Quick Thanks for Rubbing My Eyes
February 2, 2011 4 Comments
Dear Millicent,
I wanted to write a quick thanks to Jessica Valenti, who announced today that she is leaving Feministing. Her fellow bloggers and people who actually know her have written a lot of grand things about it. I don’t know her, but have watched her build her public persona at a public distance. Over the years she has become perhaps the most open public figure about building her career and path, and it has been a strikingly honest and inclusive conversation.
In 2006, I got a press pass to attend the NAPW Summit to Ensure the Health and Humanity of Pregnant and Birthing Women. I had just become a doula, and was happy to find a conference that was in driving distance. I wrote for a tiny local paper, and was happy to get accepted as press because it meant I could get in for free. Otherwise, I never would have been able to afford it. I had only written two freelance articles by this point, and had never actually been considered as press by anybody. The invitations to press breakfasts were entirely overwhelming. I also had to wake up at four every day to get to the conference on time. I add this detail so you can have a picture of me, wrinkled, sleepy, poorly put together, with a notebook and pen and no idea what I was getting into.
As I walked up to the registration table on the first day, there was a glamorous woman with long brown hair, outstanding outfit, and smart laptop case checking in before me. It was Jessica Valenti. I didn’t know who she was, but I tagged her as fancy press. Fancy enough to have a computer that didn’t take 45 minutes to warm up. Fancy enough to need internet access at all times. Somebody who knew what they were doing. I mumbled my own credentials after her and followed her in the ballroom where the conference had already started. We both sat at a table in the back, where she seemed to know everybody. Months later, I would realize I was sitting next to Samhita Mukhopadyay, and that when she asked me what I wrote about it and who for, there was a better answer than “I’m just covering this for a small local weekly,” and then grimacing my way out of further conversation.
But I was a blind baby bird, unaware, and underprepared. I didn’t know that it was Amanda Marcotte that Valenti was talking to. I had never heard of Feministing, or Pandagon, or Our Bodies Ourselves, The Guttmacher Institute, Sistersong, Exhale, Dorothy Roberts, Carol Joffe, or anybody or organization that was working on women’s rights. I didn’t get on fire about feminism until that conference, where within the first 30 minutes I realized everybody in the room knew oceans more about women’s rights than I did, and I admired them all wildly for it. I spent the entire four days underwater, hiding in the back and trying to absorb as much as possible. And I was alone at the conference, which is fine if you actually have something to say to other people, but I was so out of my league that I spent most breaks looking at brochures, and most meals trying to figure out how to have confidence and unabashed ignorance at the same time. I think it mostly came off as an unenticing nonchalance.
In short, I was a miserable failure. This was also when I had a very crappy day job, a very crappy wardrobe, and a grand sense of not having my shit together. The conference was completely invigorating, overwhelming, and exhausting. It cleaned me out, broke me down, gave me that whack on the head that there were other paths than the one I was on, and people were walking those paths very well.
I went home, looked up all the people I didn’t know. I found Feministing. It’s the first blog that showed me what a blog really was, and what the potential of blogging was. It also explained feminism in a manageable way to me, proving that feminism was just as much about offensive shirts at Walmart as it was about major policy reform. I got my toes wet, in the safety of my own home. I watched Valenti go on Colbert, publish books, build a career that is much bigger than I assumed possible. She’s two years older than me, and I want to thank her for building something big, and proving that such things can be built. But what I really want to thank her for is for intimidating me. I felt like an asshat for not taking more advantage of who I met at the conference, but I also felt so new, and new in the bad way, like where you don’t even know how your muscles work let alone use them well. Five years ago, watching her walk into that conference with her laptop scared the shit out of me. But it also woke me up.
So best wishes to Valenti as she moves on to her next projects, and keeps building.
Yours,
CF
Millicent and Carla Fran
The Art of The Comment
May 23, 2009 by Carla Fran 3 Comments
Dear Millicent,
I have been thinking of your profile of Jezebel and its evolutions, and agree with the tensions you noted between taking things to task and supporting everybody. It is a problem when every viewpoint is humanized (though, isn’t that an accomplishment of empathy, or just a distracting use of pathos?), and echoed in pop critiques of women’s studies (whininess, black holes of offense and correction, righteousness that insists on the merits of heart and humanity but which cannot offer the same to the uninitiated).
I hear those critiques most often from people who have never gotten near women’s studies (full disclosure: I have never gotten near women’s studies). But the field, like feminism, is more vital than its critics give credit for: it’s not the grumpy wall flower as much as the exuberant and just misfit (for imagery here, I am thinking either of Ricki and Delia in My So Called Life at the World Happiness dance, or of Babs in The Way We Were, soused and dancing all night even though she was supposed to be working the refreshment table).
I also like your description of the commenting culture on Jez, and Gawker. I have to admit that I rarely read the comments, and often wonder why commenting is such an inherent part of blogging. The idea is sound–a large extended conversation, full of challenges and calls and answers–and I am giddy to read any comments we have here on this site. However, in general (and again, please do comment here, I am just a grump), comments seem to be a barage of self applause: commenters either offering inane agreeance, witty snarks, or complaints about their workplace. It seems that Facebook and Twitter have capitolized on this need for constant narration, and I want all comments to really just set up shop over there. There are times when I have read comments that have taken the conversation in other directions, or that have called shenanigans when appropriate, but I rarely consider commenters part of site. When reading Jezebel, I read their content alone, and consider the commenters in their own club, with queen bees who can type up a quick response and be instantly applauded. But then again, maybe I am just jealous because I am not one of them, and we all like applause.
Feministing has a community site as part of their blog, where commenters can post full blog entries. I like this model more than general comments, and often the editors post one of the community posts to the mainpage. One of the last comment sections I read diverged into a long scolding of a commenter for using the word “lame” to describe something they didn’t like. In the following 20 comments, there was an agressive defense and shuddering of the use of the word. It seemed both irritatingly petty (the old trials of PC language), and wildy effective. Though it annoyed me that one couldn’t relax about anything, even a slang adjective, while reading a blog, it was also the right fight. At its base, the word is inappropriate, and disrespectful. This reminded me of your discussion of the small choices where it is tempting to inclusively let all answers stand as correct (taking a husband’s last name, etc.), and the assertion that the choice (the answer, not just the right to choose) actually matters very much.
And, in a sweep back to the other side, my training as a doula totally disagrees, which makes things interesting. Doulas are supposed to support a woman’s choices in labor, and bring in no personal opinion besides offering information. The idea is that doulas are not there to make their version of an ideal birth, but to assist the mother in experiencing her ideal birth. I consider my work as a doula the most directly feminist thing I do. I help women have more power, voice and control at a vulnerable moment, and I get to see direct outcomes. This would suggest the original version– –that we are all snowflakes, and power comes from not denying anybody their snowflakehood. But, when it comes down to brass tacks, I only like this model when all the snowflakes are snowing for their own good as defined by, well, let’s be honest here, me.
So maybe the great work is not in defending the right to all viewpoints, but digging to the harder, more uncomfortable area of conversation that addresses responsibility? A hard task for Jezebel, because responsibility is never an effervescent topic. It makes me think of those horrid serious talks that parents only have with their kids while driving. And maybe that is where commenters come in. How much more palatable would a lecture on unloading the dishwasher have been if there was a chorus of wits making fun of the DJ on the radio, the claustrophobia of the seatbelt,while making sure that I did indeed absorb that the dishwasher needed to be unloaded by me, or else no ride to the mall.
Yours,
CF
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