Feminist Rants Archives
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Here's something that's been bothering me for months now. So I decided to keep track.
The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that styles itself as one of the nation's more thoughtful periodicals, has steadfastly avoided running a major feature by a woman writer since the beginning of the year. I'm not joking. And I'm not over-reacting. I have the past four months – that's the past six months of editorial planning, a half-year, a substantial amount of time – sitting on my desk. I saved them for just this reason.
None of the magazine printed since mid-December carry any substantial written, by-lined contributions by women. What does appear is brief, usually in the back-of-the book critic's section or in "The Agenda" at the front. And to add insult to injury, the magazine's one featured female writer, Sandra Tsing Loh, a self-styled celebrity Mom who you may know from NPR, has dwelled for two months in a row on her kids, on her kids' schools and books about women like her. What's worse, the headline on this month's piece makes a joke about schools and "breast-milk-curdling." Dudes, when your kids are ready for school, most of them have stopped breast feeding.
The Atlantic is a dying institution. And as much as I love and cherish the idea of an intellectually driven, well-written periodical, I'm happy to say "good riddance" to what this once-fine magazine has become. With its run of Big Boy Harvard writers – and Little Lord Fauntleroys on the make – The Atlantic, in its current incarnation, is providing a sad example of what James Wolcott describes below: A self-involved, self-satisfied look at a country that doesn't exist once you drive more than a few miles west on U.S. 50.
The absence of women's voices in our political culture is a bias against changing one of the most powerful aspects of our society. That's why it's happening here on the web. And, girlfriends, it's about time.
Thu 11:08 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Reading the headline of James Wolcott's June column in Vanity Fair, "Caution: Women Seething," I started getting a little ginned up. And you know what that means.
Argh. Here. We. Go. Again. Like most of you, I think this issue is done. For now, anyway. And like most of you, I think much of the important conversation that took place took place here on the web, on sites like this one. Just what we need, another white guy "explaining" it all to us.
I was getting all ready to beat Wolcott over the head with his late timing – not to mention the fact that he's got a web site he calls a blog which he could have easily used to take part in this conversation two months ago – but he makes hard. Instead, he gives me a chance to reinforce some of the points I made earlier in this debate. Along with the opportunity ask, once again, the ever-present (at least for on-line folks) question about Big Media's self-satisfaction. Not only that, I get an excuse to beat on The Atlantic for its egregiously sexist sins.
Continue reading "Shanks Pony Express"Thu 10:57 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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How come all the people talking so earnestly about Jennifer Wilbanks – her emotional state, her future plans, her decision to flea not just her gigantico wedding but the very town in which it was to be held - are men?
Early last week, Wilbanks was just a woman with big – really big – wedding plans to marry. Today, of course, she's the "runaway bride" who was going to get married to John Mason in Duluth, Ga. before 600 invited guests with 14 attendents. That's until she went running and kept going until, well until she ended up on Albuquerque, New Mexico with no money and a bad haircut.
If you believe the news reports, the good people of Duluth, Ga., are angry. Someone got the bright idea to press charges against this woman for making a false police report and her husband-to-be has gone on Fox News to say he still wants to get married. A member of her family told the press she had some issues to work out. Her father-in-law to be said the wedding wasn't off, it was just postponed. But no one's really heard form the bride or her family. Which makes you wonder: Who exactly was – or is – getting married?.
A few days ago I got a nasty-gram that might help us – indirectly – address this very point. "Feminism, like Marxism (from which it arises) is simply wrong and evil," my correspondent said. "You are failing (and feminist webloggers are failing) because your are wrong and your ideas are evil. You are lost in the dead Marxist past."
Continue reading "Wedding Bell Blues"Mon 01:55 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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There's something in the water over there at The Chron. Girls, girls girls!
Today's entry is just as maddening as last week's account of Joe O'Donoghue's gang of concerned misogynists.
"Who killed Social Security overhaul?" writes The Chron's Carolyn Lockhead. " A: Harry Reid. B: George W. Bush. C: AARP. D: Monica Lewinsky. Answer: D."
Huh?
Continue reading "Blame the Girl"Mon 09:55 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle offered up a great illustration of why I have such increasing contempt for the movement that styles itself as "progressive." In this most self-consciously progressive of cities, it's a movement – actually, it's a fashion statement – run by hypocrites who tailor their politics to suit their needs all the while claiming higher moral ground because, well, because they're good people.
During San Francisco's last mayoral election – the one that featured art-loving hipster Matt Gonzalez against slick rich guy Gavin Newsom – there was a lot of talk about how Gonzalez's progressive "values" would be good for the city. This was a joke. All you had to do was take a look at where Gonzalez money and support was coming from. To fund his campaign, Gonzalez picked up some interesting friends, among them head of San Francisco's politically powerful Residential Builders Association, Irish tough-guy Joe O'Donoghue.
