Sexist Beatdown: Blogging About Blogging About Blogging Edition

Good morning! Are you ready for a Sexist Beatdown... that requires extensive background information and additional reading into a history of intense debate in, around, and about the feminist blogosphere? If your answer is, "Jesus, it is too early for this, no," then you are in the same position as the lovely and preternaturally patient Amanda Hess of The Sexist, who respectfully indulged my mad whim when I told her that I had been reading and looking into many of the discussions about blogging, race, class, and privilege that had taken place within the last year (like, here and here, and also here and here, are two really important things to grow on) and had become kind of obsessed with them, and specifically with this one article about "digital colonialism" which kind of seems to (a) rephrase many correct and good points raised in those discussions, and (b) do so in a way that distorted those points and pissed people off. And then I asked to talk about them with her!

So, anyway, Mandy Van Deven and Brittany Shoot wrote this thing, and in the midst of some not insubstantial points about blogworld-as-meritocracy (hint: it's not), said that women of color who guest posted at Big White Feminist Elite Blogs were being tokenized, and that "many radical bloggers, both women of color and white women, have not been naive enough to buy into these symbolic co-optation efforts, but some have." Then "some" - in my own Google Reader, I saw Shark-Fu's and Renee's responses first, but there have been lots - pointed out how effed-up that was, then I read a whole lot of old blog entries and talked to Amanda about it on the GChat.

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown: dare I express an opinion which differs from that of my all-powerful Guest Blogging Overlord? Turns out, yep, and it is enlightening for all involved.

Illustration: I made my boyfriend listen to me talk about this and then he sent me this cartoon. I am just saying.

SADY: it is time for the discussion of why GUEST BLOGGING WILL DESTROY THE WORLD, apparently! did you even get through all the billions of words in the links i sent you? i have been re-reading them myself this very evening.

AMANDA: i got through many of them. i got very tired. let me start off by saying, i apologize for featuring your words in a weekly token guest blog. i did not mean to offend

SADY: you know, i will have to think that over. as a LARGER ELITE BLOG, i am aware that my decision to work with you is based on my own misguided naivete, so really, i have only myself to blame!

AMANDA: you're white though, so i think it's better? or maybe worse, i can't keep it straight.

SADY: i am a white lady, yes. therefore this argument is not nearly so insulting to me as to many!* but what frustrates me in the "what if the feminist blogosphere is a form of digital colonialism" post is that its one central point---women of color who guest post at Big Feminist Elite Blogs are being exploited and don't know it somehow---is so very NOT REALLY THE POINT AT ALL, if you read it closely. it mainly seems to be about Big Feminist Blogs and how they are keeping people---like maybe the authors of this very post!---out of the spotlight, and guest blogging is... causing this? i do not know. what i do know, from reading feministe, is that one of the authors once had a fight with jessica valenti

AMANDA: i see. i read a lot of the stuff, but i got bored around the middle of the feministe series.

SADY: awww

AMANDA: yeah, i'm sorry. i did get a little frustrated at how vilified the two women who wrote the post were by these other blogs that they had implicated in the post, to the point where they felt the need to write a long and excessively delicate, i thought, apology on it

SADY: yeah, i sort of read through that apology but i kind of was not able to keep my attention on it. i should say that i originally found the post through Shark-Fu's response.

AMANDA: Shark-Fu's response was great, and actually this whole exercise has brought up a criticism that I've had about some of the larger group blogs for some time, which is that they can be very, very boring sometimes. regardless of the identity politics of the writers, most of which i'm not really familiar with---this being on the internet and all---i think that the smaller individual blogs are where great voices are really cultivated and stranger issues are addressed, and when they're filtered into these larger monoliths i think a lot of that gets lost. (except for Shark-Fu, whose voice can never be silenced). take jezebel, for example, which i like---after reading that blog for a couple years, it just begins to feel very safe. though there are points of daring writing by some of the women who blog there, i wish there was a little more branching out in terms of content and voice.

SADY: yeah, i definitely agree with you about jezebel. although i think some of jezebel brings up the issue of maybe Blogging While Corporate, in that a lot of the writers I definitely sought out on that site were lost or started posting a lot less after they were moved to "part-time.” but i agree that single-person blogs, where you really get to watch one voice grow and develop and chart out the areas of its obsession, are usually more fascinating to me.

AMANDA: definitely. also, the very sad loss of Pot Psychology. i think one of the problems with blogs is that they are for people to just talk and talk and talk (see: this very blog post), and so these areas of opinion are worked over and over again, which draws a lot of conversation, but which doesn't always advance the scope of the topics we're actually talking about. which is the sad fallout of the fall of dead tree journalistic outfits i suppose.

SADY: ha, yeah. i also think that this one post we're talking about now has some interesting stuff to say, but that stuff is (ironic!) drawn from critiques, largely framed by ladies of color, that they didn't link to directly except through WEIRDLY ACADEMIC FOOTNOTES BECAUSE THEY ARE BORING, sorry. but the questions of who gets "authority," who gets to be "representative," and how that lines up with the class or racial privilege you have, i definitely think are worth investigating. i mean, blogs are for talking and talking and talking, but are we also listening and listening and listening? and to whom? and what are we doing with what we learn there?

