On the Death of Internet Feminism Being Greatly Exaggerated

I have to admit that one aspect of the post-2016 feminist backlash that I did not anticipate is women writing clusters of articles declaring Internet feminism to be dead. But alas, here we are (she typed, from her 12-year-old feminist Blogger blog).

The most recent example of this trend is a piece posted at Jezebel (yes, really) bizarrely-entitled, "How the Internet Killed Feminism," which neither proves that feminism is dead nor that it was "the Internet" that killed it.

To put it in the most mild way I can, my issue with this particular piece - in addition to the factual inaccuracies* - is that it is missing quite a bit of nuance.

The piece is sort of all over the place, but if you piece the narrative together, her general thesis seems to be that the main problem with the feminist blogosphere was that a few of the most privileged, white feminist women leveraged their blogging platforms into book deals and were not inclusive, which led to rifts with women of color. For instance:

"Within the blogosphere, Feministing was side-eyed for watering things down, getting things wrong, not being inclusive and even appropriating other bloggers’ work. Outside of it, the blog was known as the feminism 101 site and Valenti the number one feminist blogger. That meant bylines in mainstream publications like The Guardian and The Nation, and book after book.

....

The disparity between white feminist bloggers and bloggers of color was underscored by the first annual BlogHer conference in 2005, which 1000 people attended, almost all of them white, and the first annual Blogalicious conference in 2009 (also sponsored by BlogHer, oddly), which had about 175 attendees, almost none of them white. Reappropriate’s Fang referred to the 'balkanization' of the feminist blogosphere from the beginning, where the standard was an upwardly mobile white coastal community that had limited self-awareness. 'They were like, let’s have feminism as a race-neutral conversation,' she said. That meant refusing to engage when they were asked to examine their privilege. 'So much of the culture of feminism that is forward-facing is driven by New York,' Angry Black Bitch blogger Pamela Merritt said. 'But the people who contribute to the movement dialogue are not living in Park Slope.'”

As I tweeted yesterday in response to this piece, those of us who were active in the blogosphere during its heydey are well aware of the blog wars, in-fighting, blindspots, and abuses of privilege.  Yes, there were many, much-needed conversations about race. At the same time, I think it's overly-simplistic, and a profound erasure, to suggest that the issues that feminists sought to hash out online, among each other, were solely along racial lines, particularly because also occurring during this time period were splinters and rifts between feminists online who were trans-exclusionary and trans-affirming, in addition to issues such as abortion access, sex work, fat acceptance, sexual orientation, religion, and class - and these issues are barely, if at all, mentioned in the piece.

I think this framing speaks to the way this article sort of lumps some of the larger feminist sites together and acts like they all had the same issues and blindspots, which is very similar to how MRAs used to treat feminist blogs back in the day, like they were one giant, monolithic feminist hivemind.

For instance, the article vaguely references Shakesville as being problematic in the same ways as some of the other large blogs, but the writer doesn't take the time to actually specify what "Shakesville" had done wrong. (She also categorizes a recent hit piece on Shakesville, written by someone with a longstanding grudge against Melissa McEwan, as an "expose." And, when she couldn't reach McEwan for comment on the piece, the writer simply framed the hit piece as the big "explanation" as to why Shakesville shut down, ignoring McEwan's stated, published reason that running Shakesville was harming her health.)

Rather, this writer's implicit distillation of the feminist blogosphere's demise into one easy, simple answer ("white feminists") seems to be more a reflection of this particular political moment, and the liberal-left political spectrum's loathing of the oft-cited "53%**", than of the many coinciding, more complicated reasons the feminist blogosphere declined.

I would attribute this decline, by the way, to burn-out, the dearth of financial opportunities for doing this work, writers' receipt of abuse and harassment, in-fighting, privileged people acting poorly, and changing trends in the media, social media, and economic landscapes.

And, disturbingly, even as the writer of this piece says that it wasn't "blog wars" that killed the feminist blogosphere, she devotes far more paragraphs to "blog wars" than she does to any other reason for the demise of the blogosphere, including the titular "Internet" or even to harassment, even though pretty much every feminist online has cited harassment as a big fucking problem, if not a key reason for scaling back or stopping their work.

In short, the article treats the feminist blogosphere like it was largely a big, dramatic catfight among women, which strikes me as pretty sexist and does a huge disservice to a lot of people's contributions to feminism. But, I suppose that the harassment of feminists online is old news that women have been talking about since forever, and there's always market in patriarchy for women taking down women, even in this very meta- way.

But, let's take a step back.

And, uh, this seems obvious to actually write, but feminism isn't "dead" just because feminist blogging has declined. Many feminist bloggers have simply migrated to other platforms, platforms where audiences and users have likewise migrated, such as Twitter or podcasting, because these platforms now typically have greater reach than blogging. Or, they issue private newsletters, if they want more granular, limited engagement.

For, it's not just feminist blogs that have declined, it's blogs in general. Yet, we don't get story after story about how atheism or Christianity or mommy-ing have "died" just because these blogs have declined. People rightly mostly acknowledge that people just do this sort of topical work elsewhere now.

(Uh, except for me, I guess. Hi! No, just kidding, there are still like 60+ blogs in my Feedly that are still updated regularly, many of them feminist blogs).

In conclusion, this piece was ambitious and the writer touted it on Twitter as "the real story" of what went down regarding the feminist blogosphere, which is why I think I've been disappointed in it.

Many influential bloggers were omitted from this "real story" of the feminist blogosphere, particularly women of color, including women of color who wrote at some of the larger feminist blogs she critiques as excluding women of color. I mean, so much is missing, really. And, in reality, one would need a book, if not volumes, to even attempt to do justice to this topic (and it seems like this writer is angling for a book deal, goddess help us, even as her piece implies that feminists who get book deals are immoral/greedy/bad).


An interesting thing about the feminist blogosphere is that there's actually an extensive written record of what happened, if one simply reads the blogposts and comment threads themselves, and thus it seems like that record should be used pretty extensively in a historical account. One doesn't have to rely solely on oral, after-the-fact interviews and impressions to piece together a narrative about the feminist blogosphere, so that's a choice when one does do that, as is the case in the Jezebel piece.

The feminist blogosphere is/was a deeply important social phenomenon, and I hope one day someone does take the time to write a just history about it, someone who knows how to do the scholarship. I reckon it's not going to be a neat, tidy story with simple, cartoon heroes and villains, cranked out in a few months. 

[Update, 12/21/19: After the writer of the Jezebel piece continued to promote her piece on Twitter after it didn't go viral, feminists primarily engaged the piece by critiquing it, pointing out errors, and disputing the overarching narratives. 

In response, the writer of the piece made the following statement: "the responses to my jezebel piece really make me understand why so many renounced feminism in the end." This statement was alarming to me because it's the same sort of victim-blaming that MRA/anti-feminists habitually engage - that feminists are too insufferable to deal with and, thus, feminism is a garbage movement that they want no part of.

