In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Feminist vs. Feminist

Jill

bigcity01600.jpg
Jessica in the New York Times

Congrats to Jessica and Feministing for their prominent mention (and photo!) in the New York Times. Jessica has some great quotes. It’s unfortunate, though, that the article has to be about pitting second-wave feminists against younger feminists, and that it relies on some tired stereotypes (young feminists are flirty! And fun! And totally hot! And old feminists are scowling and boring).

Good on Jessica and New York State NOW President Marcia Pappas for staying above the fray and refusing to attack each other to fit into the journalist’s agenda.

34 thoughts on Feminist vs. Feminist

  1. Well, Feministing threw the first punch, dissing and insulting Pappas on its blog. Feministing, and you, have little standing to complain about the NY Times reporting on a fight you started. Nor do you have any standing to complain about being characterized as “flirty and fun” when Feministing and Feministe have led the charge to be the “new” flirty, fun feminists, mistaking that for “accessibility” and political power.

  4. Nor do you have any standing to complain about being characterized as “flirty and fun” when Feministing and Feministe have led the charge to be the “new” flirty, fun feminists, mistaking that for “accessibility” and political power.

    Wow, I had no idea that Feministe was all about being flirty and fun. A here I thought we actually covered important issues — I must be hallucinating our entire front page.

  5. Feministing threw the first punch, dissing and insulting Pappas on its blog.

    Feministing attacked Pappas’s ill-conceived, embarrassing, ridiculous press release in which she claimed that “women everywhere” felt that Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama was “the ultimate betrayal.” I didn’t realize that Pappas was supposed to be above criticism to other feminists.

  6. Emma, way to play into the “let’s turn women against each other” trick. Many third wavers do it differently than the second wavers, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

    Though I don’t agree with Pappas’ methods (or even her message), I understand where she’s coming from and I bet there are women out there who agree with her. That doesn’t make her wrong.

  8. Flirty and fun?

    I admit, I don’t read Feministing for various reasons, but I do read here, and I don’t recall an overabundance of flirty and fun as opposed to legitimate, real issues that need to be (and are, here) addressed.

  10. Emma’s response to this and the feministing post is quite reminiscent of how various progressive groups at my undergrad campus which were ostensibly working for same/similar causes express disagreement….with the intensity I would think would be better reserved for one’s most vehement opponents.

  12. I hope Ann Althouse doesn’t see this picture. It features breasts under a grey sirt and Jessica Valenti.

  13. Sorry about the spelling error. For some reason, the right column (search and archives) is covering up the right third of the composition window (IE v. 6) on this page. So I can’t see what I’ve typed.

  14. I don’t like to get in the middle, but from my perspective Feministing has a tendency not to take trolls seriously or for that matter comments that slightly differ from the proposed opinion. At least I can post here. I haven’t been able to post at Feministing since the fiasco of the Duke rape trial. But that’s another issue.

    I can certainly see the differences between the two sites and I prefer here to Feministing I even to the extent that I took their link of my links page, so there had to be a reason for that. You think your feminists but it’s just misogyny in disguise wake up and smell the coffee.

    Attacking other feminists is not feminism it’s trashy and shows just where your loyalties lie. That’s why I don’t read Feministing anymore. Sometimes they might have a good article posted, but I don’t venture to the comments anymore. And I only visit their site if someone here directs us there to understand the post here.

  15. Wow, I had no idea that Feministe was all about being flirty and fun.

    I’ve been standing here shaking my bodacious ta-tas for two friggin’ years, and you haven’t noticed, Jill?

    I really don’t like they way they keep calling each of them “Ms.” in the article.

    That’s just NYT style. They call everyone by a title. Better than “Miss,” surely.

  16. That is so insulting, Emma.
    In what way does Feministe characterize itself as flirty and fun? Scroll down the home page; the bloggers here tackle serious issues in the U.S. and around the world. It also covers lighter issues, but so what? In no way do the bloggers here focus on their own “flirtiness” – that is absurd. In fact, it criticizes the faux feminism of “empowerfulness.”
    I was also insulted that the writer of the article chose the “Hot Menses Mess” post to demonstrate how Feministing’s goofiness. As though that sort of topic were the norm rather than the exception. Might as well claim that Jessica’s feminism consists of talking about her dog.

  17. Is there something wrong with being flirty and fun? Last I checked, feminists were people, and people have a whole range of emotions and expression. Being flirty and fun in one area does not rule out seriousness of purpose in another.

    But, really, Emma, way to reduce feminism and feminists into one-dimensional automatons.

  18. I think Emma sort of has a point (not about the “flirty and fun” stuff). The catfight narrative is never completely going to disappear, but it helps to show solidarity. And sometimes showing solidarity might mean saying “There’s a misguided press release from a feminist group that needs criticizing? Hmm, I bet the mainstream media can handle that all by themselves.”

  19. feminists were people, and people have a whole range of emotions and expression.

    Oh, no, no, no, nope. That’s where you went wrong. Feminists aren’t people, we’re carefully constructed archetypes designed to scare small children.

    😉

  20. zuzu: apparently flirty and fun are crimes punishable by hanging…though I have to say, a lot of the topics y’all highlight here are neither fun nor flirty. Imagine that?

  21. And sometimes showing solidarity might mean saying “There’s a misguided press release from a feminist group that needs criticizing? Hmm, I bet the mainstream media can handle that all by themselves.”

    And the way the mainstream press handles it? Look, women are voting with their vaginas! They’re so irrational! “White women are a problem.”

    If we’ve learned nothing else over the last 10 years, we’ve learned that the mainstream media can’t be relied on. They brought us George W. Bush as president and the Iraq War as the best idea ever, and we’re supposed to trust them to communicate about feminism in a fair and responsible way?