AMANDA: i thought their original post was very interesting, and often right, and also wrong, and that the bigger blogs (i suppose i am only talking about feministe here) did a sort of cop-out move to focus only on the criticisms that were easy to shoot down. (not only . . . largely). i think one of the very interesting aspects of the original post was that it made the point that, hey, the Internet is great because everybody has a voice, but actually, there are so many voices on the Internet that the little blog representative of one aspect of feminism is not heard if it's not picked up by the larger sites. so really, no, not everyone has a voice.

SADY: true enough, and there may be a lot of factors (like, if someone is writing from a marginalized perspective within feminism---if they are a trans feminist, or a feminist sex worker, or a lady of color) that may cause people to view those as... i don't want to impute ill will to anybody, but let's say those are viewed as "specialized" whereas if you are writing from a more privileged place you get to present your concerns (and have them accepted) as "universal"

AMANDA: definitely

SADY: am i saying any of this right? i am pretty sure i am not!

AMANDA: yeah, and i wish that jezebel and some of the other blogs would touch on more glbtq stuff sometimes, but they're allowed to define their content area as they please. on the other hand, they're in this position to do so much interesting stuff that i think a lot of times they don't take the opportunity to. and part of that is because they're getting cut, they're overworked, underpaid, etc.

SADY: yeah, right, and here's where i think the questions about money and audience and status and whatever get very interesting. because if you're getting paid, let alone paid WELL, to be a feminist blogger (and are dependent for your paycheck on the goodwill of a dude who is not precisely known for being warm and cuddly, in jezebel's case) then... well, you have to write in a way that will capture your audience's attention and justofy those ad purchases on your site, and that might lead to the kind of "safe" stuff you were talking about, where you go back to things that you know will work and don't get to have the same sense of adventure as a blog without those concerns. which is not to say that i don't get a lot of news from jezebel! or even that i think jezebel is what they were talking about rather than feministing, feministe, shakesville, which i'm told make far less money, and which i also read.

AMANDA: yeah. i think it's just like any other capitalist industry, really, it's a meritocracy but it's not, and it's important to remember that. at the same time ... hell, it offers a lot of opportunity for a lot of discussion, and that's great! though very very extended discussions about Why We Are Not Racist i'm pretty much over with for now. thankfully, once the pageviews subside the blogs will move on to something else.

SADY: yes, thank god for the Internet: proving once and for all that if you just stop paying attention to some people, they will go away. and then maybe you can actually pay attention to people for doing something good! like being talented! it's sad how much easier it is to talk and talk forever about someone you don't like.

AMANDA: it is sad, but that is the internet in a nutshell. it's also easy to come up with reasons you don't like something that you might even have good things to say about.

SADY: it's also easy to say purposefully inflammatory things to get attention. I DON'T LIKE NUNS OR BABIES. Next baby I see: I'm punching it, HARD. see how easy that is?

AMANDA: piece of cake.


*Actually it is not directly insulting to me at all, because of the me-being-a-white-lady thing, so I'm not trying to, like, take over or minimize anyone else's sense of being insulted by it! Just to make this clear! IN A FOOTNOTE BECAUSE IT IS HARD TO EXPRESS NUANCED POINTS OF VIEW IN THE GCHATTER SOMETIMES. The End.

Weekly Short Story Report: "A&P," John Updike

As the news of John Updike's passing trickles down into obituaries, then appraisals, then annoying comment threads in which it is argued that feminist lit crit should just disappear because what matters is not whether John Updike created worthwhile, convincing fiction but whether he was "true to himself," whatever that means, oh and also he is no longer alive so let's just rush him into the canon already because you don't want to speak ill of the dead or anything, one story is mentioned, over and over, as his finest: "A & P."

By sheer coincidence, "A & P" is now available online! Also, I had been planning a weekly short story critique! Novels: they are too big for blog posts, guys. So, let's read, shall we?

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs.

So it begins. Enjoy the prose here: its prosody ("sweet broad soft-looking"), its visual quality ("two crescents of white"), its command of the telling detail ("where the sun never seems to hit," the vulnerability of the hidden implicit there). Note that this is an Updike piece not entirely written in Updike Voice, except (you'll see later) when Updike decides he can get an effect by slipping into it. Oh, and also: OMG half-nekkid ladies! Sweet!

I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

This is the passage which directly follows the opening, quoted above. What is interesting here is how the (young, desired, so far speechless) girls in their bathing suits are followed directly by an older woman who is described in the most unflattering terms possible. She's old (if "about fifty" is old), still given to sexual display (the rouge) in defiance of the fact that this particular man does not find her attractive, she confronts the narrator for making a mistake, and she is thus a witch, a hag, a bitch, for no other reason than that she apparently wants the narrator to do his job.

She isn't the last woman the narrator will denigrate over the course of "A&P": in fact, every single woman in the story, including the bikini girls, will come under fire. Those three, however, exist in a different space: the inevitable criticism balanced with worshipfully purple prose about their bodies. They are desired and therefore spared, more or less. However, in order to praise them, Updike has to present each and every other woman in his fictional universe as inherently undesirable, ugly, and bad. He praises certain women as exceptional in order to degrade women as a gender, or maybe it's the other way around; either way, it's a narrative technique that Updike used over and over again in his work. And the women he praises at first usually turn out to be the most dangerous and terrible of all, as we shall see here, in due time.

There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen.