Continue reading "The Blarney Stone of Misogyny"Fri 10:23 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Best April Fool's blog. Hands down. No question. Lauren and Roxanne are two clever – and funny – girls.
Fri 09:48 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Hey, I did a podcast!
You can hear my feminist rants from the past few weeks live and almost in person over at The Vision Thing. Generally, I try not to sqweak when I'm interviewed but this time I couldn't help myself.
I also spent an enjoyable couple of hours late last week with Demo Godess Chris Shipley. We were chatting about future of this on-line stuff. You can read Chris' generous take on what I'm doing.
Tue 10:00 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Katha Pollitt has written in, responding to my post yesterday. Here's her letter. My response follows.
A friend directed me to your website, which I had not read before. I appreciate the urgency of your concern about the issue of women, writing, magazines and blogs. However, you make a number of assumptions about me which are quite unfair. In my Nation column, to which I link on Political Animal, I do discuss blogs, and the invisibility of women's blogs to male bloggers. The Washington Monthly discussion is supposed to last all week -- why assume that because my first post discusses print, that is all I plan to discuss?
More important, you suggest, on the basis of no information at all, that I do not promote women writers at The Nation, and may even prefer to be a solitary voice. Fact is, I have written about the paucity of women (and African-American) writers in The Nation and elsewhere for YEARS, including columns in The Nation about The Nation's own lack of diversity. Although I do not have ANY POWER at the magazine to hire staff or assign pieces, I have worked hard to put this issue on the front burner. (When I did have a little power, as the literary editor for two years in the early l980s, I reviewed books by women constantly, and assigned pieces to women constantly, and did a special issue on feminist books -- a first at the magazine. The only columnist I was permitted to hire was a woman, the wonderful dance critic Mindy Aloff). I raise this ancient history only to suggest that I have been plugging away at this for a very long time! We now have equal numbers of male and female columnists and much more coverage of feminist issues, and --not to take away from the gifts of the writers or the commitments of the editors, who are almost all women now by the way -- I do think I get a little credit for putting the issue on the table and keeping it there.
Continue reading "Letters, We Get Letters"Wed 11:10 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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I'm no Katha Pollitt. I've never met Katha Pollitt. Katha Pollitt is no friend of mine. But I can tell you, Katha Pollitt is channeling my website.
Pollit, a writer for The Nation, takes up some space on the Washington Monthly to rehash – again – the disparity between men and women writing political opinions.
Only I said it – almost all the women writing on the web said it – last month. And again last week. She says it today.
Continue reading "Sister, We're Doing it For Ourselves"Tue 04:03 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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If the "blogosphere" is an individual medium as Jeff Jarvis says today on his site in response to comments about women going unnoticed by their (okay, our) male colleagues then how come he's always on TV? Isn't that a mass medium?
And how come he rounds up comments and links from other sites and to talk about on TV and presents it as a public service – which it surely is – for readers as well as those writing on-line? Because TV is a great way to spread the word about individuals to a larger number of people, that's why. This is indeed a medium of individual voices, but it has a few gatekeepers.
UPDATE: Proving there's nothing more charming than a little old-fashioned honesty, Jeff Jarvis answers my question and make several good points. Oh, and he makes a nice comment about the New York TImes' Maureen Dowd, too. She'd probably get a lot more dates if she spent a lot less time gleefully writing up "scientific" evidence of men's stupidity.
Fri 03:37 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Kevin Drum has girded whatever it is that cat-bloggers gird and wandered – gracefully this time – back into the on-line gender war. Drum has written the column he should have written last month and he deserves a lot of credit for doing so.
I still quibble with his world view but that's just going to be the way things are. It's not a point worth hashing out here. The man means well.
The larger, more important point Drum makes about how conversations about women's status become marginalized – we've had more than one on-line demonstration of this technique from Jeff Jarvis (patronizing and cavalier), Dave Winer (hostile and condescending) and, earlier Drum himself (dismissive and a bit clueless) -- is a good one, generously made. And it's more than worthy a little discussion.
The problem with women writing on-line isn't the barrier to entry: Getting a site, getting it up and running is inexpensive and technically easy. The issue is barrier to popularity, which leads to influence and power. That leads, eventually to advertising revenue, freelance gigs and more influence and power, authority even. We do not live in a culture where those at the top of our social and economic pecking order – that's white men – share these things willingly and happily. There are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between. And many women have fought very hard to get the small little pieces of real estate we have because so many men think that sharing means there's less – a lot less – for them. And they don't like it.
