Gawker would become many things over the years that followed - a news organization to be reckoned with, an employer with a dedicated human-resources department. ![]() We were all going about it wrong, but in 2007, it wasn’t clear how consequential Americans’ deep ambivalence about fame and its shadow twin shame would soon become. We all wanted the same thing, which was to feel known and admired. I wanted to be appreciated as a smart, funny writer. I, of course, wanted to be recognized, too - recognized for the skillful, perceptive, and clever way that I made fun of these people. Years before most people began to routinely broadcast their own personal details via social media, we told their stories for them, often in the least flattering way possible. It was part of my job to make fun of anyone who seemed to aspire to public recognition on any scale. At 25, I still had an outsize optimism about my own capabilities. Our bread-and-butter posts were regular compilations of the best and worst and funniest and most relevant things to read in newspapers and magazines, which we cherry-picked for content while simultaneously mocking the reporters and editors who worked at those newspapers and magazines for being slow, stodgy, and humorless. They came to the site for what was then known as “media gossip,” an expansive category that grew steadily more expansive until it came to encompass just about everything. No one was on Twitter yet, and Facebook was just becoming a thing outside college campuses, so people wasting time at desk jobs in New York were basically forced to read Gawker. Overnight, I had thousands of new friends and enemies, and at first that felt exhilarating, like being at a party all the time. They emailed me and chatted with me and commented at me. Every person who read the site knew my name, and in 2007, that was a lot of people. What the job did have, and what made me blind to everything it didn’t, was exposure. Compared to the book-publishing job I’d just left, where I’d had an office, health insurance, and a 401(k), this was a step down: Gawker had no designated desks, and we were encouraged to work from home because the space couldn’t physically accommodate all of the company’s employees at once. Denton had acquired millions during the first dot-com boom and, craving mischief and notoriety, used the money to start a gossip blog. It had been founded five years earlier, in 2002, by a British journalist named Nick Denton. My first writing job was at now-defunct website Gawker, which was then run out of a storefront office on Crosby Street in Soho. I had told the story, so the story was over. Each time I wrote about it, I felt certain, was the last time. ![]() I took this stance as a result of being shamed - in one extremely public incident, then a series of ensuing, related public and private ones, most of which I’ve already written about in various ways over the past 13 years. Unfortunately, you can’t decide in advance how to feel. ![]() As long as I didn’t feel it, it couldn’t be wielded to control me. Because I understood that shame was used to control women, I decided that I would choose not to feel it. At the beginning of my writing career, I developed a theory, or a coping mechanism, or a political position, about shame.
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