Note how the narrator is miraculously able to infer the entire social order and relationship history of these girls based on simply watching them for no more than a few seconds - not talking to them, not seeking their input, not even overhearing them as they speak to each other. Male authority over female truth, the narrator's authority over fictional truth, the author's authority over his fictional world: they blend so seamlessly into each other, lending legitimacy to each other, that we almost take the narrator and Updike at their words before we realize what Updike has done.

Note, too, how precisely their rankings in this imagined hierarchy correspond to how attractive the narrator finds them. He (and Updike?) naturally imagine that, as he values them, so do they value each other. Female value is located solely in the desirable body; a flaw in female beauty lessens female worth. At least the chunky one has a nice can; the tall one (Updike's fiction has more than a few short, self-conscious male protagonists - just saying*) is "the kind of girl other girls think is very striking and attractive but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much." Aside from his apparently telepathic insight into the lives and thought processes of women to whom he has never spoken (and I imagine this is what people are referring to when they speak of Updike's "insights into mundane life," since it is such an eloquently regurgitated cliche about female competitiveness, shallowness, and bitchery) note what "making it" means here: being wanted by men like the narrator. Does she want? Does she have preferences? Does the narrator or author at any point attribute desire, meaning preferences for specific people or types of people, to this sexualized character? No. She needs to be wanted. That is what success is supposed to be, for women. That is all it is.

Blah blah, narrator gets implicit boner, blah blah, purple prose that breaks the rules the author has set for his narrator's voice ("this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light"), blah blah other women are disgusting ("house slaves in pin curlers," all other women in swimsuits wear shorts too and "are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less"), blah blah, more boner, blah... Oh, look! Men!

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice.

Amazing, isn't it? Within three short paragraphs, this character has been given a voice, personality, and history, complete with relationships and implicit psychological conflicts. Is he a boy, or a man? A responsible husband and father or a kid who can leer at asses and make dirty jokes with his friends? We don't know, and neither does he. We know he struggles. After all, he's only twenty-two. The distance between Stokesie and the narrator is alternately far smaller and far larger than it appears. The narrator feels it too.

We are halfway through the story and no female character has had a line of dialogue. Or a distinct motivation. Or a name. Just thought I'd let you know.

Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks."

What the... another named, speaking, male character with an actual past and personality! Things are getting CRAZY up in this here A&P! And a woman speaks for the first time in the whole entire story! (There are only three lines of female dialogue, so enjoy them.) And, miraculously, as soon as she speaks, the narrator finds a reason to dislike her! Her voice opens up the possibility that she has a personality, one which may not be solely based around the wild desire to gratify the narrator with her body. Since women's worth is primarily derived from their bodies, of course, that voice is "flat and dumb," but how can you expect a woman to have a mind worth engaging? It is also "tony," meaning rich, meaning that she possesses power that the (working-class or at least lower-middle-class, we assume) narrator does not, which makes her a threat... oh, I'm sorry, I mean "a bitch." I forget that men are never scared of the women they demean, and that misogyny is never directed at a woman because she seems stronger or smarter than the men who seek to diminish, intimidate, or humiliate her; that would be ridiculous, because how could a boy ever be threatened by a lesser order of life? My bad.

"We want you decently dressed when you come in here."

"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

Geez, listen to her, all "having opinions" and "resisting authority" and "expressing anger" and absolutely for sure because the narrator is psychic somehow thinking that she's better than people like him. I hope she doesn't turn out to be a bitch like all the rest.

A word, here: the question of John Updike's misogyny is not about whether or not his male characters call his female characters "bitches" and "cunts." Those gendered insults are misogynist, but there are a thousand ways to frame them; their appearance does not automatically render a text sexist. The question of John Updike's misogyny is definitely not about whether his male characters are sexually attracted to women, or sexually active with women. The idea that feminists are somehow offended by male lust itself is an ancient and idiotic straw man argument that is barely worth addressing here. Here I go, anyway: desire does not presuppose that a woman's only worth lies in her ability to gratify a man. Desire does not presuppose that failing to gratify a man is some sort of character flaw, nor that the female party in a sexual exchange is always less than fully human, some sort of unknowable but undoubtedly inferior Other that one should not even really desire to know. Desire does not presuppose that sexual activity makes a woman worth less and a man worth more, while holding the paradoxical position that women who are not sexually active are cold, cruel bitches who are refusing to give men what they need and want and deserve. There are a thousand ways to desire. Desire is not misogyny. Misogyny appropriates desire and promotes the myth that one cannot exist without the other; then, because people like desire, it promotes the myth that people who oppose misogyny also oppose desire; thusly, it communicates that misogyny is itself desirable because it makes pleasure possible. This is untrue, but it is definitely part of why the question of whether Updike's work is misogynist is so regularly confused (by non-feminists) with the question of whether he wrote about sex.

So, the question of John Updike's misogyny is not and has never been about sex. The question is: what position do women hold in his fictional worlds? How are female characters created and deployed? How is their reality conveyed, and (since he strove for realism) is it consistent with the actual reality (the motivations, the inner lives, the choices and actions) of women? What function do women serve in Updike's work? Here is one answer:

The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow...

