Wow, I'm reading the "best of the trolls of the Girls Read Comics troll parade" and it's so hard to choose. Plus I keep finding distractingly great tshirt slogans... I was thinking that "Don't bother to listen - everything I say is a feminist temper tantrum" might be nice.
They start out with denial - of course there's no problem - you're too sensitive - and then proceed quickly to aggression, exemplified by Hotsuma:
"No, I do not care, regardless of how much truth it holds, most of the girls on this board have made it to where I would just not care if every women in marvel got shot, while naked, while being raped."
Wow, just wow. Why stop there, Hotsuma?
Or maybe /b/ saying "So stop your bitching and just be glad we don't take away your right to vote."
Oh! Okay, when you put it that way it all makes perfect sense. I'll stop bitching about sexism now. Thanks for the warning, troll dude!
Karen had to turn off comments because the trolls were turning into vandals, putting a million digits of pi in the comments and stuff like that.
Can I confess something - I'm having a bit of a middle-aged moment as I feel intensely comforted, or gratified, or something, to see so many younger women being articulate in public about their feminist rage. We did it with zines with the riot grrrl movement, and many people did it before - over and over - but I think the net is finally going to change things, and fast, so that the wheel won't have to be re-invented. 14 year olds will be reading Karen and women like her and they'll be so much more educated and in touch. They won't be *alone*. That has got to make things seriously different. My generation won't be saying (as I keep hearing from feminist 20-30 years older than me) "Feminism has failed because young women aren't in the movement anymore." It's not true, they're not standing alone either, and we can prove it to them.
I continue thinking about conversations I've had about the 70s CR movement and how it was the process that educated people. Everyone speaks, non-hierarchical, everyone listens, figure out what's going on. But once a core of people had figured stuff out they declared they were the experts and new people just beginning to think and talk about feminism needed top-down educating. That's the key of a lot of stuff gone wrong in ways that are internal to various movements, I think. We're seeing blogging communities spring up, go for a while, create a thing happening, and then change to something else. I've heard bloggers declare that blogging is dead or that it's inherently destructive, because they've personally moved on in their thinking, or because something went wrong in their own community. New stuff keeps springing up. What me might need - historians of the feminist net and of its conversations. I wonder how well the wayback machine is capturing my own particular corners of the blogosphere? What can I do to help make sure that's happening? What can older feminists do to help younger ones? What would have helped and encouraged me when I was 22 and writing angry manifestos?
I'm thinking that I haven't seen a feminist blog award, and I've mentioned this before. Rather than make a centralized award structure, what about making a voting and tip system? What about making a Feminist Whuffie economy? So that anyone in it can tip someone with a hat tip (which would function like a vote or a cool on something like slashdot or everything2, but which would be decentralized? ie. put some code on your blog and be in the ring of feminists. Of course the membership gateway issue would be rough but not rougher than not having such a network. And thenn in theory one would also have actual tip jars, because blogs, people, or posts with lots of whuffie could be brought to the attention of people who might have actual money to tip with. So rather than fundraising and yearly award-giving, it would be like distributed tip-giving, like a genius grant. there should not be a best feminist blog post of the year -- there are way, way, way too many great ones. It's more like "feminist blogosphere buzz tracker of the week" or maybe something like a 3-day cycle of buildup. Like a couple of weeks ago it was Twisty Faster and her post about bjs. I want to know, and want it to be part of history -- HISTORY -- what the feminist blogosphere was buzzing about every week. I hope the Carnival of Feminism will function this way.
Because part of what makes young feminists drop off the radar is that no one is giving them money, jobs, tangible help. We can make them part of history and give them attention but I want there to be more to counter the pressures that drive women relentlessly into poverty and grind down their fierce resolve.
I am doing what I can to help my daughter think long and hard about what it means to be a girl, when it should matter, and when it sure as hell should fucking not matter. But she is being raised by all of us, in our cozy little Feminist nest. Perhaps when she starts her own blog she'll be one of those who reaches out to her peers to spread the world.
Posted by: squid | July 04, 2006 at 10:19 PM