As of today, she has deleted her Twitter account.]


Related:
The End of an Era at Shakesville
A Woman Will Win, Eventually, But Will the US Let Her?


*For instance, the writer asserts that the "lifepsan of the feminist blogosphere" was from 2001 - 2009, even though feminist blogs continue to exist today and multiple large sites she includes in her piece, such as Shakesville and Feministing, existed through 2019. As another example, the piece erases the fact that the founder of Jezebel, framed as a big white blog, is a Black woman.
 
**The oft-cited "53% of white women" who voted for Trump in the 2016 election, which is sometimes loosely equated with all white women.

The End Of an Era at Shakesville

We have lost another online feminist space.

Shakesville, of course, wasn't just any feminist space, to me. My friend Melissa McEwan's writing has been hugely influential to my thinking around progressive feminism, social media, Internet culture, and politics. I was an active commenter at Shakesville for at least 10 years (I looked at my DISQUS account yesterday and I have posted over 3,000 comments). In addition, Melissa often included links to my writing here in her regular blog roundups, sending readers my way. Then, shortly after the 2016 election, I became a guest contributor at the space she cultivated and led for 15 years.

I was honored to share my writing at Shakesville and mindful of the trust that she and the other contributors and moderators had placed in me. Melissa's contributions to feminism and to the heydey of the feminist and political blogosphere during the late aughts are likely immeasurable. And, like any feminist who rises to a certain level of visibility, she has long been held to impossible standards (although, over the years I came to see that she also holds herself to sky-high standards in her writing, fairness, and accuracy). I saw repeatedly how any real, perceived, or invented missteps were eagerly pounced upon by others before the inevitable "cancellation," while she simultaneously experienced relentless torrents of targeted abuse from misogynists across the political spectrum.

As a contributor and longtime user of Internet, I was appreciative of the Shakesville comment moderation policy, even though it has long been a topic of ridicule and is sometimes put forth as "evidence" that Shakesville was "a cult." My perspective, as I've been a contributor at multiple blogs for more than a decade, is that I've come to see how lax moderation policies at many other platforms, blogs, websites, comment sections, and forums have completely normalized a collective, societal opinion that cruelty is a casual and non-important thing we just have to "deal with" when on the Internet, rather than a thing that is deeply traumatizing to humanity.

"Just don't read the comments," they say, accepting that abuse is just the price we have to pay for being online.

And politically, I think we will be experiencing the fallout of content platforms that have, or long had, relatively "anything goes" or "all sides have a point" moderation policies, like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for a very long time. These continue to be leveraged against our political system today. The zeitgeist of libertarian tech culture has long been "connecting people" and "free speech" rather than building communities and, welp, it turns out there's a difference. It's as though the founders of so many platforms didn't care, or know, or understand how their philosophies could be gamed by extremists and used to silence the marginalized and monetize fascism.

In many ways, social media sites are the anti-thesis of community-building. Or, rather, people have to put a lot of work into making these sites functional online communities, if it's possible at all on a platform. Civil debate about literally any topic, even the most mundane, does not just magically happen. At its core, a comment moderation policy is the setting of boundaries in one's space, used to delineate the bounds of engagement the community agrees are acceptable.

That so many perceived or framed Shakesville's comment policy as abusive and/or cultish, I think, speaks to a deep, longstanding discomfort many people, including women, still have with women setting clear boundaries, building community, and then leading that community.

During the heydey of political blogging, many people eagerly started "weblogs" without putting thought into what their comment moderation policy would be. Most sites in the early days didn't even have a written one. I've run this site for about 12 years now, and I think many people were figuring it out as they went along, myself included. I remember early confrontations with homophobic male Christians who approached commenting here with complete and total entitlement. There are some things I wish I would have handled differently, but never have I wished I would have spent more time in this one precious life engaging with bad faith assholes here.

Eventually, many people in the blogosphere abandoned their blogs. I think they did so for a myriad of reasons: it was a risk, it was labor that was hard to monetize, it became boring, they didn't have instant success, they realized it's a pain in the ass to deal with assholes, it was stressful, they moved on to other things, they started podcasts, and more. Sometimes, I wonder why I'm still here and whether I'll stay, but I suppose that's a post for another day.

Here, I mostly want to say that, as a writer at Shakesville, I was deeply appreciative that I wasn't expected to engage with abusive comments following my posts there. I had done that before, repeatedly, at other sites and eventually the toll made me want to post less and less at that site until I eventually just stopped writing there (or the blog owners just deleted the blog altogether).

Mostly, I will miss Shakesville. A lot.

More broadly, it seems that we continue to lose more and more feminist spaces online and off, precisely when we need them most, including feminist bookstores, cultural events, and lesbian bars. And, I don't say that to imply that I think Melissa should have continued to run Shakesville. She took on the world for so many years at great detriment to her well-being.

I think about these losses of feminist space and contemplate the way that misogyny so often adapts as feminism progresses, in this neverending cycle. For instance, the near-election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 freaked rape culture patriarchy the fuck out and so we're currently in a feminist resurgence that's also a profound backlash. The world has decided that since roughly half of the white women who voted voted for Donald Trump, then white women do not experience gender-based oppression, or else why would they have voted for their own oppression?

Yet women, all women, actually do continue to experience gender-based violence, hostility, and aggression - in addition to, in many cases, additional identity-based oppressions. Even so, some progressives are joining their MRA brethren and starting to concede that "just" being a woman these days, that is - a white cishet woman - isn't "enough" of a marginalized identity to warrant analysis or advocacy. Some progressive/leftist/liberals communities, particularly if they're very keen on how progressive/leftist/liberal they are, act like they exist in a sort of post-feminist "gender-blind" space. In reality, such spaces are really only blind to gender-based disparities, as they replicated the norms of rape culture and patriarchy. 

Mostly, it continues to make me angry that progressive feminists, especially as they become more high profile, have to deal with so much abuse until they/we can't take it anymore. I think a lot about the voices we've lost over the years. And, while we expect the attacks from the right, so many within the moderate-to-left political spectrum are bystanders at best and active collaborators in the abuse at worst. 

Progressive feminists, especially now, just don't fit neatly within the political spectrum in the US. 

So many people casually take it for granted that this or that high-profile feminist is "trash" or "garbage" or "cancelled." Sometimes, that perception is based on honest critique. Yet, in combination with the reality that most women who are public figures get to make maybe one or two mistakes in their careers while white men get cultural forgiveness and redemption tours, the end result is a net positive for white patriarchy and rape culture.