  22. That was sarcastic; I’m not suggesting we trust the mainstream media. I’m suggesting that sometimes it’s better not to give them any more ammunition.

  23. Let’s see, responding to a press release that seemed to imply that ALL feminists should be pissed off at Ted Kennedy, by pointing out that not all feminists are consistent on their single-block voting? How is that not a reasoned argument? Cat-fights are almost always engineered, unless openly cultivated by those of dubious intellectual honesty (think, Camille Paglia attacking Susan Sontag).

    In terms of fun and flirty, that’s just an effort to coax 3 wavers into a patriarchy-approved scold of those Dworkinite 2 wavers and at the same time call us 20-something feminists vapid. Fuck that. Don’t fall for it.

    One area left to manufacture a controversy–oh noes, Jessica’s drinking wine; she must be a 1. yuppie, 2. drunk. Watch the circus begin (“gee, I can’t believe we forgot to do the “liberals are elites” argument, oh and a date-rape drug joke would work great with that picture too”). Yeah, the response to this “issue” is really hitting all the MRA and patriarchy defenders sweet spots.

  24. This press release was so off the wall that a lot of people initially suspected it wasn’t even authentic. Did it really need a response? Well…there’s nothing wrong with responding to it. But anything with the potential of making feminists look stupid is red meat to the media. No response, or a blandly stated disagreement, might have helped defuse the “Feminists vs. Feminists” storyline.

    The response to that Gloria Steinem op-ed falls in this category too. Gloria Steinem is a great women’s rights leader. At worst, she is a great women’s rights leader who wrote a questionable op-ed. I felt that a lot of the disagreement from feminists my age (twenties) displayed too much of a rush to distance themselves from her.

  26. Yeah, but the15th, unless you distance yourself from stuff like that, the media’s going to attribute that kind of thinking to all feminists.

  27. I think by “anything with the potential of making feminists look stupid,” you actually mean “anything.” The media will use “anything” in the hopes of making feminists appear to be in-fighting, too stupid, too smart, anti-sex, pro-sex, etc.

    If Valenti hadn’t responded, then the Times could have written an article saying something along the lines of, “Oh, the new feminists are too busy having sex and drinking to even recognize what the older feminists are saying, blah blah blah.” Feminists (all women, really) will be lambasted for everything they do, and everything they don’t do; to self-censor in the hope they the MSM won’t have ammunition to criticize feminists is a pipe dream.

  28. No response, or a blandly stated disagreement, might have helped defuse the “Feminists vs. Feminists” storyline.

    Of course, not responding or a bland response would have fed into the All Feminists Are Irrational storyline so beloved of the mass media, but I guess that’s less important that showing a united front all all times.

    The funny part, of course, is that Valenti and Pappas deliberately refused to attack each other or each other’s group and presented it as a rational disagreement between two similar groups, so the NY Times wasn’t actually able to present it as a catfight, much as they wanted to.

  29. Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I do realize that nothing’s going to stop feminists from being characterized as shrill man-hating harpies or vapid slutty party girls. It’s a good day in media-land if we’re not both of these things simultaneously.

  30. You know, I’m not in this feminist thing to make the media like us. I’m in it to make change happen. Newsflash: no matter what we do or say, the media will portray us as fools, at best. Personally, I would much prefer to see us presented as fighting each other than as not existing (they still say we’re in the post-feminist era).

    And the NOW-NY response was ridiculous, and I am one who checked it out to make sure it was for real before I threw up. I refuse to let that kind of thinking be passed off, unchallenged, as feminism. Further, when we let shit like that stand, we may as well officially form a separate movement in which only white women will be recognized as women, because that’s essentially what that piece was doing.

  31. The catfight narrative is never completely going to disappear, but it helps to show solidarity. And sometimes showing solidarity might mean saying “There’s a misguided press release from a feminist group that needs criticizing?

    Self-censorship to maintain solidarity in a progressive movement is not only counter-productive in this social landscape as several other commenters noted, but also something that reeks of enforced conformism practiced in Fascist/Communist countries of the not too distant past. This was the very language used by the avowed bourgeois Marxists/Maoists on my undergrad campus to minimize differences and squelch dissent both within their movement and with those who disagreed with their ideology.

  32. Everyone practices self-censorship all the time, if that’s what you want to call it. The same idea can be expressed in an infinite number of different ways. If Marcia Pappas had exercised a little self-censorship by writing a soberly worded statement about why she thinks Clinton is a better choice than Obama for Kennedy to have endorsed, this whole dust-up may never have happened. Most of us will disagree with a friend in different terms than we would with an enemy in order to avoid alienating the friend, although the actual substance of how we disagree may be the same, and I would argue that this is not quite the same thing as living under a fascist dictatorship. I think of second-wave feminists as friends.

  33. It’s been drawn to my attention elsewhere that I’m letting my snark level get out of control even when I’m dealing with people on the same side, so, the 15th, I apologize for comment #28. You’re right, we don’t need to be going balls-out against people who are on the same side as we are.

    That’s one of the reasons I was glad to see the NYT article — it seemed to me that both women did a really good job of defusing the situation and not letting the media spin it into yet another catfight story.

  34. RenegadeEvolution said

    oh gee, jessica again? I’m shocked.

    And what exactly is that supposed to mean?

    Loosely Twisted said

    I can certainly see the differences between the two sites and I prefer here to Feministing I even to the extent that I took their link of my links page, so there had to be a reason for that. You think your feminists but it’s just misogyny in disguise wake up and smell the coffee.

    Excuse me?

Comments are currently closed.