posts on the
problem with the way boys are not being taught to respect women in this
country, but that’s not what THIS post was about.
See, here’s the problem that I see over and over again in
our country and it’s why I want to get off of social media altogether some
days. People default to knee-jerk
reactions, immediately taking offence without regard to the writer’s intended
audience, purpose, or context.
What results is what looks like the current political
situation in our country. It’s not pretty.
Seems like everyone wants someone else to be responsible, to
pay, to be culpable for their offenses. Our
sense of justice is high, but our sense of responsibility is quite low. We
want to blame, but we don’t want to take a good, hard look at how we are
actually living our life that may contribute to a problem.
In my original post, I was not trying to place blame on
anyone. I was simply writing as a mother
of daughters to other mothers of daughters to challenge us to think deeply
about being a little counter-cultural in this one area. That is all. I was
not trying to address mothers of sons. I was not trying to point fingers. I
just want us to think.
Culpability? When it
comes to culpability I think we are ALL responsible for keeping girls safe, and
this is one way, as a mom, I am simply trying to do that.
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