Ah, yes, the "reward me for my 'unselfish' actions on your behalf with sex, since I do not actually care about you, but about my boner" move. Always a winner. But do the girls respond appropriately? Do they fall all over the hero in a beswimsuited orgy of sucking and fucking, or at least ask him out on a date, or at least praise him to the skies? I mean, he'd even take the fat one or the ugly one! He's not asking for much here, just that they realize they exist for his gratification and be appropriately grateful for his not insulting them, or at least not insulting them aloud! And they do not, they are not, they fail!

I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls [MY?! - Ed.], but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'djust had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

Note the text's final disgusting woman, a screaming young wife with children. The narrator has risked his all due to his desire for women, and those women have betrayed him. The ones he wants, he can't get; the ones he could get, the ones other people have gotten, are awful. The text's assortment of aging or married women are not placed in the story accidentally: they are what the bikini women will be, in time. Women are bitches for not gratifying male desire; women who gratify male desire are, or will be, bitches. Desire leads to relationship leads to marriage leads to children; desire leads from the screaming young wife to the house slave in pin curlers to the hag who ought to be burned; women are a trap, women are a tragedy, women, put bluntly, are just plain bad. Oh, how hard, how very hard it is to live in this fallen and woman-infested world.

Misogyny? That's putting it lightly. Yet if I rejected every book with undertones of misogyny or sexism, my list of total books read and enjoyed would diminish by at least half. Sexism is an undeniable part of history and culture, hence of the literary landscape, and you know what? I love to read. I love to read D.H. Fucking Lawrence, folks. I have no problem with putting up with sexism if the work is decent. Yet in this story, the clumsiness, the self-indulgence, the overdone symbolism and straining for deeper meaning and liberal substitution of cliche for character or insight, the unevenness of the basic craft, the absolute lack of any innovation in terms of technique or insight by which the author might hope to justify these obvious flaws... John Updike was a misogynist, sure. That's only a part of why he was a bad writer.

*UPDATE: I have been informed that Updike was, in fact, tall. Of course, he is also being reported as "handsome," so. What can I say? He writes like a small man. 

LINKING TIME Is Up In Your Baby-Maker

It is Blog for Choice day, hurrah! So all the Internet ladies get to write posts today about their shmushmortion hopes and dreams. This year's topic: What is your top pro-choice hope for President Obama and/or the new Congress?

My post is right here, duh. It is mostly about how I hope Obama will actually be (non-reluctantly, unapologetically) pro-choice. I dream small and/or big; honestly, when it comes to this topic, I can't even tell the difference any more.

Shark-Fu at Angry Black Bitch writes about if Roe were magic. It is not, sadly, and therefore does not fix everything, as she makes clear.

Cara at Feministe blows your mind with a post linking abortion rights to rape to "sexual rights" (my two favorite words, denoting my one favorite concept) in general. (Also, if you go alllll the way down to the bottom of this post, you will see that Obama has already granted one of my wishes! I take it back, you guys, he is totally going to drive us all to Chuck E. Cheese and give us an unlimited number of tokens with which to play skee-ball. He is the best.)

Melissa McEwan at Shakesville supports choice because she trusts women. Melissa McEwan is adorably optimistical and full of faith in the world, and makes me feel crusty and bitter on a more or less regular basis. I love that about her.

Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors uses her platform to broadcast Nancy Northrup's serious, well-thought-out, and totally plausible suggestions for promoting the cause of choice. This is why Ann Bartow is totally brilliant and people who quote her out of context in order to level unfounded accusations of P.U.M.A.-ism at her (ahem) need to actually, you know, read her blog.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon wonders what the overlap might be between anti-choice advocates and old white dudes who hate the ladies. (SPOILER: It is huge.)

Finally, Amanda Hess of The Sexist has spent the entire day covering the enormous anti-choice protest in Washington. So, to sum up: we are representing ourselves and making our presence felt and educating people as to our beliefs, using TECHNOLOGY and WORDS while INDOORS. They are wandering around D.C. freezing their asses off and screaming about how abortion is "Vietnam for women" or something. We have now conclusively proven which side is smarter. You know, in case you wondered.

Oh, and here's Barack almost wearing a t-shirt and/or running for President of Your Heart:

If I insist that he give all future press conferences whilst wearing this exact shirt no matter how smelly it gets or how many times the White House Puppy throws up on it, does that make me a single-issue voter? Or does it make me A CITIZEN WHO GETS INVOLVED?

Tiger Beatdown: Apologia, or: Why I Spend All My Time on the Damn Internet

[So. Not so long ago, I had a discussion with someone in which he asked me to answer some tough questions, most of which had to do with this blog. They were questions like: why have you chosen to write what you write? What change do you think you can affect by writing those things? If you think what you have to say is valuable, why don't you Do Something With It, rather than scribbling it out on your lunch break or whatever and shooting it out into an essentially uncaring void? And: why are you so mean to Aaron P. Taylor? That conversation got under my skin, not because I think he was wrong, but because they were good, solid points that called the existence of this blog - and the amount that I care about it, which is: A Whole Lot - into question. Then, about forty-eight hours later, someone asked me if I would potentially be interested in helping with a conference presentation about the role feminist blogs - and specifically individual, non-professional feminist blogs - played in the movement. Which was some weird-assed timing! And I did not know what to say! Because I had been kind of thinking that I was wasting my whole entire life at that specific moment! So instead of coping with those questions and doubts directly, I kind of spent the next week or so writing shitty, mean, poorly composed posts that were essentially continuations of an argument that I was having with myself about whether this blog should exist. On the blog itself, I unsurprisingly took the "pro" side, because Tiger Beatdown, which at this point in my life has become an entity unto itself, was like, DAAAVE, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT, DAAAAVE, every time I thought about shutting it down. What I thought privately was often dramatically at odds with what I posted. However, in the interest of not being a boring, incoherent asshole any longer, I will share with you the e-mail I wrote back to the nice lady, which is long and crazy - and edited lightly, here! - and probably my most complete and coherent answer, and which goes like this.] 

