What Is This Mania About Self Promotion? A Rant

OK, someone explain to me why there is such passion about self-promotion by authors? If we don't promote our work, who is going to do it? The marketing departments at publishers seem pretty clear on this, that is, that it is up to authors to sell their books. We are told to post about books everywhere, all the time, and forever But it seems that other authors, and may I observe that all the ones who have expressed this to me have been women, decry everything from posting videos to doing no more than mentioning one's work in email signatures. For the record, I recently got bumped from a blog because I insisted on promoting my novels. In fact, I had mentioned one of my unfinished novels in passing, illustrating how I had found a useful foods history site I had found. Now I have just had two posts of mine about my latest novel deleted unilaterally by another administrator because they constituted self promotion. It's my blog, I started it, and my answer to the charge is, "Yeah, so?" I have never noticed any men chastising other men, or women for that matter, for being too forward and promoting one's own work. I suspect it would rarely occur to a man to do this. They, like I, subscribe to Walt Whitman's "I celebrate myself, I sing myself." They also just understand that that this is how you sell books. If someone doesn't' want to read your self promoting post, they just don't. They don't expect the sites, blogs or groups to make the choice for them. You know, they call governments that do that "Mommy states" for a reason. Given my own studies into the self deprecating culture of so many women -- I wrote a book on how women came to have such low self esteem as a group -- I can't help but wonder if this rejection of putting oneself or one's work forward is part of that self-imposed modesty. Like my friend's mother, who quoted that old saw, "Fool's names and fool's faces often are seen in public places." So achievement is all right, just keep it to yourself. Balderdash. I wrote the book, I'm proud of it, I want to share it. You might say it's my baby,and I thought moms were supposed to support and promote their kids. Didn't I just see a bumper sticker on a car that said "My daughter is in the National Honor Society"? If you want to promote your work, let it be known, I am behind you all the way. I make it a way of life to promote other people's work, as anyone who reads any of my blogs already knows. When I see good work, I crow about it. And that goes for my own work too. Why these "bluestocking" relics of a pre-feminist era somehow think this is wrong... well, I just don't know. They have every right to establish and enforce no self promotion policies, but only on their own blogs and sites and discussion groups. They have the right, yes, but I think they are definite throwbacks and serve nothing but outmoded ideas about achievement. Hear me roar!