But, many times, the "critique" is straight-up misogyny, abuse, or people being resentful that a woman has set a boundary with them. Many times, the abuse goes viral, on Twitter, with people competing with one another for the hottest, most abusive "dunk" on the feminist, in a process that is profoundly dehumanizing and usually distorts and simplifies everything she stands for. Her entire body of work, discounted because someone with a bunch of followers ridiculed one of her tweets, generating an algorithmic pile-on in which the targeted woman is reduced to a stereotypical "vapid garbage idiot."

It seems to me that it's the fate of every feminist of any renown to be reviled in her own day as "ruined forever" because she is imperfect, "crazy," "idiotic," "hateful," and/or "angry" so that instead of building upon feminist works, new generations of women who have internalized the message that earlier feminists had nothing valuable to say simply start over and over again, repeatedly. In reality, most feminists of any renown have something to teach us, even if they were profoundly flawed in other ways. And, gender-based hostility, discrimination, and violence are ills against which every generation has to be vigilant.

I will end by linking to a Shakesville piece that has long been one of my favorites. "The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck," which Melissa wrote almost 10 years ago to the day. 

It has resonated with me for many reasons. The clear articulation of the usually-unacknowledged dynamic that women contend with on a daily basis when confronted with casual, pervasive misogyny: "Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?" How this dynamic led her to be distrustful of men, rather than - as the stereotype claims of us - hateful toward them. 

And, the critical concept that being an ally to marginalized people is an ongoing act of vigilance wherein we each have to make ourselves trustworthy to those with identities we do not share:

"This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is.

There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day.

I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me.

Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day.

Just in case they're more like me than you think."

The work of progressive feminism will never be finished. Don't let our most valuable tools be taken from us - and, just as importantly, don't throw these tools by the wayside yourself: the insights of those who came before us, and our capacity to build upon these insights.

Maudespeed, sisters.

Social Justice Writing and the Decline of Blogging

I'm not going to link to the article I'm referencing today, but I miss the heyday of blogging.

Twitter is much more popular now than blogging and I sometimes wonder how that platform has changed people's conception of what social justice writing is or should be. I think many people do Twitter threads well, in terms of fleshing out thoughts in ways more similar to longform.

Twitter has increased the character count and has made it easier for users to thread their Tweets into a continuous "longform" piece if they wish. Although, I find using that feature to be much clunkier with my usual writing process where I move words and sentences around, compared to the Blogger interface that is essentially a giant text field. For instance, I wrote about this topic on Twitter this morning as well (ironically?) - the piece for Blogger was going to be exactly the same, but even as I copy-pasted the Twitter thread to Blogger, I realized right away that it read choppily and I had additional thoughts to insert.

Anyway, on Twitter, I also see a lot of social justice "dunking" where the aim is to humiliate someone for being so "self-evidently" wrong that it doesn't warrant explanation. I've had run-ins with some serious assholes, as I've sometimes written about here where it's been clear folks were using me as a prop to score cool points to their followings.

Not that this kind of thing didn't happen during the blogging years of the aughts. I remember a lot of blog wars and much of the bully behavior and profile is similar. But, engaging with people on Twitter, particularly in a "dunk" context, gets not worth it fast. Unlike with comment moderation at a website, any fucken rando can chime in to the convo. And, even if you block assholes, you know their comment is still "there" on Twitter, for other people to engage with and view.

Or, you see a bunch of people vehemently agreeing with the dunk, but no one really explains.... why.  This phenomenon probably happens more on Twitter than on blogging platforms, because it more coincides with what Twitter was for. It was designed for the hot, short opinion.

Dunking has its role, I suppose, perhaps mostly if/when users are building solidarity around someone else being wrong/stupid/bad.

But, its purpose and impact on audiences compared to analysis is quite different. With respect to the article in question that I read yesterday, it was a longform piece that read like the author thought social justice writing should be a series of "dunks" and social justice lingo with almost zero analysis.

Part of this, too, might be attributable to a lot of gender studies/social justice writing in academia being inaccessible to many lay audiences - physically, financially, and/or linguistically. For instance, I read a recent journal article, and had to do so 5 times before *I think* I understood it.

It read as though it was written *for* other academics within the same bubble and sphere who already know the zillion other articles already written about the topic at hand, as well as the obscure terminology, rather than for the masses.

Nonetheless, the concepts within academic articles often flow onto Twitter and, like a modern version of the game "telephone," are often warped beyond what the author meant or intended.

So, people think they know what something means, but their understanding comes from a "dunk" or from someone else's (or their own) misreading. And concurrent with these dynamics are bots, deliberate ratfucking, and bad actors.

Despite the decline of blogging, I've also kept up my blog for more than a decade, for these (and other) reasons, including that I just get different things out of each platform.


UPDATE: Okay, the editor-in-chief of the article that inspired this post has publicly addressed the, um, problematic article. So, it's this.

Area Man Terrorized By Obscure, Fake Manifesto; Promotes It On His Popular Website

Yesterday, at his blog, conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher posted a hyperventilating, novella-length piece about a document purporting to be a manifesto for helping pedophilia become socially-acceptable via using the same strategies that the LGBT community used.

Dreher begins, "I want to share with you the most disturbing thing I have read in a very long time. You need to know about it." He then shares large excerpts from this "manifesto," which by the way was originally posted anonymously at 8chan, even adding his own annotations throughout, stressing the urgent direness of the situation:

"It’s actually a reasonable strategy document — 'reasonable' in the narrow and amoral sense of it makes sense as a strategy to get society to accept something totally evil. We know that this can work because it has worked with other sexual minorities."

"Other sexual minorities."

So, yeah. To anyone with even an ounce of skepticism, the document is an obvious, right-wing fabrication. Dreher himself half-acknowledges that in his original post, but then admits that he doesn't really want to look too deeply into the matter because that would be too dark:

"I am unwilling to do the kind of digging online in this darkness to nail down with certainty that this is an authentic document. I will only caution you that I have not seen it verified yet. Nevertheless, it is out there, and it most definitely has the air of plausibility."

There is a certain dipshitted deliciousness to watch a man who regularly mocks college students for being oversensitive snowflakes confess that he can't be bothered to ascertain the authenticity of a document that denigrates LGBT political gains by suggesting that gains for pedophiles logically follow.

His admitted ignorance about this text's authenticity, however, doesn't stop Dreher from treating this slippery slope "threat" as 100% real. In fact, as it becomes more and more clear to him, in real time, that the document is a fake, he only digs in further, stressing that "we" still need to be on guard anyways.

After people began commenting on his post, he added two updates.

In the first, he acknowledges that it might be a fake, but insists that "we" still ought to think about how "we" would respond to such a manifesto if it were real. In the second, he says he read it again and now doubts its authenticity. Even so, he insists that the very fact that some readers might think that this obscure fake manifesto was authentic, which he initially promoted on his website as authentic, "tells us something about the current cultural moment."

Indeed it does, good sir.

