Does Oversharing Ruin Female Dignity? I recently read a brilliant Substack piece by Tova Sterling who asked herself this question (read here). She reflected, more eloquently than I ever could, on the antinomy between unflinchingly sincere content creation and the dangerous parasocial effects of processing one’s feelings publicly.

To contextualize this for people who, unlike me, are not chronically online, Tova Sterling’s article was a direct answer to alt-right influencer Brittany Venti’s video essay, which tried to shame sexually explicit writing produced by women. Her right-wing piece (of shit!) was titled “Oversharing Ruined Female Dignity” – and as my queen Tova acknowledged – while the video content itself was an uninsightful misogynist slop – the opening phrase in isolation was nonetheless worth rescuing.

So then, increasingly mired in my own oversharing writer’s sin, I confess this simple idea suggesting that the quantity of ‘sharing’ could affect one’s decency, brought a quiet but insistent doubt about the recent path my blog has taken.

With my last posts, I first dared intertwine philosophical texts on love with my own dating failures experiences. Slowly yet sincerely, I even feel my writing moving away from complete vagueness, and from a humor so persistently shielding the real that I get lost myself.

Yet, the original conception of In a Time of Krisis had another direction. I had diligently planned for my published writing to follow my yearly book list, to simply serve as a digital catalogue of stories, ideas or philosophy that moved me.

In a way, to even answer the question of who I am – mostly to myself whenever I need a reminder I am not an empty shell, an unrecognizable ant from the dark anthill.

But if my writing has moved away from book reviews, and entered an era of personal confessions, then, has undignified oversharing become my defining feature? Has the elegant mastery of philosophizing my relationship to men led to a total collapse of my honor?

Sadly, unlike my beloved Disney protagonist Mulan, maybe I won’t bring honor to us all.

Diminishing Dignity Returns

Even when trembling with powerful emotions, some people manage to maintain a distant nonchalance, so as to exclude outsiders from the intimacy of their resentment.

But, try as I might, that has never been my case.

Quite on the contrary, I have always been one to try and desperately include people in the intimacy of my feelings – maybe to a fault. The price of this embarrassingly ruthless sincerity is, apparently, my diminishing dignity.

This habit, of course, isn’t limited to my writing. Offline too, I have a tendency to overexplain and overclarify!¹

I struggle to live in even short transient snippets of ambiguity, always needing to warmly onboard people into the concreteness of my anxiety – be it when I suspect I am annoying a friend, or if I worry the guy I am emotionally invested in is pulling away.

In any case, they will be hearing from me!

Now, we can argue that clear and timely communication is good (a comforting belief for those of us incapable of shutting up), but let us be frank, the alternative – restrainedly weighing one’s words – does not always mean not communicating clearly.

Both things can be true - transparency can be emotionally healthy, and restraint can sometimes be wise.

I just happen to notice that one is constantly framed as excessive, emotional, embarrassing — while the other gets aestheticized into elegance, mystery, self-respect, femininity.

Curious how that works.

The Defects Of My Character

About a month ago I was broken up with² by the snowboarder persona I had soft-launched to my readers in This Girl Which is Not One (read here).

Later on, when I admitted to my coworker bestie that we were still texting and trying to stay friends, the blunt phrase melodically left her lips:

Gurl, have some self-respect.

That’s an understandable and familiar commentary – I don’t blame her.

But it did bring me back to Tova Sterling’s article, which, ironically, I first read while visiting Mr. Snowboarder in the Netherlands – a trip that would end in sorrowful goodbye sex.

The author spoke about the bigger picture of women who speak up publicly – be it about their sexuality, traumas, or any vulnerable lived experiences – being framed as “attention-seeking, or morally suspect.”