I think that, when we're talking about blogs, it's important to realize the role that small presses and self-created media have always had in the feminist movement, or have had at least since the second wave. Small feminist presses, newsletters, magazines (Ms. was a big deal, but it was also only the biggest and shiniest product of a large and diverse movement to create feminist print media - Bust and Bitch are kind of in the same position now) and feminist bookstores have always been crucial to the conversation, as were zines later on. Blogs are the rational next step: people can create their own media for less money than ever, and can get it out to a wider audience. [EXCISED FOR EXTRA TANGENTIAL CRAZY.] The accessibility and global reach of the Internet have really been embraced, especially by feminists who are isolated due to location or other factors. 

There's another way that blogs tie into feminist history, and I feel I would be remiss to ignore it. Since blogs can get pretty personal, and since they have comment sections, they can also be seen as an extension of consciousness-raising groups, in which women spoke to one another about their lives in the hopes of finding common experiences and interpreting those in a political context, so as to get some sense of how sexism actually worked. Some comment threads on Jezebel are actually perfect examples of this. They start with "me too," then get to "I wonder why," and then get to larger conclusions. "Personal is political," as a slogan, has a lot of flaws; however, I do feel that, due to the pervasive nature of sexism and the extent to which we have all internalized it, the ability to analyze and discuss your own experience in a political context - and to reach that "me, too" moment - is pretty vital to developing your feminism. 

Paolo Freire wrote that most education was based on "banking" - the students are presumed to know nothing, and the educator, who knows everything, just dumps knowledge into their heads. Freire saw that as a paternalistic model that was based on structures of oppression. He thought this was especially true when students were marginalized. He believed in a non-hierarchical form of education, in which the classroom would be composed of student/teachers - everyone teaching each other, everyone learning from each other - who discussed the subject at hand in the context of their own lived experience, and thereby not only empowered themselves by coming to understand that they were, in fact, "experts" when it came to their own experience, but actually worked together to develop a theory of their own oppression, which would hopefully help them to fight it. This sounds touchy-feely but I think it is true: nobody knows more than you do about your own experience, and what you say may help someone to understand a portion of their own life that has been confusing or weird. When we blog our feminisms, and seek out the work of others, we are engaged in that basic Freirian task of student/teaching. 

Moving that one step forward, I see blogs as representative of pluralism and diversity, which is so vastly important, not only to feminism (specifically Third Wave feminism, which is all about that) but to any kind of progressive movement. I have a Google alert set up for the word "feminism," and most of the newspaper articles I get through that alert are op-eds which contain statements like "feminism means X" or "feminists believe Y," which is of course totally screwed up, and is usually followed immediately by a statement like "you'll never guess what I'm about to say, but: it turns out I totally disagree!" Of course, feminism was always a diverse movement, but during the reign of Old Media it was more possible to view it (or promote a view of it) as an oppressive, monolithic movement that brooked no sass or backtalk. 

If you thought that Ms. was the ONLY feminist magazine (and you might well think that - it was the only one available at most newsstands) then any statement made by a Ms. contributor would appear to be The Feminist Perspective. If mainstream feminism excluded working-class POVs, or POVs from women of color, or from queer women (as with Friedan and "the lavender menace") then people whose only exposure to feminism came through the mainstream would get the impression that feminism was irrelevant or even hostile to people with those perspectives. [A lot of smart people actually do object to feminism due to the fact that they perceive it as a monolithic, white, middle-class movement - I added this in later, as you can see!] Nowadays, it's far less possible to believe in The One True Feminism, or The Feminist Perspective. You can't say that Feministing is "the feminist blog." Nor can you say that about Feministe or Shakesville or Jezebel. [Lots of young women get their education about feminism, not primarily from print media or even from women's studies classes, but from these sites; their plurality, the fact that they don't always agree with each other, and the fact that most of them routinely link out to other, smaller blogs as a form of community-building is a large part of what makes them valuable and engaging. This, also, was added in later!] The essentially random and response-based nature of blogging - the way one can go from talking about Barack Obama to douchebloggers to movies to vibrators within a week - also helps to maintain diversity of viewpoints, in that we are analyzing the culture one piece at a time, casting a wide net, and determining on an individual basis what is important enough to write about. 

[EXCISED FOR MULTIPLE-EXAMPLE-BASED CRAZY.]