He then goes on to approvingly cite Ross Douthat's recent "redistribution of sex" garbage fire of a piece that was somehow published over at The New York Times, which is really the PERFECT on-brand capstone to Dreher's clusterfuck of manufactured outrage. 

Dreher also sees TERFs as allies now because they're all-aboard the anti-trans train, which is also PERFECT, obviously.


Related:

I know 2018 has brought us a lot of weird and misogynistic shit, but even I was not expecting Ross Douthat to tell us that the "the organs of establishment opinion" need to entertain the extremist notion that sex ought to be provided to men as a prophylactic to femicide.

— Fannie Wolfe (@fanniesroom) May 3, 2018

The 2017 Roundup

Welp, 2017 was a year, wasn't it?

I usually do an annual roundup post around the New Year, but I expressed a lot of my thoughts already, in relation to the Apocaversery, over at Shakesville.

There, I outlined what I see as three important tasks for the resistance, going forward: acknowledging that many people in the US are motivated by bigotry, which is as to be expected, given that bigotry was built into our political system from the get-go; we must support candidates who understand and can speak to both economic and "identity politics" grievances; and we must resist the normalization of Trump's, and the Republican Party's, ongoing cruelties and danger to democracy.

To my first point, I've begun a personal project of reading at least one biography, in order, of every US president, as well as biographies of those adjacent to the president such as their wives and the people they enslaved.  It's slow going, mostly because I'm also reading other books in-between, but stay tuned and I'll post any insights I have as I make further progress. (I'm about to begin James Monroe).

In terms of my writing, 2017 was the most prolific year I've had since 2012. I wouldn't say I've had more free time to write, but rather, I've carved out time in my life to write due to ongoing political and current events.

The top five Fannie's Room posts during 2017, in terms of page views, were:

• When Your "Activism" Primarily Consists of Being a Twitter Jerk
• Why Women Are and Should Be Leading the Resistance
• Wayback Wednesday: Quiet
• You Are Doing Emotional and Human Labor For Your Fave Social Media Sites
• The Cynical Populists

These number do not include my pieces published over at Shakesville, which has a higher readership than this ol' blog-a-roo.

Looking toward 2018, I continue to believe that we are living in a moment of profound feminist resurgence that is also coupled with a harsh Republican-led backlash - though I hasten to add that this backlash has collaborators across the political spectrum. Indeed, a large barrier to a leftist "revolution," at least as envisioned by many of Bernie Sanders' vocal superfans, continues to be that shitty white people, particularly men, think they're at the vanguard of radical progress when, in reality, their opinions on women are as establishment rape culture as they come.

But, more to come. Onward to 2018. The only way out is through, my friends.
 

Commenting Issues

Hello dear readers!

I've received a few emails as of late that some people are unable to view comments. Apologies for the inconvenience, and here are some troubleshooting tips:

• The commenting system I use here is DISQUS. This system is compatible with the browsers listed here. If you want to comment and find that DISQUS isn't loading for you, I would suggest opening a different browser and seeing if the comments will load.

• Secondly, some browser plugins and extensions will prevent DISQUS from loading. For instance, I have a bunch of privacy plugins installed in one browser I use, and DISQUS never shows up for me in that browser. Disabling these plugins and extensions might allow you to view the comments (or, again, trying a different browser that doesn't have these plugins/extensions).

• Another option is that you can follow particular sites that use DISQUS, by logging directly into your DISQUS account. If you go to the DISQUS site and login, you can comment on blogs that you follow, within the DISQUS site. Instructions here.

• DISQUS also has a troubleshooting page, with some tips.

DISQUS is a free commenting system and it's worked pretty well since I've implemented it. It's better than other options I've used in the past, including Blogger's base commenting system, but from time to time issues like these arise.

Anyway, please feel free to email me if these issues persist. And, if anyone else has other tips please share!

Happy Fannie's Room Blogiversary

Welp, I started Fannie's Room 10 years ago this month!

Can you even believe it? It's like I always say, time flies when you're playing your part in the homosexualist socialist neoliberal shill feminazi hivemind agenda.

Seriously, thank you for reading, commenting, and sending me kind emails every once in awhile. Is anyone still here from the good old days of the mid-aughts? Or the Obama era, roughly 10,000 years ago?

Back in 2007, the blogosphere seemed different. It was before Twitter really took off, so literally everyone had a Blogger or Wordpress weblog. Now, I get the impression that having a blog, let alone a Blogger blog is kind of dorky.  Commenting, too, has decreased over the years, although the readership numbers have stayed about the same or slightly increased each year. (By the way, can people see comments/DISQUS, or are they not viewable in certain browsers?)

Over the years, I've seen many blogs abandoned or deleted due to writer boredom, busy-ness, harassment, or unknown mystery reasons. As such, I'm always looking for new progressive, feminist, LGBT, political, or pop culture blogs to read, so feel free to drop some recommendations in the comments or my email, even if it's your own.

Although I read multiple other blogs throughout the week, my daily blog reads these days remain (although I comment less these days as well):

• Shakesville
• Lawyers, Guns, & Money 
• Echidne of the Snakes
• Dorothy Surrenders 
• Historiann

I also have no immediate plans to stop blogging. I've written most days for most of my life and I really, really wish I had some of my old journals, because I'd post some entries for entertainment. Hmm, maybe I'll do some digging.

But anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. My point is that writing is something I've always done, for better or worse. Many of my paid writing jobs have been for uncredited content where I've been hired to develop and detail someone else's half-formed thoughts: speeches, letters, various appeals. So, it is a treat to get to write whatever I want, here at least. That some people are interested in it, too, is an added bonus.

Some of my favorite times in Fannie's Room have been:

• Doing and writing about my (creatively-named) Book Experiment of 2014, where I read only books written by women for the whole year
• Lightening up the political posts with TV recaps and femslash posts. Although, I do get the impression that writing about politics and pop culture/LGBT stuff lessens my credibility in both worlds. Leftbros mock women who care or write about pop culture as being unserious shills. And, perhaps some pop culture fans are put off by political writing. A plus about this space being non-commercial is that it can exist within this niche. Dozens of people are waiting to read Supergirl recaps followed by me complaining about BernieBros!
• Writing this post: So You Want To Teach the Lady Feminists
• Getting in blog and commenting wars with various bigots. Ha ha, just kidding. That's actually a terrible way to spend time usually.  
• Participating in blog carnivals, adding blogs to my blogroll, getting a post linked to in the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, and reading Pam's House Blend every day. Boo-hoo-hoo.
• Being called a "leftist gender warrior"/socialist in 2008 and being called a neoliberal shill, by Internet Leftists, in 2017. Go figure. 
• Learning that, although exceptions to this rule exist, nothing good comes from conversations about gender or politics from people who use "females" as a noun or who spell it "Hilary" with one "l."
• Writing a somewhat off-the-cuff Election 2016 Fallout series, shortly after the election.
• The Great Google Reader Conversation/Mourning of 2013. I mostly just thought it was funny that I posted about MRA shit, casually referencing the demise of Google Reader, and like 20 people started talking about blog readers. I really never know what content will resonate with people or what they'll want to talk about.

