After fifteen years of existence, the feminist blog Feministing, shut down last year for good. In its heyday, it had advanced many notable causes, advocated strongly for reproductive rights, established effective boycotts on offending companies, served as a space for third-wave feminists to share ideas, and had educated many young women (and some men) as to the particulars of the many philosophies that go into establishing such a broad concept as feminism. At the time, I was out of the closet as bisexual, which had initially sparked my interest, as I was curious to explore the parts of myself that I knew could never be confused as “male”, but I was still years away from identifying as non-binary. I didn’t even know such a term as “genderqueer” or “bigender” existed.
Wanting to learn as much about this new identity I had taken on for myself, I wrote, for around eight years consecutively, to the Community section of the Feministing blog. The editors periodically put their content on the front page, much as goes for Kos today, and an editor would from time to time elevate a Community post to the front page (which happens here, albeit less than before).
Essentially, it provided mostly Millennial feminists a platform to express their ideas. All of this is well and good, as is the mythologized version of the blog, but I hung around long enough to learn where the bodies were buried. Among the editors, there was an enormously competitive, dog-eat-dog desire to further their own ambitions. They wanted book deals, impressive-sounding freelance writing assignments, TED talks, speaking engagements, and, to be blunt, they wanted more than anything to boost their own profiles, and be damned if anyone got in their way.
I’ve used this quote before in past posts, and I will use it one final time to augment my argument. I don’t want to come across as a person merely with a chip on their shoulder, especially regarding high achieving women. Unlike some men, successful women do not intimidate me. I am sympathetic to the plight of women, especially how far it has taken them to reach the heights they have sought to achieve for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Still:
All/nothing patterns are insidious and, if we are not careful, we tend to reproduce the same discourses that oppressed us, creating and recreating boundaries around gender identities and experiences to make sure we know who is “in” and who is “out,” who is “with us” and who is “against us.” As long as there is policing of gender...there cannot be truly be liberation.- Alex Iantaffi.
This I experienced to a large degree, and stood in great contrast to the stated aims of the site, which was ostensibly to educate young, usually college educated women who were enrolled in women’s studies programs. I will tell one anecdote that I think will be very revealing as to the mindset of the editors. At the time, I lived in Washington, DC. An after-work party was pitched at a local watering hole called The Science Club, which for those who are familiar with the city, is in the Dupont Circle area.
Two editors of Feministing were present. Neither of them spent any time at all interacting with the phalanx of young women who formed their readership. They instead took an elitist, snobby attitude and talked to their own friends alone, thankyouverymuch. I tried to engage one of them (I’m not going to name names because I don’t want to get sued or come across as petty) with conversation and she couldn’t wait to disengage herself from me. Chilly and unsmiling, she tolerated my conversation for five minutes at most, grabbed me awkwardly by the waist, pulled me with great purpose to the side, and then moved in the direction of whomever she felt was worthy of her attention.
The act hurt my feelings and left me very upset. And in a second, I remembered two crucial passages in the New Testament, both from the Gospel of Mark.
“The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the law of Moses. So practice and obey whatever they tell you, but don’t follow their example. For they don’t practice what they teach.”-Matthew 23:2-3.
The club was packed with the young women I mentioned earlier—women’s studies students from local colleges and universities. I was the only man (as that was how I identified in those days) present, but I’ve been in many spaces before where that has been the case. It doesn’t really bother me. Amazingly, in my eight years of writing (I wrote under the pseudonym “Comrade Kevin”) at the time, I found that I had achieved a fan club. One editor implied that I ought to be thankful for the attention, and though I was, I thought that she and the other editor in attendance should have been just as involved as I was in spreading myself thinly through the crowd.
A brief aside: my “Comrade Kevin” moniker dates back to 2004. I attended a state school in the South, where most of the student body was conservative. A friend of mine who was the only other Democrat in the classroom gave me the nickname “Comrade Kevin” as a joke, because we were the only two talkative, flaming liberals enrolled. I used the same nickname when it came time to write my own blog, which I’ve abandoned over time, but that’s another story for another time.