On a purely personal level, I started my blog because I was writing on a site for young women, and sometimes I would want to say something that is not entirely in line with what that site was about. I posted about a date rape case, for example, and in the comments there was a discussion about whether the girl in question was "really" raped or whether she had "deserved" it. I didn't feel that site was the right place for me to get into an argument or to give Feminism 101 lessons, for a variety of reasons, but I knew that I needed a place where I could say whatever I wanted, mostly for my own sake. [EXCISED FOR DEFENSIVE, MORE OR LESS IRRELEVANT CRAZY.] I wanted a blog of my own where I didn't have to worry about appealing to anyone but myself. Now that some people [but not a lot!] are actually reading it, I get kind of freaked out, wondering if I am always being "responsible" or giving the "correct perspective" on the issue at hand. Then I figure: there is a comment section! Also, it is the blogoworld! If I am stupid, someone will correct me, or just make fun of me via the Internet, and if they are smart and funny, and not the sort of person who argues that one can get a "deserved raping," I will welcome that. 

Ultimately, I am a tiny, tiny drop in a vast ocean. I will never be the only or the most important voice in the room. What I have to say only matters to the people who choose to read it, or maybe just to me [BECAUSE I AM AN EGO MONSTER IN LOVE WITH THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE - FULL DISCLOSURE CRAZY]. And, at least as far as Tiger Beatdown goes, that's what I want. 

The Sad Ballad of Phyllis and Betty

You know, reader, when I want well-informed, thought-provoking, responsible essays on gender as it pertains to literature (or literature as it pertains to gender) there is one publication to which I turn: the New York Times Book Review. KIDDING! Ha ha ha, woo boy, sometimes I crack myself up.

I read Bitch, of course, which published an article roughly nine billion years ago about NYTBR's tendency to ignore major new feminist works or assign them to obviously hostile reviewers, and its tendency to assign more space to writers who embrace feminist backlash (because that's "edgy" now; think of it as the old-people version of Vice) than to writers who embrace actual feminism. Bitch will no doubt be pleased to note that its article, despite being nine billion years old, is still totally true! For what did NYTBR publish, in this week's edition, but an essay on the life and work of Phyllis McGinley?

They published several other things, actually, some of which might have been good. I couldn't tell! I was unable to read them, because I had been blinded by the terrible, terrible essay on Phyllis McGinley!

Who is Phyllis McGinley? Why is there an essay about her in the New York Times Book Review? Why are she, and the essay, and the essay's author, all so crazy? I will let the essay's crazy author, noted television critic Ginia Bellafante, explain it in her own creepily approving words:

[McGinley lived] contentedly for a number of years as a wife, mother and well-known poet in Larchmont, N.Y., writing reverentially of lush lawns and country-club Sundays in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere... McGinley’s light verse sought to convey the ecstatic peace of suburban ritual, the delight in greeting a husband, in appointing a room, in going to the butcher. Anticipation pervades her work, the feeling of something quietly joyful about to happen — beloved friends coming for dessert, perhaps.

Have you barfed yet? Get it out of the way now, because this essay ("Suburban Rapture!" Is its title!) is dead set on sickening you, being as it is about how mind-blowingly great it was to be a suburban housewife in the 1950s. History students among you may recall the 1950s, along with most of the 20th century, as a time when women had precious few viable options other than becoming housewives, and even the ones that did work (or had to work, due to social marginalization and corresponding poverty - I'm not discounting that) were relegated to menial, low-paying positions with little to no hope of advancement, due to pervasive, unchecked, institutionalized sexism and racism, which were of course inextricably bound to each other and also to class! Ginia Bellafante, apparently not into this whole "history and also actual well-documented fact" thing, seems to recall the 1950s differently: as a blissful Eden, from which women were expelled when they ate from the Tree of Wanting an Actual Freaking Choice. To demonstrate how very lovely it all was (we grow good people in our small towns!) and how the elitist lib'rul media (referred to here as the "contemptuous... literary and intellectual class") just doesn't get it, she has chosen to utilize the marginal and deservedly forgotten McGinley.

The facts of McGinley's career are as such: the lady churned out a lot of crap. It was extremely commercial crap, mind you - so very commercial, in fact, that some of it was used in actual commercials, as in her many catchy jingles. She was your basic ladyhack (not to be confused with your basic Ladyhawke) and, as a ladyhack myself, I cannot judge her for cranking out women's magazine articles, children's books, and light verse that was... well, about what you would expect from a writer of commercial jingles. I can, however, judge the Pulitzer committee for awarding her a prize in 1961, a gesture which I can only interpret as proof that the nascent second wave was making a great deal of gentlemen very uncomfortable, and that they felt the need to placate the bevaginad masses by rewarding a token female who knew her place and stuck to it - er, I mean, "exhibited a uniquely feminine sensibility." For here is a sampling of the timeless, Pulitzer-worthy verse of Phyllis McGinley:

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe,
She can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby,
She can use her intuition instead of her brain

... She can write sexist poems that drive you insane!

Ginia Bellafante insists (and insists, and insists) Phyllis McGinley loved being a suburban housewife, and so did lots of people, so it's just plain silly that people keep insisting that women who became housewives when it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women did so because it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women. Ginia Bellafante just doesn't understand why Betty Friedan "dismissed" McGinley as "one of the housewife writers." I mean, as Ginia Bellafante points out in her own piece, her entire career and aesthetic was about being a housewife, so you can see why that was a completely unmerited attack!