Related, here are the most-read blogposts at Fannie's Room (it is true that some of my writing might now make me cringe, but I'm not Hillary Clinton or ever running for President, so I hope it's not used against me too badly):

• The Art of Mansplaining
• This is What An Anti-Feminist Looks Like
• Losing Privilege Is So Oppressive

Anyway, thanks again for reading. I know there are several of you who comment somewhat regularly (Hi Sarah, Aeryl, Jarred, and Howard!). The rest of you: de-lurk, de-lurk wherever you are (if you want).

Should we all drink margs and live-tweet at each other?

A Toast to the Toast

Since The Toast stopped publishing about a year ago, I've missed the feminist site at least once per week. Particularly the "If X were your girlfriend/boyfriend" series, the civil quirky discourse, and the unapologetic deletion of troll comments.

Sarah Scoles at Motherboard ran a profile on The Toast and co-founder Mallory Ortberg today, if you're interested.

Blogging Update

Dear readers - I'm a bit busy at the moment with usual life things, but will resume blogging (and Supergirl recaps!) the week of 5/22.

2016 Wrap-Up

Well, 2016 has been ....a year.

The popular consensus seems to have been that 2016 was a particularly bad year, for a host of reasons. I was on the fence about whether I agreed with that. I've had some personal ups and downs as well, but after all, aren't all years a mix of bad and good?  Shouldn't we give poor 2016 a fair chance?

The events of November 8th firmed up my opinion on this matter: 2016 was a bad year.

2017 marks my 10th(!) year of blogging, having started during the Bush years. Time flies when you're having fun, ranting, observing political things, getting into fights, and posting fan vids, so I thought I'd take some time to reflect. (Are there any readers left from the good ol' days? Reveal yourselves! ....*crickets*).

1) Twitter

Earlier in the year, I decided to re-active my Twitter account. I had opened one circa 2009 but didn't really connect with the user experience (aka - I didn't really understand how to use it). It's thus far been a mixed bag. Being a wordy writer, I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable with the 140 character take, but I appreciate using Twitter to follow fast-moving developments and my latest celebrity crushes. Ahem.

Connect with me if you want: @fanniesroom

2) Pop Culture/Femslash Fridays

On the blogging front, it's been mostly good getting back into blogging more regularly. The last year I wrote more than 100 posts was 2013, but in 2016 I wrote 185. Much of this uptick was due to the 2016 presidential election, but also the integration of pop culture posts and femslash fridays.

I hope people have liked these posts and am open to suggestions - maybe a new show to recap once I'm done with Supergirl? (I may not necessarily be able to heed suggestions)

3) Where Are The Feminist Blogs?

In 10 years, I've seen a lot of feminist blogs come and go and just recently realized my daily feminist blog-reading list has dwindled. I haven't looked at data on this, but it also seems like the blogosphere is changing, with more people moving to micro-blogging on Twitter and/or writing at sites like Medium and Patreon.

I'm still satisfied with the Blogger platform and will stay here for the foreseeable future (while also guest posting at Shakesville). But, what other feminist blogs are people reading? I'd love to put new ones in my Feedly! Self-promote away, as well!

4) Donald Trump Reading List

After Trump won on November 8, I began pulling some of my feminist classics from the shelves: Margaret Atwood, Angela Davis, Catherine MacKinnon, and Michelle Tea, as well as political texts that seem particularly relevant right now: Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Eric Wolf's Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis.

Like many, I've felt compelled to arm myself with knowledge of both how to recognize, and resist, features of oppressive regimes, because we know many mainstream media voices will not do this for us.

For escapism and enjoyment, I'm set to read various memoirs (mostly of women) and some Jacqueline Carey and NK Jemisin books I haven't yet read.

Share any and all recommendations!

And, thanks for reading - here's to 2017 being.... another year.

A Serious Post About the Memes of Production

Okay, I'll play.

I want to dedicate this post to a brocialist member of the Tone Police, "Your Woke Toddler," who toddled into my Twitter mentions yesterday to scold me for integrating pop culture references into political posts because such integration doesn't comport with his enlightened notions of proper political purity and serious discourse.

It is wrong of me, he instructed, to build a "geek brand" off of "real-world problems," which sounds to me like a cool leftist way to try to trivialize my (ad-free! non-revenue!) writing and shame me at the same time. Although, he has a point when you think about it. Can a person, let alone a woman, even cite geeky things and express serious political thoughts at the same time? PROBABLY NOT.

Behold, an observation: We are apparently to believe that re-tweeting dank leftist and anti-Hillary memes under the handle "Your Woke Toddler" is a Very Serious Contribution to the Political Discourse. (Why, it's almost as though frivolity in political discourse is not my scold's real complaint, but maybe, just maybe, something else! Is this a consistent complaint Toddler makes of all he encounters? PROBABLY NOT!)

Behold, another observation: We are to believe that one should never include a Game of Thrones reference in any post about politics because Game of Thrones has no message about politics from which we can or should draw analogies to current political realities. Apparently, that's just, like, the rules of leftism.

Nevermind that pop culture, art, geekdom, and science fiction are used by many people to cope with, draw comparisons to, and/or critique political oppression, and have long been used this way.  Literally who doesn't do this? Consider, for instance, the many women for whom The Handmaid's Tale serves as a precautionary tale about the dangers of the state controlling reproductive autonomy.  Better not mention that! Best to instead follow an Internet rando's rule on citing fiction in political work, or else you're just another unserious shillary corporatist neo-liberal imperialist!

And let me tell you! This little non-commercial, non-corporate independent geeky outfit I run here at Fannie's Room makes me millions of dollars! Millions! That's why when I'm not indulging pop culture cravings, my other favorite pastime is to dive into my vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and do the backstroke.

I admit. I do this, even though there is suffering in the world.

But, and gather closely because I'm going to let you in on a little secret, I do sometimes hear that faint whisper from 22-year-old me: "If..... if only I could seize control of the means of production." I would then make all the femslash. No wait, sorry. At such times, I wonder, "Could I too one day be a white person on social media who fetishizes violent communist revolution?" Was I a total sell-out this whole time for not spending months attacking Hillary Clinton, when I could have instead been tweeting the whitest, most violence-glorifying shit ever about Fidel Castro after he died?? But the Goldman Sachs speeeeeeeeeeches!

Dear readers, it's clear I've been put in my place.

Tyrion Lannister tells us that we should know what we are, and wear it like a shield, so it can never be used against us. And readers, I say to you, I have been smacked down from my high horse. I'm now the opposite of an uppity, shallow liberal feminist. I'm downity. Debbie Downity. I shall cope with political travesty only in serious ways, ways which are dictated to me by brocialist strangers on Twitter. I have seen the light of the wagging finger and I want nothing more than to please it (for, a bird landed on it, and I was mesmerized!).