Returning to the after-work meet and greet at The Science Club: one young women asked me if I was an editor or would become an editor at some point. I really didn’t have the heart to tell her that as a white male, even queer, even gender non-binary, my status as a privileged person would keep me from achieving that position. In reality, though, I was sort of an de facto editor, because I often wrote one highly substantial column every day. They put them up, dutifully, day by day. Though I got no credit whatsoever from the editing staff, I was as much taken for granted by the editors as the women’s studies students. I helped grow the membership and readership of Feministing considerably, and they took all the credit.
I didn’t have the pedigree that the editing staff had. I hadn’t attended any of the seven sisters, obviously, because I was born into a male body. I didn’t have an elite pedigree. I was on track, as a high achiever and with high scholastic achievements in high school, to attend an Ivy League school, but got seriously ill my senior year and had to be hospitalized for a month and a half. By the time I returned to school, my GPA had plummeted, my health was still very frail, I needed to be close to my doctors, and it made more sense for me to stay close to home for undergrad. I received a disability scholarship, which paid my full tuition for any public college or university within the state of Alabama where I might choose to enroll, though notably it didn’t cover textbooks.
The success I saw within the Feministing editors, sometimes due to their own hard work, often due to nepotism, made me often feel resentful. I fully admit that I would have loved the ability to form the connections they made to get their pet projects off the ground, due to their very own privilege, when I was a self-made person who was just as capable and intelligent as they were. On certain issues, I was not only their intellectual equal, I was their intellectual superior, but they almost never granted me that right or distinction. No overtures of friendship were ever offered. I suppose to them I was this strange man who for some reason wanted access into the club. And it took me a long time to be taken seriously. Following that, it took me an equally long time for my views to be accepted, rather than summarily rejected.
Another crucial variable must be factored in, too. I suffer with bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety, two conditions that have at times made my behavior grow strange and nonsensical in the eyes of some. In the middle of an episode, my direct communication via e-mail with editors showed their great discomfort, lack of understanding of mental illness, and unwillingness to extend basic courtesy to me when I was in an acute phase. Instead, I received discriminatory attitudes, stigma, curt dismissiveness, perhaps even fear of the unknown. If it had been me in their situation, I would have been much kinder and sought to understand. But as I have outlined here, kind was not their default setting. Achievement and ambition was.
Instead, I got attitudes like the video clip that follows below. Remember the film Mean Girls?
The behavior of certain editors was cut-throat. Their desire to climb the ladder as high as they could manage led me to understand the true purpose of the site, which was mostly a platform for their own ego and accomplishment. I doubt many of them responded personally to the young women they were supposed to be schooling, unless they could provide something of personal gain to them.
Part of this is the nature of the industry. Freelance writers make squat for pay, even with impressive bylines and publications, and are lucky for whatever assignments they get. Book deals are hard to come by these days. They most often require an agent and enough literary and academic cache to get them into print, and even publication is no guarantee of success. Many worthwhile feminist texts of any wave are consigned to specialty sections of bookstores or very niche identity and interest groups. Being a big deal in the feminist world is a very tiny one indeed.
And in the end, I may have the last laugh. Theirs is, as I said, a very tiny kingdom. The two most successful third-wave feminist writers and activists are Jessica Valenti and Jill Filipovic, both of which were extremely kind to me in my personal interactions with them. Valenti founded Feministing with her sister, Vanessa. Filipovic ran a feminist blog called Feministe, which is currently on life support. I see both of them periodically featured on significant publications. Valenti has written several books and will likely write more.
It is highly unlikely that any of these writer/activists are going to scale the heights and reach great fame, but in their own minds they will. My priorities are very different. I am more interested in advancing Quakerism and leading people back to God. If that lands me a book deal (I’ve already had several short stories published) than well and good, but I see my ambitions for a much greater purpose than strictly myself.