It’s a worldview that treats women’s silence as dignity and women’s honesty as humiliation. – Tova Sterling

Not only do I believe her exposé to be politically sound, but I also hear the scary echo of this worldview while I try to move through life as authentically as I can. An echo that sometimes talks me out of the value of my sincerity. It tempts me to believe that, through some disciplined self-development spiral, it is conceivable to fight against the defects of my character and blaze victorious, namely –

admirably peaceful

and

unbothered.

A Krisis

I don’t think I was meant to win this game though.

Nothing screams more peace-less and sur-bothered than having a digital diary, which combines your first name and the word CRISIS.

Rather chalant one might say.

Thus, not only do I invite outsiders (exes included) into the vulnerable familiarity of my long WhatsApp paragraphs, but I double down through my blogging affair.

And while there could, surely, be many good reasons to not speak to one’s ex, or not to publish one’s reflections regarding them online (like I did in Of Toothbrushes and Men), I wonder: is the loss of dignity truly one of them?

Not long ago, one of my best friends asked me – gently – if I didn’t think putting my personal essays online might make guys lose attraction – whether I wasn’t sacrificing an inherent mystery by providing early access to my inner world.

Maybe.

Or even – absolutely!

After all, I’ve never been even slightly mysterious…

I’m awkward, observant and endearing. I replay conversations before they even end. I track the pause before someone answers, the connotation of their phrase, history, feelings and context; how many times they blinked – how many times I blinked. I imagine how a moment feels from their side, then from a hypothetical third observer, then from the version of myself I’ll be tomorrow.

Since that is how I, an oversharer, operate to begin with, well, perhaps I am bound to write long messages, making sure the inherent nuance of my thoughts, historicity, and current anxieties are all accounted for and expressed coherently…

Maybe the same flow further translates in me writing some pretty chalant In a Time of Krisis essays. And maybe, just maybe, it is precisely the intensity of one’s feelings and one’s hyper-attunement to multiple perspectives that merit more respect and dignity than pure indifference.

Just maybe.

I’m Breakin’ Dishes

And would I even be able to feign nonchalance or perform distance if I tried harder?

I care so much about everything that I might one day burst out and abandon all self-control – run around telling strangers I love them, breaking dishes, and yelling curse words all at once.

Yes, there is some value in safeguarding the intimacy of one’s trembling emotions. But it is perhaps to have them privately processed before letting them run loose.

In defence of those advising us to fiercely protect our dignity and show basic restraint – I will contend that, in some cases, weighing one’s words is indeed advisable. Nonetheless, it seems to me, the purpose of it is not to keep one’s dignity – a quality, which after all is supposed to belong to all humankind.

It could be rather to pause and allow for one’s vulnerable experiences to ferment, so that their eventual sharing will end up more aligned with one’s guiding principles if all else was equal.

Maybe oversharing in this sense would not be defined by an over so much as by a pre – a prematurity of the utterance.

Snap and Clap and Touch Your Toes

So then, my loyal readers, is my dignity hot to go?

Perhaps, I overshare online. I overexplain in real life. I text when I should probably disappear and cultivate intrigue.

I write essays that risk being read by the very people they were inspired by - and that sometimes leads to even more sincere demystification, such as, for instance, the precious knowledge a recurring blog character (known as “M2”) gave me after publishing the article inspired by him (read here):

It was, in fact, NOT my toothbrush on the living room table!

That being said, by the time my writing of that essay had passed through my editing, deleting, rewriting and publishing pipeline, I had already lost feelings for M2.

So even if I may have behaved - and written - in ways that are deeply incompatible with the cool, restrained version of womanhood that conventional dignity seems to require, I was no longer in the headspace of measuring my worth through his set of eyes.

My (over?)sharing, then, did not feel humiliating, because the emotions had already fermented. And I cannot quite convince myself that not having published the article in the first place would have made me more honorable. ³

But if common naming conventions of the word dignity dictate that I become silent, unbothered, or worst of all - unreadable, then I fear you can indeed take it:

H - O - T

T - O

G - O

Hurry up, it’s hot to go! – Chappell Roan