From henceforth on it's nothing but academic analyses of Das Kapital, comrades! Down with shallow pop culture blogging!*

But first, this.

A last bit of "white feminist"** shit for brocialists to ridicule via that well-worn veneer of post-feminist enlightenment that masks their seething misogyny. I give you my version of the popular "Me in 2016" meme!

Me at the beginning of 2016:

Me at the end of 2016:

Me at the beginning of 2017:

But, in spite of brocialist dipshits, I do believe we mustn't forget the real enemy. To paraphrase Jessica Jones, Trump is the kind of person who gives people a bad name. But then again, so are lots of people.

As the walking-Deplorable-Comment-Section prepares to take office, I continue to contemplate resistance while steeling myself for the cruelty he has emboldened. As this cruelty is inflicted offline and on, I think about different strategies for addressing cyberbullies and will likely be experimenting with them in the coming year. As you can see. The mean people are winning because they count on nice people's civility and exploit it. When you do fight back, they see it as an unfair attack. When deplorables are blocked or banned, they think it makes them strong and us weak.

They're wrong.

I will defend myself, but unlike them I don't actively seek out people to harass. That's not because I have any great respect for them as Internet Deplorables, but because I respect the principle of presumptive civility more. You treat me well, I treat you well. You fuck with me, I defend myself and fight back. What I won't do is allow strangers to dictate to me how I can and cannot cope with this political reality, what tone of voice I use, or what sources I cite to articulate my points.

On that note, I am over the non-pragmatic left, many of whom effectively acted as propagandists for foreign operatives even if they didn't know it and won't now own that complicity. I have always been over the right, who have shown their hypocritical true colors as is typical. These political rifts didn't happen overnight in November, they've existed for a long time and were effectively exploited. I find myself searching for political allies, even in unlikely places, while I also search for that middle ground between pragmatism and idealism, self-defense and aggression. Perhaps there is no middle ground and we encompass them all.

A lesson from comic books is that these are the conditions that create anti-heroes. So says Jessica:

"They say everyone's born a hero. But if you let it, life will push you over the line until you're the villain. Problem is, you don't always know that you've crossed that line.

This is a dark moment in US history. I suspect posterity will be appalled at Trump and his fans - the obsession with "Hillary's emails" while they ignore Russian interference in the election, the misogynistic "lock her up" fantasies, the racist backlash against President Obama, the pussy-grabbing. I mean, where do you even stop the list?

In a dark way, the light that history will shine on the Trump depravity gives me hope. And also, there is always honor in defending ourselves if only because it communicates that we are worth defending.

So, on that note, how is everybody else doing?


*J/k, your regularly-scheduled fan-video Fridays will not be going away.
**White feminism is a thing that should be critiqued, but contrary to some leftist interpretations doesn't actually mean, "White feminists who aren't socialists are all shallow bitches who do nothing but worship Lena Dunham all day."

The Brave War On Safe Spaces!

Since I see so much regular mocking of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and content notes, would it be helpful to the people for whom such things trigger their cruelty if I added content notes for the fact that some of my post have content notes?

JUST WONDERING!

But seriously, people have been mocking content notes and trigger warnings for years. If that's the metric they use to automatically dismiss a person, or their posts, it's their loss. If they have so few actual problems in their lives that content notes and trigger warnings are the hill they want to die on with respect to Internet dialogue, I guess that must be nice for them?

When I see someone mocking safe spaces, and the mechanisms people use to create them, I know I'm dealing with someone who resents other people setting boundaries. Alert Alert Alert! The hot take about them is: OMG liberals/progressives are so ridiculously over-sensitive. But really, imagine a person hating boundary-setting via a simple note at the top of a post so much that they take time out of their life - spending time with loved ones, reading a book, watching a good show - to be a jerk about this topic. (Also related: people who think it's a human rights violation to be blocked or unfriended on social media! The horror!)

It's really indicative, I think, of a larger cultural disdain for boundary-setting.

Have you noticed, for instance, that the mocking of safe spaces and trigger warnings is a favored taunt of the gloating Trump supporter?

As Trump is someone who had admitted on tape to grabbing women's genitals without their consent and ran a campaign promising to strike a blow against that great national threat/terror-of-terrors "political correctness," this War Against Safe Spaces is especially amped up right now.

I think about the dialogue in terms of this favored meme of Trump fans:

The moral equation these folks make is that white bigots having to be "ruled" by a black man is akin to women and people of color having to be "ruled" by a racist sexual predator.  The racists were in pain for 8 years, so now it's your turn! 

Sure, Trump may destroy the economy, re-align the US with Russia, stock his Cabinet with Goldman Sachs elites, send people to die in who knows how many wars, and make most of his fans' lives financially worse off, but hey, the important thing right now is that bigots get to gloat at Clinton supporters and cackle at [content note: ableist slur] "butthurt* libtard tears" for the next four years!

Isn't conquering political correctness via dank meme what's really important in life, once you stop to think about it? The bigots, oppressed by safe spaces, shall truly overcome!


*Why is the adjective often "butthurt" with these people?
**LOL at the meme: "no riots or tantrums." Isn't electing the supremely-unqualified Trump the ultimate in-your-face man-baby tantrum of all time?

On SEK and Academic Blogging

I only knew him as the blogger SEK from Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a blog at which I've long lurked/read, but Scott Eric Kaufman passed away in November.  My sincere condolences to his friends, family, and the readers who came to know him through his writing.

In his tribute post, Paul Campos, also at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, references one of SEK's pieces about blogging from nearly 10 years ago. Because I'm eternally interested in this topic, I thought I'd share it with you. In it, SEK, who had a PhD, writes:

"Over the past three years [blogging], I’ve learned what it’s like to write in a way most academics never have: namely, for an audience. If this seems like a simple point, that’s because it is. Nor is it one of those profoundly simple points, either: it’s straight simple. When a blogger sits down to slave on her dissertation, article, or book, she doesn’t turn her back on the public sphere. Because in the end, the public sphere is us.

I’m talking about the communities we currently have, only five years in the future, when we’re scattered around the country, unable to communicate face-to-face, but still connected, still intellectually intimate, because we’ll still regularly be engaged with each other’s thoughts. But I’m not only talking about us. There’s no reason our community needs to consist solely of people we knew in grad school. Why not write for people who don’t already how you think about everything? Why not force yourself to articulate your points in such a way that strangers could come to know your thought as intimately as your friends from grad school do?"

I have about 50 or so blogs in my Feedly. Some of these are written by academics, by which I suppose I mean people who are adjuncts or who have faculty appointments in higher education. Most, like me, are not.

