"What Watch"

Thanks Pillow dear, for your last post. Not only because we love to love the fox-and-hound friendship struck between Clinton and H.W., but also because we need to talk about Jezebel.com (and how they're, you know, really irritating...er...difficult). Advance apologies, the following is gonna be a doozy (with a possible sequel)—this diatribe/exploration has been coming for a long time.

Megan Carpentier, D.C. political correspondent to the Gawker owned "neo-feminist" blog, wrote about the ex-president joke curfuffle: This whole thing went down, I shit you not, at a National Automobile Dealers Association conference, where the ugliness of feminists is obviously an important topic. Those guys laughing in the background? Those are the dudes that want to sell you your next car, con you into the undercoat you don't need and generally treat you as an inferior being because you're a female who, naturally, knows nothing about big, complex machines. Oh!—the ever-so-self-conscious "dudely" tone! Oh!—the anger and bile! Oh!—the hypocrisy of defining yourselves as "neo-feminists" and spurning the veteran leaders of Women's Lib (Tracie, née Slut Machine, famously posts that Gloria Steinem and co. are "dinosaurs"—[though I must note that her television posts are the best thing on the site]), all the while behaving as knee-jerk, glib watchdogs (dinosaurish maybe?).

Now, I don't have the tiempo or energía to sift through all of their recent posts (of which there are many many), but I seem to recall a regular commentor recently saying of the site's newest contributor, "she's too pretty to be a feminist, but we'll trust her anyway." It was typed in jest, but problematic whatever the intention. We needn't tackle beauty+liberation (and further hypocrisies), because it should be obvious to anyone (including Papa Bush) that ALL WOMEN ARE INJURED BY THE PATRIARCHY AND THUS SHOULD BE AND ARE FEMINISTS (and—shit, I can't help it!—physical beauty is not a thing that causes women to somehow be "in cahoots" with men, but something that causes further painful entanglement in/by their muddled, oft cruel desires and suppositions).

Let's instead (ha!) pause to be grossed out by the tribal "we." At A&P, we say "we" a good bit. We refer to we writers, a group of dear old friends, constant conversational companions since we were in Airwalks and/or shooting room temperature peach Schnapps (you devils). At Jezebel "we" refers to a bonafide online community, a bunch of broads who are technically (or untechnically?) strangers experiencing a kind of "group mind." Sometimes I find that Jezebel addresses a mixture of things that are endearingly pertinent to we (our generation, that is), and anyone who blogs owes a thing or ten to the Gawker franchise for slickening and standardizing the medium. But the four of us, Alpha, Pillow, myself, and silent partner, Petrova, spurn "communities." We have loved each other through and often because of our rejection of "the group" and its "mind." And this discourse is drawn from the real thing, real human contact.

Props to Jezebel for taking a stab at blogging feminism. One is bound to be inconsistent when approaching such a whale-of-a-notion daily. Generally, I don't like to engender things, and I don't like any ethos that polarizes. But it is damn necessary to address women's issues, and to resuscitate that tarnished moniker, feminist. For truths—I think my beef with Jezebel is down to (god bless you, PMC) poor taste. Their name and graphics are horrible. Their sycophantic, commenting followers are downright loserly (and/or in high school).Their ideas about clothes are super(duuuuper) embarrassing. Their use of language is bland and watery. Call me a snob (it's accurate), but I can't be havin' that.