This piece is really miraculous, in that any given line has the capacity to inspire epileptic rage fits, as in, "Having married happily at 33, she loved domesticity the way a woman can only when it has come late to find her," which manages to imply within a mere 22 words that (a) "domesticity," meaning marriage and babies, is the only thing that can make a woman complete and happy, (b) women who don't have it are failures, and women who get it should be simperingly grateful, (c) THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE is late to find it, or, I'm sorry, to be found by it, since we obviously don't have any choice in the matter and can only hope to be chosen by that one very special boy, who can evaluate and reject women as if we were avocados he were squeezing for ripeness in the fucking supermarket, for he is Man, Master of All Things. Jesus, and they wonder why we drink. However, I would rather skip right over most of the piece, and deliver to you its creamy, poisonous center, which goes like this:

“A liberal arts education is not a tool like a hoe . . . or an electric mixer,” McGinley wrote, dismayed at a world she thought was conspiring to make women feel as though any acquired erudition would be wasted in a life of riffling through recipe cards. “It is a true and precious stone which can glow as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler’s window or bartered for bread and butter.” She went on to dismiss the already benighted suggestion that Bryn Mawr was a threat to what ought to get done in a kitchen. “Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German,” she wrote, “will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.”

McGinley’s point, an eternally divisive one, was clear: a woman who enjoyed herself as a wife and mother should not submit to imposed ambitions.

Fair enough! If you have absolutely no goals in life other than to get married and have babies, no-one should force you to discover a cure for cancer, or to make any use whatsoever of your education. However, if you do have other goals, a life spent doing nothing but making chocolate brownies would be pretty goddamn tragic. That, one suspects - and hears, from women who survived the era - was the more common scenario. And, hey, good news for ladies whose brains are capable of comprehending something other than the fine points of selecting lawn furniture: it turns out that having ambition does not automatically make you barren or unlovable! You can, in fact, have a career, a marriage, and a baby, or a career and marriage with no baby, or a baby and career with no marriage, or whatever else your heart desires. It's just strange that the women who tell us otherwise, the women who insist and insist and insist that being a wife and mother to the exclusion of all other things is an honorable and beautiful route that is not in any way limiting or likely to drive you out of your mind - women like Phyllis Schlafly, Phyllis McGinley, Caitlyn Flanagan, and the woman who seems to just love them all, or at least to be unable to frame an incisive and well-merited critique of their message, TV critic Ginia Bellafante - are only able to reach us with this message because they have, well, jobs.

--- AND NOW, THE SECRET PRIZE ---

I know, right? This post was freaking huge! I've decided that whenever I write a bonkers nutso long-winded thing like this, I should reward people who make it all the way through, as with the Cracker Jack prizes which are maybe the only reason on Earth to eat Cracker Jack, which is sticky and gross. Therefore, I present to you: women's education in the McGinley Age. Strangely, none of them seems to be studying Heine!

Places That Are Better Than My Apartment: An Ongoing Series

You know, it's not often that I feel nostalgic for the days before suffrage. Today, however, it occurs to me that, were I living in that day and age, I could at least have an apartment in Manhattan - namely, the Trowmart Inn.

According to Ephemeral New York (and this article, thanks for linking, guy) it was a "handsome hostelry" for ladies "of the class who [labor] for a small wage, and whose parents have no home within the city." Why, that's me! What sort of accomodations were provided for such ladies, pray tell?

For $4 a week, a girl could have a single room containing a bed, washstand, and table, plus breakfast and dinner.

You also got a library, a "good-sized laundry with porcelain tubs," access to a "medical woman" who worked on the first floor, and, as the Times points out, plumbing which was thoroughly "modern and scientific." In addition to this, there was no curfew, so you could gallivant around at all hours in a manner most unbecoming.

Furthermore, the building's owner, William Martin, was a man with a mission: to improve your love life through superior real estate.

"Girls who work long hours in factory, shop, and store, and whose leisure is spent within the dull confines of a cheap lodging or boarding house, have few opportunities for making and pursuing the acquaintance of desirable young men."

Yeah, tell me about it.

"Girls of gentleness and refinement do not care to be courted upon the open highway, nor in public parks, and thus the world is filling with spinsters, who, according to Mr. Martin, had they a proper place in which to entertain their admirers, would develop into happy, excellent wives."

Well, maybe. At the very least, they could develop into people who could say "come over to my place" without feeling the blush of housing-related shame.

There were apparently lots of lodging houses for working girls scattered throughout the city, but, as one letter to the Times points out, they had a significant problem: women who earned "too much" couldn't get rooms there, even if they couldn't really afford anything else.

"It has long been evident to those interested in the subject that girls earning from $7 to $9 per week were worse off than those who earn $5 or $6... Any one who has tried to find board from $4 to $5 knows from sad experience that the person who obtains it is to be congratulated. One may succeed if one goes far uptown or into the suburbs, but there carfare will bring it up to a higher figure."

Old-timey ladies: they're just like us! If by "us," you mostly mean "me!" And that is usually what I mean! Also, are you interested in hearing about economic and social disincentives for working women? Because this girl has some for you:

"It must be remembered that the more a girl earns the more she will have to spend on clothes. The clothes worn by the writer when she was earning $4.50 a week would not be suitable to wear in a first-class office, nor can she bring a luncheon and eat it in the office, as she did then. Her present salary is much larger than the former, yet she does not save much more in proportion, and she is not at all extravagant. This state of affairs often tends to crush ambition and make a girl regret an increase in her salary, since she must leave her comfortable quarters and probably in sheer desperation resort to doing her own cooking in a small furnished room. Dozens of girls ruin their health in this way, and almost starve in the effort to make 'both ends meet.'"

