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| Oliver Bateman |
Heather Armstrong didn’t mean to become a “mommy blogger”. In 1997, she taught herself to code, and began working at a Los Angeles tech start-up. When she started writing about her life online, her focus was Dilbert-style office politics.
The title of the blog, “Dooce”, which eventually became better-known than her own name, came from a misspelling of “dude” in a group chat. Eventually, her unwise online disclosures got her fired — “Dooced”, as the process of sacking incautious bloggers came to be called.
Armstrong started mining the rest of her life. Dooce pivoted to offering carefully-scripted “unvarnished realities” on parenthood, marriage, and Armstrong’s struggles with depression. The market in the early 2000s was far less crowded than it was even a decade later, allowing a cornball line like this to land in a way it probably wouldn’t today:
I am here to tell you that there is no possible way to have an 8-pound creature GUMMING your tender nipple without the slightest bit of discomfort……the only way to describe it to a man is to suggest that he lay out his naked penis on a chopping block, place a manual stapler on the sacred helmet head, and bang in a couple hundred staples.
Continue reading @ Unherd.
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