Continue reading "He's Baaaaaaack"Thu 10:01 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Newsweek's Steve Levy said he wanted to generate discussion on the boy/girl blogger breakdown. Looks like he got his wish.
Lots of folks, from the Columbia Journalism Review to a colleague from Personal Democracy Forum have pointed readers here. Dave Winer is giving me a hard time for calling him stingy. And Jeff Jarvis is in some kind of smack-down with Juan Cole that I don't have the time to really understand. On top of that, a lot of men keep calling me "him." (For the record, I am not a man. Even though I live in San Francisco, I have no plans to become one). And, in keeping with what Levy intended, there's a plan afoot to have a meeting of female on-line writers, probably this summer here on the West Coast.
Some good, some bad. All in all, a good day's work. But let's step back for a sec because some of this conversation is getting confused between the on-line and off-line worlds. Levy made his somewhat off-hand remarks against a background of on-line debate – mostly heatedly between me and Kevin Drum -- and mean-spirited flame war that's being conducted by LATImes editor Michael Kinsley and USC professor and pundit Susan Estrich. Levy couldn't know, of course, that Maureen Dowd would focus on Kinsley and Estrich to write something similar to his column on the same day. That makes me less certain he should get all the credit for this discussion and some of its after-effects. But that's a small point. We are where we are.
Continue reading "Gender Bender"Wed 11:40 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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Reasons why people – er, men – wonder why there are "no" women bloggers. This post is in response, partly, to Steven Levy's musings onn Newsweek's site. For the record, Levy wrote a better version of the column Kevin Drum tried to write a few weeks ago; he made some phone calls, however.
1)This medium was first taken up by techies. Most of them are men. It's not worth going into the statistics on men and women in tech, and the reasons and whyfors. There are more men, that's all you need to know for this conversation.
2)Those men prefer to link and read men like them. As it was in the beginning so shall it ever be. When they wonder where the women bloggers are what they're really saying is "I don’t read any women bloggers."
3)Even though the "blogosphere" has gotten much larger, most of these men are still reading the guys they started out with three years ago., linking to them and talking among themselves. There's talk of broader horizons, but it's pretty much that: Talk. Glenn Reynolds, however, is an exception to this trend. And since he got slapped around last month, Kevin Drum has started to link to more women. Josh Marshall rarely links to women writers. Dave Winer is also stingy.
Continue reading "Today's Top Ten"Sun 03:13 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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In all the to-ing and fro-ing these past few weeks about the League of Extraordinarily Stupid Gentlemen, I noted that it took an act of Congress to get women parity at place like Harvard.
Comes now the Wall Street Journal's Karen Blumenthal saying yup, the Ivies resisted admitting women as hard as they could as long as they could. Harvard and pretty much every place else fought hard to keep Title IX from becoming a law that would require them to admit as many women as men. It's an interesting read. Have at it.
Continue reading "Blaming Harvard"Wed 11:42 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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In the East, it's Larry Summers. In the West it's Kevin Drum, proudly holding up the "Girls Keep Out" sign for on-line political writing. That's no surprise for anyone who knows The Washington Monthly and its founder Charlie Peters. Peters refused to hire women for years, a fact that – when I called it to his attention last year – Drum didn't acknowledge last time he hashed over this issue.
CORRECTION:Kevin Drum reminds me that he did cite my comments about The Washington Monthly when we discussed this issue last year. I had sent him a more pointed note than what he posted on his site. He chose to identify the fault as the magazine's. I pointed to its editor. The links above take you to the note I sent Drum, which I posted here, and to his post describing our correspondence.
This week, Drum thinks there aren't enough women bloggers because women aren't comfortable with the "food fight" atmosphere that's part and parcel of blogging. Girls, as we all know, don't like to fight.
Continue reading "The League of Extraordinarily Stupid Gentlemen"Tue 02:05 PM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
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One of the more depressing problems that American feminists have always faced is the sad reality that, as British novelist A.S. Byatt once said, there are always women ready to join forces with the other side.
Byatt – who is a woman -- didn't mean that in pop-culture Venus/Mars which is, sadly and maddeningly, what feminist principles have been reduced to in American culture. No, Byatt – a keen observer of the similarities between the real and the formulaic in life and in fiction -- is saying that there will always be women happy to support the status quo and to accept the small gains given them in the name of peaceful, gradual protest. Because, at heart, they really aren't interested in change only in negotiated settlements. They got theirs. The rest of us are on our own.
Continue reading "Oh, Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?"Mon 09:45 AM | permalink | printer-friendly version | email this article
