Last month, I published my wildly-popular piece “My Husband Didn’t Take My Last Name,” a satirical look at naming traditions at marriage. With hundreds of comments on both the original and the syndicated versions, I learned a few things.
1) Some readers are just skimming my blog.
In my perfect world, all of my readers obsessively read every word of every blog post I publish. Alas, as a skimmer myself, I know that some of you are just reading the main points. In fact, I anticipate skimming behavior and try to format my blog posts with subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs. So how do I know that y’all are skimming?
I opened my satire by explicitly stating it was satire. And yet, several comments were along the lines of, “At first I was so mad, but then I realized what you were doing!” Yeah, well, if you had read the italicized paragraph at the beginning, I clearly explained the post was satire.
That said, I only published the satire itself on the syndicated copies, so those readers didn’t have the benefit of an explanation… Which some of them made quite apparent…
2) Some readers don’t understand satire.
I don’t know why I was surprised at the number of confused comments. I think I tend to over-estimate the intelligence of people on the Internet. Clearly more than one person had never heard of satire. On a few of the Huffington Post comments, I literally just replied with a textbook definition of satire.
For the record, Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” is satire.
3) Unless a man experiences a problem firsthand, the problem does not exist.
I literally laughed out loud at the mansplaining in the comments.
DON’T WORRY YOUR PRETTY LITTLE HEAD.
NO ONE CARES THAT YOU DIDN’T CHANGE YOUR NAME.
SILLY GIRL.
I exaggerate, but only slightly. So here’s the deal, all people, but especially men.
Unless you are:
- a woman
- in America
- who is married to a man
- and who did not take your husband’s last name
then you probably don’t know how people react to that sort of decision. The exception would be if you are a man who took his wife’s name, which means you have probably faced similar reactions, although certainly not identical ones.
Trust me, I’m not just making shit up. I’ve been vocal about my desire to keep my last name since well before Dan was in the picture. If you think that’s unusual, you probably haven’t spent much time on a southern college campus. Marriage was always a hot topic! And in the world of Lilly Pulitzer and monograms, it was easy for me to mention my monogram wouldn’t ever change.
So I think I know what I’m saying when I explain that not everyone respects a woman’s choice to keep her name upon marriage.
4) I’m really good at writing satire.
Overall, the response to my piece was positive. And while I can’t believe so many people did not understand it was satirical, that is a sign of well-written satire. More feminist satire might be in my future!
Have you ever written satire on your blog? What are your favorite satirical sites? Do you have a topic you’d like me to satirize in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments!
You are really, ridiculously good at writing satire and I’d love to see more. Whenever I try it, I just sound plain old sarcastic. In addition to the skimming, I think people are mostly trained to disregard stuff that looks like “fine print” – whenever I see italicized bits before blog posts, I just assume they’re sponsorship disclaimers and don’t really look.
Hey, I enjoyed your post on how to be a heroine! Maybe not straight-up satire, but hilariously snarky!
That’s a good point on the “fine print.” I do put disclaimers in italics at the top too. Italics at the beginning and/or end of a post is how I add other info that isn’t necessarily part of the post itself, even if it’s important.
We need another font style, clearly.
Your third point here is so true, even when satire is not being used, and is probably one of the most annoying things ever in life.
What’s really sad is that some of the mansplaining came from guys who get at least something right about feminism since most of them said their wives kept their names.
What I don’t think they realize is that in America, LESS women are keeping their names than they did a few decades ago. If anything, the pressure is worse than it was during second-wave feminism.
There might also be a small contingent of people who don’t know the definition of “satire” i.e. people who think stories in The Onion are real.
Yup, that is a true statement.
One of the best things about The Onion articles is when people post them to facebook all upset not realizing where the article is actually from. Assuming that you had that reaction to your post, which I’m guessing you did, I think you can call yourself pretty sucessful!
“…in the world of Lilly Pulitzer and monograms, it was easy for me to mention my monogram wouldn’t ever change.” = Brilliant!
I’m from Texas living in Australia. It is much more accepted here that I didn’t change my name. I shared your post on my facebook, and I noticed the “likes” that I received were from Australian women (predominantly).
It’s one of the things that bothers me so much about the “tradition” argument or the “confusion” argument. Like… you know America is not the entire world, right?
I kept my maiden name and added my married name to it, not hyphenated, just two last names. My southern born and raised husband was a bit flummoxed by that (and still occasionally pokes at me for it) but it is my name… I can do what I want with it! 😛
One of my friends did that so she can use either name, or both names, and still have it be a legal variation of her name.
‘…over-estimate the intelligence of people on the Internet.’ Sad but true.
On skim reading, I find I tend to skim read more when a post is set out with headings and such, I wonder if it actually helps or hinders?
I don’t know; that’s a good point. I like to skim to see if the writing is good, or if the topic interests me. Headings don’t influence my reading (that I’m aware of), but small paragraphs do. It’s difficult on a computer to read a large block of text.
Comments like those are exactly why I keep “Thanks for mansplaining!” and “You explained my joke to me!” graphics handy for Twitter.
Very smart!
This is such a great post, but #4 is my favorite! It is surprisingly hard to declare publicly that you are GOOD at something, and own it. Thank you for the reminder to do that more often!
Aw, thank you! I’ve always been fairly confident, and I’ve been equally quick to shoot back at anyone who suggested I was “bragging” or “prideful” if they would say the same thing about a boy/man (this started pretty young). Whaddya know, most people hadn’t thought of that. 😉
Haha, I’m actually a little hesitant to write satire sometimes on my blog because I worry that the majority of people won’t get it. As far as satirical sites, I remember a family member sending me a link to an article from The Onion (can’t remember what it was about) and they thought it was real. The Onion does its job well.
Only that one post was satire? I thought your entire blog was a satire…
Aw, is this your first time trolling? You’re so cute!
So after you commented on my “lessons learned from going viral post”, I was just about to suggest that you write your own…and then I came across this. Well done lady…and congrats!!
I wrote a satire on ‘7 Things Women Should Never Wear’ And when I shared it on Facebook a few people started sharing what things they felt women shouldn’t wear…obviously not reading the post and seeing that my whole list was basically like love yourself and wear what makes you happy.
I would love to read that! Would you mind sharing the link with me?
http://www.littleblogonthehomestead.com/7-things-women-should-never-wear/ 🙂