Tiger Beatdown

[Sady is going through some boy troubles. She has good timing. In honor of this, and of the Most Terrible Week of the Year, Tiger Beatdown will be here to hold your hand through the weekend, with a star-studded series of posts on break-up songs. Let’s hang out and hate this bullshit together, everybody.]

The heartbreak of an inveterately verbose asshole is a hard thing to understand. If, for example, I told you about my heartbreak! Who would believe me, or care, really? There is something about people who seem powerful only when they’re speaking – people who construct massive fortifications of verbiage and argument and rhetoric in order to safeguard themselves, who have the mastery of conscious thought that language implies so concretely down, who are so good at relaying their version of things that you doubt there can be any other – that prohibits empathy, though it may very well encourage identification. You might want to have that power, but you don’t necessarily want to be around it; there’s too much chance that you will wind up on its receiving end.

All of this is a way of telling you that, as a verbose asshole myself, when I break up with someone, the only music I can really listen to is Bob Dylan’s.

I know! I know! Dylan is, among other things, a gigantic douche on occasion; very specifically, he would seem to be a misogynist of the old school, a member of the Grand Old Boner Party, the sort of man who can only deal with women – at least rhetorically – if they are childlike and precious, or strangely exotic objects on which he looks with fear, admiration, and deep distrust. We can debate whether this is just something that happens in his writing, or whether it carries over into his life, but if you doubt that Bob is capable of shitty behavior to – well, to most people actually, but specifically to women, or that his shitty behavior to those women can be fairly predictably sexist, I suggest that you ask Joan Baez about it. Or just listen to that one song of hers, about how, when they were dating and she was promoting her relatively unknown boyfriend out of the goodness of her heart, giving his scrappy little nothing projects her own by-then-substantial cred, he used to casually insult her writing. My poetry was lousy, you said, the girl says; don’t let on that you knew me when I was hungry and it was your world, the boy says, the breakup still fresh and already glorying in the fact that he no longer has a more successful girlfriend.

It’s such a bullshit cop-out, that line; it’s a put-down disguised as a plea, a confession of vulnerability designed to hit precisely where it hurts. It’s a masterpiece of passive-aggression. It was your world; don’t let on that you knew me when. And yet, though the specific song in which that line happens – the one about the lady who does pretty much everything like a woman, except for break, which she does in a far more immature fashion – has been railed against by so many feminists, held up as an exemplar of Bob Dylan’s legendary lady issues, when it is literally true about you specifically, it doesn’t quite sting so much. Although it does sting. Your long-time curse hurts, but what’s worse is all this pain in here. I can’t stay in here. Ain’t it clear? These are some lines, assuming that you read the song as about you, that will suck the breath from your lungs. And they are human. You have no choice but to accept them, and to understand.

But tell me every key stroke doesn’t hit you with the force of a blow. Look at his turned back for me and tell me what it means. Tell me you don’t see the circles under that girl’s eyes.

(Continued)

Say, who’s spending too much time on the Internet lately? Me, that’s who! I have been spending too much time on the Internet lately! It is making me doubt my own cred as a socially functional person, I will tell you that much for sure. HOWEVER. One of the things I have been doing lately, when I am on the Internet, is getting involved in the stuff that I should have been getting involved with all along, such as:

WEBSITE REDESIGN!

Yes, this is an updatey post, about changes you will be seeing (hopefully) in the near future. Website Redesign, it turns out, is one of those changes! For example:

• As it turns out, C.L. has a working knowledge of templatey stuff, which I personally do not – I manage to fuck things up every time I edit the template, to such a degree that I am always surprised when the computer does not spontaneously burst into flames as a result of my meddling – so, hopefully, at some point in the future, you will be getting an overhaul visually and in terms of certain website content.
• Also, Tiger Beatdown is terminally ugly. But we do have a header, designed by a top-secret ladyblogging friend several months ago, which is gorgeous and hilarious and also, I think, might get us sued. So, hopefully you’ll be getting that, and a slightly more attractive and colorful, less wall-of-text Tiger Beatdown experience fairly soon. Another thing you might be seeing is ads! Which leads us to:

MONEY STUFF!

