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The world has gone crazy, but I push myself to not let anything completely slide. The blog is especially vulnerable, it would be easy to get caught up in the daily scramble and lose touch with my webspace.

My developer Jay is a few years older than me, our kids go to school together. A peach of a man, he comes from a military family and at politics from the Other Side. We laugh about that quite a bit. We met a few years ago when my older son joined Scouts, the one year Jay was Scout Leader.

We live in the same subdivision, his son works at the grocery store up the street. I see him and his family around plenty, even for a small town. But we only got together professionally this past Winter. It was actually Hubs who put it together in conversation that Jay was moving into managing blogs, and I definitely have one.

Owing two men a debt of gratitude at the same time is taking some getting used to.

Jay and I strategize on Mondays. I’ve started just bringing the computer to the office (read: an old house on Main Street) because I wasn’t getting anything done at home.

Facebook naturally takes a chunk of our weekly rounds. Jay has been throwing $10 at it every other week, tweaking this and that, trying to get a feel for my audience. We are something of an exotic species in Jay’s world.

The first funded post got 1,389 views. A month later at the end of July, we saw 2,709. My critique of straight women as trauma victims got to 2,906 after someone completely misunderstood it and picked a fight.

But last week’s promoted post, a recycled one about class war that unfortunately only keeps getting more relevant, got 300 views exactly.

This struck me as odd. Jay agreed it looked like we were being throttled, and threw up my latest article just to see what would happen.

Rejected. Four times in a row. He tried promoting a totally different article with the same result.

Found in the Wild: Female Erasure on Quora is a short rant about my frustrations in finding my people. And how, beneath every rock and in every dell lurks a transwoman, waiting to mansplain how he’s just like me. I spat it out in an hour and didn’t think much of it. Same shit, different day. I even named the individual vexing me – What does it matter if no one is listening?

Then (s)he followed me back on Quora. Without coming to visit me here at home, I assume.

I want to call people out, but I think it’s one thing to vent in my space and something totally different to come at someone where they live. I have no intention of targeting this person with anything other than occasional curiosity in the future.

After I got home I poked at Facebook a little more. Not only had my promotions been denied, I noticed none of my posts from the last two weeks had more than five views.

My stomach dropped. They’ve killed it! My little baby page with all my favorite feminist memes and articles isn’t being seen by anyone anymore.

But as it sank in I found myself smiling. They canceled me! Me! No one even knows who I am! It must be because of my content. If I’m pissing someone off that badly, I must be doing something right!

Quora is kinda weird in general, in this writer’s humble opinion. Some spaces are immaculately curated, some look like one person promoting a business. The whole site in general is pretty “liberal” and I’m tired of sifting through page after page only to find more trans positivity than actual discussion of women’s issues.

There must be a better way to connect with my feminist community. Reddit was where my RadFemmery was born, but I never felt comfortable posting my stuff there. Self-promotion is frowned upon across the site, its focus being anonymity. Reddit tried to crush us, but our community has popped back up in several places. The incomparable MK Fain has ensured we have a home at Spinster, and created Ovarit to gather Reddit refugees.

Even in my midlife stress fog, I knew I needed to know this lady. I wrote a thing or two for her last year, so I fired off an email to ask if it would be cool if I promoted my blog on her sites. Ya know, where anyone might actually care.

MK was warm and supportive, as always. I dove into Spinster today and had a great afternoon learning and getting feedback. Better late than never, right?

Quora users read. That’s awesome. Jay has had a lot of luck building another blog there, one dedicated to feel-good human interest stuff. I’m not sure it’s a great fit for me, but I’m gonna keep poking at it. I like to take my time and get to know something through osmosis. I haven’t given up on finding something cool on Quora, assuming I’m given the opportunity.