We're thrilled to have Heather Armstrong. [applause] [cheers]
Oh, it went up. Oh, no. Hahahahaha. Oh, my God, the captioning that's gonna happen on
this talk, you guys, oh, man, a colleague of mine had suggested I should screenprint shirts
that say hairy vaginas, because of what it has to do with what I want to talk to you about today.
And the reason it's that big is because I'm obeying the rules of "fixing your boring slides", Andy.
That's 450 point type right there for all y'all.
>> So I am Heather Armstrong, I am the author of Dooce, been blogging for 14 years and I
am the fucking queen of the mommy fucking bloggers. Which means for the last 11 years I've been
exploiting my children for millions and trillions of dollars. There's this one. She made me
a lot of money. [laughter]
It was good content. And then I realized that if I expanded my family I could expand my
readership, so I added this one. [laughter]
You guys, I mean, the cash rolled in. And oh, the money that I made according to the
Wall Street Journal, who interviewed me in 2008. And they wanted to know how much money
I make. And I was like, I'm from the south, I'm from Memphis, and you do not ask me how
much money I make. That's rude. And so they found some dude at some internet place who
did a back of the envelope conjecture about it, and now it is gospel. I make millions
and trillions. Which is I guess what I want to -- that's what I want to talk to you about
today, is I'm not going to tell you about the history of my website, you can go read
my Wikipedia page. Don't you know who I am? [laughter]
I'm not going to get into all of that. What I want to talk to you about is the reason
that I want to walk away from the millions and trillions of dollars so I want to take
off the queen, I want to take off the crown. Why I want to walk away from something that
is working. Just last week, The Atlantic ran this story
about my decision to walk away and its implications on the entire industry of mommy blogging.
And I set the internet on fire, you guys. The mommybloggers went crazy, because who do I think I am to be interviewed by The
Atlantic? Who do I think I am to say I choose not to do this anymore? Except what they saw
on the screen was "Dooce Declares Mommy Blogging Dead." It turns out I'm really
good at getting people to misinterpret me. Really, really, really good at this. Back in April when I announced I wanted to step back from blogging
and not do sponsored content, the internet went crazy, they were like oh, my God, Dooce is gone forever.
And even this dude, he wrote a post about my retirement. "My retirement."
[laughter] Thank you, Anil Dash, for calling him out
on Twitter and telling him to read the words that I had written.
No, what I want to do is get back to the content that I originally wanted to write, which was
the raw and the real, the not so pretty parts of life, the funny.
[laughter] The everyday life, my daughters, my dogs,
I wanted to get back to -- [laughter]
Aw. [laughter]
It writes itself. [laughter]
So there's an artist, her name is Liz Phair. She wrote a song called Nashville and in it
is a lyric that I have hanging over my computer and it's how I write and the lyric is "I can't
imagine any better terms, the naked, half-awake about to shave and go to work, I won't decorate
my love" and she's talking about a romantic love, but that is the love I have for my girls
and my dogs or my dog now, and the life that I led and the stories. 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, and I always did it as irreverently as I possibly could.
[laughter] (Clears throat).
I was chronicling my baby bump with my second child and some reader said, well, you are
not glowing like you should be. [laughter]
You have a scowl on your face, so I was like, I will show you a smile and I will show you
a scowl, don't challenge me on that. So this is my trademark brand of crazy as one critic
put it. This is what I want to write about and until 2011 I supported 4 employees and myself
including my entire family on the banner ads that ran around this content. Just banner ads. And I could write about anything and everything
that I wanted completely unfiltered and it was glorious. I loved it. I really enjoyed
it. And I mean you all probably know that the bottom completely fell out of the banner
ad model, and what was -- what was selling for 3 and 5 and 7 dollars basically was selling
for 15 cents and so the only way to make money as a mommy blogger was to do sponsored content.
And so I thought, OK, how am I gonna do this? How am I gonna make this work? I'm supporting
three people and my entire family, what do I do? So if I'm going to write sponsored
content, I'm going to fucking write sponsored content. I'm going to write, first, what
I want to write and second, what does my audience want to hear from me, and third, I'll make the brand happy.