The academic blogs I most enjoy tend to be those where the writers engage with their blog readerships. I say that while also realizing that some writers may be shy, may be too busy to engage, or there may be too many comments to respond to. I also wonder if, in some cases, there is an assumption that it's the role of the academic to lecture and the readers to listen, with the readers interacting only with each other. That is: an expectation of monologue rather than dialogue.

Whatever the case, I appreciate SEK's point: imagine more academics engaging with wider audiences in, outside of classrooms and academic journals. 

I'm currently re-reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I first read circa 2004.  I'm not sure what Freire would have thought about the Internet being used for what he describes. But, in nearly 10 years of blogging I do see people coming together in dialogue to learn to name their oppressive lived experiences. At least, that is, they can do so when those with oppressor/dominator mentalities are excluded from the conversation.

Happy Thanksgiving and Blog Note

Hi all.

Blog readership is usually pretty light around Thanksgiving, so I'll resume the Election Fallout and Supergirl posts next Monday.

If you celebrate Thanksgiving, have a good one. If you're traveling, stay safe. And if you have to be around Trump-supporting family members, best wishes in navigating.... that.

For now, I am thankful that I found a Xena fan video set to Rihanna's "Te Amo."

By the way, has anyone ever counted how many hot tubs scenes are in the Xena series? I'm betting about 13. And also, I may or may not have watched the episode "Heart of Darkness," prominently featured in this vid, eleventymillion times.

Blog Update

In case you're wondering, I will post this week's Supergirl recap tomorrow. I couldn't post it today, acting like everything was normal. It's not.
 

"Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around." - Stephen King

Working For Free

LOLSOB.

Those of you who are artists and writers will probably appreciate this:

"Illustrations of the People Who Want You to Work For Free"

My accompanying thoughts:

If a commercial website/blog is being run or started, I'm of the opinion that payment for writers, designers, and artists who provide content and other labor to that site ought to be built into the business model, and not seen as something that might happen eventually one day if the website Really Takes Off.

Well That Seems Reasonable

[Content note: Misogyny, trans bigotry].

Rod Dreher, who we already know for his deplorable opinion of trans people, is now taking issue with a college that... provides free tampons and pads in university restrooms.(*)

Do you ever get the feeling that some cis white men think that if they don't need something, then nobody should have access to it?

Attribute it to what you will, but what a massive empathy gap.

That goes for abortion. Menstrual supplies. Safe spaces where his views aren't welcome. Content notes preceding content he doesn't understand or care about. Birth control. Gender affirmation surgery.  All of these, many a cisgender white male conservative sees as decadent wickedness that have no place in their preferred utopian enclave. Motto: I don't need it, nobody should have it! Even if others getting it in no way impacts my life!

Can you imagine what it would be to be a woman and/or LGBT person in this Benedict Option-esque society?

What an incoherent logic system.

Imagine: to simultaneously favor forced birth while opposing and mocking the provision of supplies one needs as a result of having a reproductive cycle.

It's the mindset of the men who think that men like themselves are human. Everyone else, an aberration. A supporting cast member to his important hero story. Except, like all privileged white men with unexamined privilege, when he finds out he's not the world's central hero, he believes he's its most important victim.


*I have not embedded a link to Dreher's blog, but rather to a different politics and culture blog whose authors have views that more align with my own. In light of the changes to AfterEllen, I've been thinking more about how many commercial Internet models reward hateful clickbait authors who are financially rewarded for drawing visitors to their site. It presents a dilemma, of course, as one (n=me) wants to counter such speech.

I'm going to try to minimize my complicity in directing traffic to such sites by (a) no longer directly linking to them (perhaps I'll do screenshots or something instead), and (b) not gratuitously calling attention to something unless I am also in some way countering it.  Any "share" of a deplorable opinion that doesn't also counter it or say it's awful is a promotion of it, which, I believe is partly responsible for our current Donald Trump situation. We must do more than use our social media networks to merely say, "Hey this person said this thing, oh no!"

Full disclaimer that I'm not perfect. I'm just trying to be more mindful to minimize my complicity in the Internet's toxic clickbait model.  /Welp this addendum was basically a whole entire other blog post, BYEEEE!

Damn: Trish Bendix Writes AfterEllen Eulogy

AfterEllen, the popular lesbian and bisexual pop culture site, is shutting down. Or, at least, is going to be significantly changing. [NOTE: See update]

Editor in Chief Trish Bendix wrote a eulogy yesterday on tumblr, noting that the company that owns AfterEllen wouldn't let her post her piece at AfterEllen:

 "Here are the facts: Evolve Media purchased AfterEllen from Viacom two years ago. They gave us two fiscal years to become their LGBT property and profit in that space, and they found we are not as profitable as moms and fashion. And, yes, “they” are mainly white heterosexual men, which is important to note because not only is this the story for us, but for a lot of other properties—large-scale media outlets, lesbian bars out-priced by neighborhoods they helped establish, housing in queer meccas like Portland that is being turned into condos and AirBNBs. 

 At the very same time, queer women and culture is being celebrated on the Emmys, in the legalization of both mothers being included on their newborn’s birth certificate, and our namesake, Ellen DeGeneres, being one of the most well-known, well-liked and undeniably profitable television and lifestyle personalities of our generation.

Somewhere, there’s a disconnect. AfterEllen is just one of the homes lesbian, bisexual and queer women will have lost in the last decade. It was a refuge, a community, a virtual church for so many. I’m not sure that some people outside of us can really ever understand that.

Evolve has decided to keep the site and its archives alive for now, with a promise of periodically publishing freelance pieces in the future. I am not sure what that will look like, as Friday is also my last day, after 10 years of contributing writing and eventually coming on to work full time as a blog editor, then managing editor, and, for the last two years, as Editor in Chief."

With all of the usual disclaimers that I haven't agreed with all of the site's content or moderation practices, this space has been important for so many women during its 14 years in existence, including to me. Participating in The L Word forums circa 2004 were some of my first experiences interacting with an online community of queer women.  I even had a completely awkward (on my part) meetup with founder Sarah Warn when she was visiting the city in which I live, and which she probably 100% doesn't remember, LOL. But, I drank too much and we talked about my shitty ex, Desert Hearts, and how/why she created the site.

It's a bit unfathomable to me that the site will be changing or will no longer exist in its current incarnation.

Through its interviews with lesbian, bisexual, and trans (LBT) actors and those portraying them on TV/film and through its recaps, reviews, and different contests (like the AfterEllen Hot 100), I think the site has had an extremely important (and perhaps overlooked) impact in terms of letting the TV/film industry know both (a) that LBT women exist as a fanbase, and (b) we care A LOT about how we are represented in TV/film.