I consider myself one of the more fortunate ladies in the world, because people who read this blog continually straight up ask me for the opportunity to give me money. As you may have guessed, I make my living right now by freelance writing; as you may also have guessed, my primary commitment right now is to writing and editing Tiger Beatdown; as you may have guessed thirdly, I don’t get any compensation for that. Which is problematic, because it is more or less a full-time job. So, in this new chapter of the blockbuster saga Sady Doyle and the Quest for a Living Wage, I will in fact be looking into ways of making Tiger Beatdown sustainable, and “monetizing” (ugh) is a part of that. Just remember, it was your idea!

• I’m looking into ad networks; specifically, I’m looking for ad networks that will help make this site financially viable and also have something to do with Interests That Are Relevant To Our Readers. Which is, like, the definition of “Looking Into Ad Networks,” but whatever. I’ve submitted the site for consideration to some folks already, but if you care to advertise here, tigerbeatdown@gmail.com is a good answer for you.
• People have asked to “donate” through PayPal – one super-neat dude, by the name of William (hi, William! Thank you, William!) even found my PayPal account out of nowhere and sent me a chunk of change which, while good for about 3.5 okay dinners in the city of New York (or 1.5, if I decide to let my boyfriend eat too) was actually kind of startlingly large to me personally. I thank you for this, and for your interest! It feels strange to me, though, in that in order for this to be an actual “donation,” of the tax-deductible variety, I’d have to go and file for non-profit status, and until then it’s just people giving me money out of the goodness of their hearts. And I want people to get something concrete – increased exposure, or whatever – for their money! SO:
• Remember how you were all asking for t-shirts and merchandise in that one comment section until it EXPLODED???? I am talking to some people about that, too! One of the people I am talking to about it is very gifted, and very Etsy-enabled, and she made me this cunning ensemble out of the goodness of her heart:

Attractive, no? Except for my terminally weird facial expressions and the strangely chin-erasing lighting, I think so. And, while I do not think this specifically should be the merchandise, because making other people wear the tangible proof of my self-absorption is maybe a step too far, I do want you to know that hopefully we are going to have some t-shirts and they will be precisely this attractive, though not this very same one.  And finally:

• If all other attempts to monetize fail, I will simply insert a dollar sign into my name, a la Ke$ha. Get ready for the reign of $ady Doyle, guys.

AND THERE’S MORE!

• As you may have noticed, the blogroll is being updated. We’ll be including a bunch of new links soon. There are some that aren’t included because they belong neither under the heading of “Ladybusiness” or the “sometimes but not exclusively or perhaps not at all political but still they make me so happy I could cry” heading of “Other Business.” For example, Racialicious (which is up) and Questioning Transphobia (which isn’t yet) both have a focus on the ladybusiness, but that is not even remotely an apt or complete summary of what they cover, and I don’t know whether we need to create new categories for easy access (“Trans Business,” “Race Business,” etc.) or whether that runs the risk of fragmenting everything and pissing people off by feeling that they are being shunted off into some special category that they don’t think fully or accurately applies. It’s complicated, you guys! So feel free to share suggestions in the comment section.
• Also, we are bringing on some new writers. This is so I can do other freelance work which actually pays me, without Tiger Beatdown going dark. Thus far, everyone who has been invited to write has been invited specifically by me. Pitches are exciting, though! Although I may not get the chance to respond to each and every one personally! Also, in the name of transparency, I have to tell you that I very much want to pay writers, but right now, I have to get to the point where writing, editing, comment-moderating and running the business end of this site is actually financially viable for me, rather than being an actual and heavy drain on me financially, which I can measure in lost time and income. Once I am actually earning something that approximates a living wage, I am telling you, I will get to paying writers, because writing is labor and deserves to be compensated. Right now though, the Tiger Beatdown Finances are not such that I can do a tremendous amount of that.

And that is that! So, hopefully this has been a very enlightening and non-boring post, which you can feel free to comment on with any number of demands, questions, and suggestions. Or it might be kind of boring. In which case you can just make fun of my hair, or whatever. That works, too.