So for two years I wrote the best sponsored content you've read on the internet, period. You're not going to find better sponsored content.
And then in 2013 a campaign came along that was the beginning of the end for me. Banana Republic
came to five authors who were represented by Federated Media and said we want you to
do a three-day getaway and we want you to write about it and we want it to be fun and
untraditional and not stuffy. And I thought, you want me to throw a party
and you're going to pay for it and you're gonna pay me to write about it and twist my
arm a little bit more, Banana Republic! And then said, can you use your gay assistant
and his boyfriend? Can they be a part of it? And my gay assistant was like yeah, let's
do this, so I took a step back and I was like, okay, they want my gay assistant to be a part of this
and his boyfriend and they want us to go up to Park City and spend two nights at Deer
Valley and they want us to drive this car the whole weekend.
[laughter] Also, while you're up there, can you guys
go horseback riding? [laughter]
The post wrote itself. And my gay assistant saw all of the pictures at the end and he
said, I'm going to quit if you don't call this Brokeback Banana.
[laughter] So I did.
[laughter] And I also wrote about the horseback riding
experience, because they wanted me to. And I don't know if any of you guys know about,
if you don't know anything about horseback riding, if you haven't been in a long time
or haven't been ever, about five minutes into the experience, there's a lot of pain in your
legs and your butt. And our excursion was two hours long? And 45 minutes into this,
I was in so much excruciating pain that I literally was doing the breathing exercises
that I had practiced to prepare for the natural childbirth of my second child.
And I -- it was -- the breathing techniques that I learned in the natural mother birthing
books that show the mother in all of her natural glory, that show all of the hairy vaginas.
[laughter] Oh, yes, I did write that in that post. Oh,
yes, I did. How could I not? I'll take it off so you don't have to look at it.
[laughter] So the initial reaction to that was, oh, my
God, this is the funniest thing you've ever written, second reaction was, this is the
funniest sponsored content you've written. Three, I can't believe Banana Republic let
you do this, this is amazing. I love Banana Republic! And then it was, Banana Republic let you do this? And
two days later I got a call from a representative at Federated. Banana Republic is not happy about Brokeback Banana. They were so upset, in fact,
that they demanded I remove it from my website. They demanded that I take it down immediately and make it disappear, poof! Because apparently you can do that
on the internet. And I said OK, I'll take it down but I'm going to tell my readers
why, and that sent them into complete panic mode. So my author representative called John Battelle, founder and CEO of Federated Media, who is having dinner in London with the Black Eyed Peas. [laughter]
She calls him up and she's like, "John...?" So I get a call from John Battelle, who's upset because one, he's had to leave his dinner with the
Blackeyed Peas. And just a tangent, in that moment, I was like are you seriously going to name drop with me, John? Really? I have 1.5 million Twitter followers, John!
Do you have a direct message from Peter Frampton? Tyra Banks? Boy George? How many inappropriate
direct messages do you have from Lance Armstrong, John? [laughter]
So then he's doubly upset because Banana
Republic has threatened to pull all of its advertising from every Federated Media property. Hundreds of millions
of dollars, and he sat there and scolded me like a child. And he said, how dare you do this?
How dare you put 50 jobs on the line? How dare you do this? How could you do this, Heather?
And I was stunned, but my initial reaction was like, who didn't tell Banana Republic
they were working with this woman? Who at Federated didn't say, do you know who Dooce is? Do you really want her working on this? Like, where did that disconnect happen? But I stood my
ground. That's who I am, that's how I've made my name, and they realized that, and somebody
made some sort of, like negotiation, they came back and they said, OK, fine, you can
leave it up and we won't remove our advertising, but (whispering) please take out hairy vaginas.