Without being privy to financial circumstances that Bendix refers to with the respect to the company that owns AfterEllen, my subjective opinion as a user is that the site declined significantly in terms of user experience, something I noticed mostly in the past couple of years. I'm not at all referring to the content of articles, but rather, to what seemed to be a greatly-increased commercial presence. When visiting, I always got the sense that first and foremost a company was behind the site wanting to make money off of users, and that sense was almost completely overwhelming when visiting.

I understand the importance of ads being necessary to generate revenue when one is running a commercial site. Yet, a visit to the site to read an article often entailed: seeing a banner ad, seeing ads on the sidebar, having ads on the sidebar with embedded videos that would automatically play, having a pop up ad with video show up once you clicked on an article, and having a pop-up ad play audio/video. Like I said, overwhelming. The ad content was overly-intrusive, made the site slow, and it distracted from the substantive content, so I know my visits to the site definitely decreased over the years.

But, I also think sites ought to pay writers, particularly if they are commercial sites. And, the revenue to do that has to come from somewhere.

With the shuttering of The Toast earlier this year (which I also find heartbreaking, and which also seems like it was done at least in part for financial reasons), the LBT and feminist blogospheres will have to continue to explore models of sustainability - models that pay people and in which the user/reader experience is not eroded. Readers seem to not like paid subscription models. Although, I know other sites (like Shakesville) use a donation model.

Personally, I would love to blog/write about LGBT pop culture and feminism on a full-time paying basis, but it's difficult to conceive of doing that in a way that would pay the bills. Hence, Fannie's Room, something I do in my free time. (YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR, SUCKERS!)  And, there's almost a Catch-22 component to it: if you work full time at a non-blogging job, you have less energy to write during your free time. If you work full-time at a blogging job, you probably have more trouble paying the bills.

I guess my point is that I don't have a simple answer. I'm sad to hear this news about AfterEllen. It seems like the end of an era, in some ways, and I hope we can find a way to collectively fill the void. What is after AfterEllen?

[UPDATE: An Emrah Kovacoglu, General Manager of TotallyHer Media, posted at AE today that the site isn't shutting down, but that Bendix has been fired as Editor, that people would still be able to access content, and that they hope to work with freelancers to generate new content. This claim aligns with what Bendix said in her tumblr.

In the comment threads, multiple current writers for the site have said that this information had not previously been shared with them, and that the editorial change was abrupt. The way TotallyHer has handled this situation has led to distrust within the community that AE would be now (mis)managed by straight men and eventually shut down when not profitable enough. I will certainly be monitoring developments.]

Dear Diary

So I was scrolling through my archives and check out this HOT TAKE from me circa 2007:

"My voting strategy as of now. And this could change. First, I'm going to throw away my vote for Mike Gravel in the primaries. I refuse, on principle, to vote for any candidate whose support for LGBT rights is not clear, and frankly not correct- even if there's a woman running, and even if there's an African-American running. Because right now, this little-known and underexposed candidate is the ONLY one is in full support of marriage equality, who opposes the Defense of Marriage Act, AND opposes "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." (http://www.gravel2008.us/issues) 

And then Hillary will win the primaries. And I'll have to choose between (a) not voting at all (b) voting for "the lesser two-evils," neither of whom fully support gay rights and are more beholden to corporate interests than they are to the common citizen. Ahhh, the 'lessser of two evils,' that bane of the American voter's existence. 

But, since voting is one of the few meaningful ways for a non-millionaire average citizen to participate in our democracy, I'll choose to vote. 

And I'll vote for Hillary. Who will lose to Rudy Giuliani. Because when America's gut-checked, we'll find out we aren't quite ready for a woman president after all. 

I hope I'm wrong."

What the what? Who the fuck even was I back then? Who the hell is Mike Gravel? Why was I too lazy to use basic HTML to embed a URL? Was I a single-issue "gay rights" voter?

And damn, at least dudes regularly get paid for being wrong about politics.

I mean, it's like reading a journal of sorts, except way more embarrassing because other people can read it as well. (I know, oh woe is the blogger life).

Anyway, I guess my larger, more serious point here is that people's political opinions can and often do change over time.  I ended up voting for Obama in both the 2008 primary and general elections, which is a decision I still agree with. But, I supported the Greens in 2000 (yikes) - mostly because I was in college with little work experience, hadn't yet experienced gender discrimination, didn't fully appreciate that perhaps incremental change is the best way to make lasting change, and I felt powerless in the grand scheme of things and thus sympathized with "anti-establishment" sentiment.

The second point is that I'm also quite certain there are plenty of topics within my archives that I think differently about at present.  The challenge is if and how to address that now.  My thoughts are "out there" representing me, but I have changed over time, as many people are wont to do.

Sadly, neither political nor Internet "gotcha"/"callout" cultures allow for such change or concede that change can be genuine.  The demand is that people must have been perfect, however that is defined at the moment (which itself changes over time), from day one.  A person is painted as a flip-flopper at best or unchangeably rotten to the core at worst.

Hillary Clinton, for instance, is now sometimes critiqued for not fully supporting LGBT rights from the start of her political career. Now, however, I believe she is a sincere ally. I trust that now. I didn't in 2007.

I guess when I look for sincere change, I look for the reasons the person gives for changing. Have they listened? Have they learned? Have they apologized if they've done wrong?  And, looking at ourselves as the judge of someone else, what is our investment, if any, in painting another person a certain way?

Twitter Takes Steps to Address Safety; Jerks Flounce

Related to my ongoing interest in Internet civility, Twitter has recently announced the formation of a Trust & Safety Council. From Twitter's blog post about it:

As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust & Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly. In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices from organizations including: 

• Safety advocates, academics, and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet; 

• Grassroots advocacy organizations that rely on Twitter to build movements and momentum; 

• Community groups with an acute need to prevent abuse, harassment, and bullying, as well as mental health and suicide prevention.

The devil will be in the details of implementation, of course, but it is heartening to see a major social media company actually putting thought and resources into addressing the safe use of its platform.

Of course, some are already concern-trolling the decision, as can be expected anytime a forum purports to address civility, with the usual whinging about political correctness run amok and the threat to free speech.

Conservative/Actor/Gamergate um "personality"/opponent of "political correctness" (because of course) Adam Baldwin recently flounced from Twitter, linking to an absurd article about Twitter's Trust & Safety Council published at libertarian/conservative site The Federalist. A few other similar folks who shall remain nameless have also flounced apparently.

*shrug*

Well. Gotta say, I'm all in favor of jerks flouncing from social media platforms.  Truly.  It just saves some woman from having to take time out of her day to teach a jerk on-demand feminism, defend herself from harassment, or be a jerk whisperer.

Besides, how many thousands of women have quit Twitter due to harassment and safety concerns?  Our Fantabulous Free Speech Avengers never bring up the speech lost due to harassment and unbridled free speech/Anything Goes policies.

No matter what the policies are, someone's voice is always going to be silenced.  It's just a matter of whose and what kind of speech we collectively value more.