How much do I love this woman? Smart, ambitious, contrary, not above telling a Times writer what is what - I kind of want to build a time machine just so that I can hang out with her. Of course, she doesn't sign her name; she's just "A GIRL WHO WORKS."

Lady Business Book Reports: Prolegomena

Once upon a time, in a magical land called Brooklyn, I got very drunk and ended up having a passionate discussion about Christopher Pike with someone I had just met. There were two dudes at the table, and one other lady. I don't know what we had been discussing before - politics? - but I do know that, up until that point, everyone had been involved. The second Christopher Pike came up, however, it was just me and the other girl, frantically trying to figure out who killed whom in Gimme a Kiss (so, this girl faked her death, because someone else read her top-secret sex diary, although she'd fictionalized the hot stuff because in reality her boyfriend was kind of a choad, and then he died trying to save her life, although she wasn't really dead, so WHOOPS, and then Fakey McNotDead's friend found her hiding out in a shack, and Fakey set her on fire for reasons that remain unclear, although I think the friend killed people too because Dead Choad had given her herpes and the herp had driven her mad, mad for revenge) while the dudes were like, "huh what why no let's go get some beer."

This is an extremely roundabout way of saying that I believe there are books in this world that most women have read. These books tend to overlap with the books that men don't read, or are encouraged not to read. It's not new or groundbreaking to point out that women buy books more often than men do, but books that are specifically gendered as feminine tend to receive a whole lot of scorn. (Scorn and terrible cover designs.) A man who writes a book primarily for other men (like, say, The Corrections, or All the Sad Young Literary Men, or any of the FUSWG canon) is perceived to be more serious and literary than a woman who writes primarily for other women. Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich both made this point, in their own ways: men can and do write for men with no difficulty, whereas women have to perform for both genders, or maybe just for the guys, if they're going to be taken seriously. Lots of girl-focused books (I refuse to utter the term "chick lit") are, in fact, poorly written, broadly stereotypical, and regressive - but then again, so is the work of Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby, and as far as I can tell I may never stop hearing people praise those men.

I sometimes contribute to a blog for young women. The writing staff of that site once received an e-mail reminding us that we should be fun for guys as well as girls. I spent a while puzzling over that one. Then I turned in an article about birth control and waited for the site's male commenters to show up and call me a whore again. To be fair, they had a lot of fun with it! That's another sad fact about writing while female, one which several of my friends can confirm: write about sex, or clothes, or anything traditionally feminine, and people will call you a vapid slut. Write about the issues of the day, and people will call you a stupid bitch who should stick to writing about sex and clothes. Write about dieting: you're anorexic. Write about the pressure to be thin: you're a pig. Girl stuff isn't to be taken seriously - and it is allllways open to insult and ridicule - but God help you if you should try to cover anything else. That's man talk!

Anyway, I had a little epiphany about all this while watching Mad Men - specifically, a scene in which all the secretaries are huddled around a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, giggling about the dirty bits, and Joan reflects ruefully that "men still won't read it." I have no idea whether this was accurate (I am thinking yes, based on other things I've heard and read) but it would make sense for women to be early adopters of Lady Chatterley, because, unlike other novels of infidelity, such as Anna Karenina (which was about wanting "passion," in some vague sense) or Madam Bovary (which was about some woman who'd been corrupted by reading too many sentimental novels), Lady Chatterley was very specifically about a woman learning how to get off. Admit it: at some point in your life, maybe when you were eleven or twelve years old, another girl passed you a dirty book in secret. Everybody knows basically how dude parts work - we certainly hear enough about them - but girls still have to take an active part in digging up information about their bodies. In the early sixties, a book like Lady Chatterley, despite its flaws, would no doubt have been used to aid in the investigation.

Women use stories socially - to form a basis of shared knowledge, to communicate things we're not supposed to know or discuss, to approach difficult personal topics, and to conduct all manner of lady business. Girls still probably get copies of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret at puberty, and after one breakup, I received no less than three copies of Eat Pray Love. It was the first thing that women wanted to do for me: give me a book so that I could understand what had happened. They'd read it; they wanted me to read it; it was the book one read in such a situation. Oprah knows about this stuff. That is why she is rich.

Maybe it is the same for guys! Maybe they are all passing around worn Norman Mailer paperbacks with instructions to read certain passages, or providing each other with giddy recaps of their favorite Hardy Boys novels. I've heard (oh, okay, I've read) that sports, and talk radio about sports, provides sort of the same function: it's a space that is overwhelmingly male, and when dudes get together to talk about it, they're also, in some back-handed way, discussing masculinity. Is it better to stay with your team or your team's city, demonstrating loyalty, or to carve out the best possible deal for yourself, showing independence and assertiveness? Is it better to be a star player, or to negotiate your role on a team so that the team is winning more even if you're spending less time with the ball? Things like that, I take it, are what guys discuss in a sports context. Then again, I am not a dude, so I have no idea!

I am a lady, and I conduct lady business. So: because of all this, and because this is apparently my Winter of Projects (dear God, I love projects), I am taking it upon myself to read books of the girly variety, and to report on them. That, in case you were wondering, is why I have a copy of Little Women in my bag right now. Look - don't even start.