Those two words, hairy vaginas, are the reason that all sponsored content going forward from that day has
to be approved by a brand. I'm responsible for that. Blame me. The brand gets a say now,
but you can blame me for a while on the internet. I don't know if you remember this, Andy just
mentioned it. My mom is really proud of this. [laughter]
(Clears throat). Sponsored content going forward from there
was absolutely torturous and soul-sucking because the brand not only got a say, the
brand wanted product placement, they wanted rewrites, they wanted to inject everything
into your post and they wanted no irreverence whatsoever. And I joke about John, but he
and I have a really good relationship and he took really good care of me and my contract,
such good care, though, that I had to say yes to every campaign that came my way, and
in the days leading up to the end of that contract, because they wanted it to end, I
got handed a three-part series, a three-part campaign, three posts, where I had to stick
my kids in the car, drive them to a fun activity, and play a word game in the car and take photos
of them and then write about it. Except that when I'm in the car with my kids going anywhere,
it does not look like this at all. [laughter]
It looks a lot more like this. [laughter]
We're either listening to music and arguing about it, we're not listening to music and
arguing about it, we're kicking each other's seats, we're screaming at each other, we're shooting lasers out of our eyes.
This is what it looks like. And that third post came along and my kids were done. They
were like, we don't want to do this, mom, and I had a deadline. And I had to coax and
cajole and beg and bribe and scream and plead, please get in the car, let's go do this, we
have to do this. And they were like, please, mom, they were in such a bad mood. And hours
and hours and hours later, I got the content that I needed. I got the photos. I turned
in a really good piece of writing that was completely manufactured.
And I -- the end of that day, I felt like a completely empty shell of a human being.
And thought, this is what I have become. This is how I'm making my living. So in the last
almost 15 years of me doing this, I've experienced a lot of success, but I've also experienced
quite a bit of crap. I was hospitalized for postpartum depression, which I wrote about,
but that depression is now used against me. I'm that crazy woman on the internet. My divorce
was played out across the internet. The dissolution of my marriage. I read about it on Jezebel,
I read about it in the local paper, I read about it in the New York Times, I read about
it all over Twitter. People will recognize me in public, they won't say anything, and
then they'll go home and send me an e-mail that says, I saw you at the grocery store but
you looked really haggard and gross so I didn't want to say hi. Happens all the time. My children's teachers
read what I write. My children's friends read what I write. My children's friends parents read what I write. All of my neighbors read what I write.
I was sued by a publishing company, a lawsuit that was eventually settled, but not before my entire savings was completely wiped out.
Just last week, a stalker found the hotel where I was staying for a wedding in Springfield,
Illinois, found my room and slipped a really creepy handwritten letter underneath the door.
And I've endured this for the last 15 years:
[spoken audio] You've got this scary lantern-jawed papier-mâché giant head look going on, like you're dying
of cancer, which I hope you do. Maybe it's because the only person who really cared about
your welfare was your ex and look how you screwed that up. It's clear from your blog
that you're just a bottomless sponge of need and desperation. I hope your kids sue you
for every penny you ever made, because they'll need it for the therapy they'll have to pay for
for having you as a mother. Yeah, get over yourself, you're a blogger,
not a nurse, not a teacher, not a therapist, not anyone who's devoted their life to actually
helping people.
You're a self-serving idiot who has porned your children's lives all over the internet for the sake of fame and greed. [end audio]
None of those things are the reason I'm choosing to walk away. I could endure all of that for another 15
years, I don't want to, but I could. I could totally do that. That's not the reason.
I told people that was the reason. The day that I had to turn in that last post, when
my then-five-year-old walked up to me with tear-stained cheeks, that day I was trying
to coax her into the car. She walked up to me, and through those tears, said to me, mama,
please don't make me do this. I realized that my child had been written into my contract.
And that I was exploiting her. And so I choose to walk away. Because I can no longer make
a living as a mommy blogger writing the story about everything, every secret revealed and
every question that is answered, in a spontaneous moment like this. The description of this,
the adventure, and the glory, the joy of this, I can't write about it and make you laugh
because your kid does the same thing anymore to make a living, and that's what I signed
up to do. Mommy blogging is not dead. My desire to do it the way it is being done is.
And if you can't say hairy vagina, well, fuck 'em.
[laughter] [applause]