feminist blogs

As some of you know, I recently deleted my entire blog. I had several reasons (of which this episode was less an immediate trigger than it was the icing on the hyper-rhetorical cake), but the bottom line was that my life had been overtaken by (overt) political blogging, such that most other subjects and activities had become subordinate.

There was also a growing disgust with the state of political discourse within the feminist blogosphere. Many of the feminist blogs to which I had once looked for nuanced explorations of crucial issues of politics and culture were now doing little besides spewing constant streams of grossly distorting invective against Barack Obama (or what they would oh-so-innocently refer to as “vetting the candidate”).

When I took a deeply felt, authentically diplomatic approach, my would-be sisters advocating for Hillary Clinton generally ignored me (with precious few exceptions - you know who you are). And when I took more of a fighting approach, I began to deplore the sound of my own voice.

Finally, I did a post specifically on the dangers of the Obama/Clinton divide among progressives (using a one-shot opportunity to guest blog at Huffington Post), and while responses were generally favorable (I was thanked, for instance, for “inserting a little sanity into the divisive discourse”), it was also clear that my words could not begin to counteract what was, after all, a tsunami-sized wave of grossly cynical, and sometimes openly hateful discourse.

So, does my about-face with regard to overt political blogging mean I no longer care - passionately - about these issues? Hardly. (Indeed, what woke me up in the middle of the night, provoking me to write this, was a dream containing the audaciously brassy and insistent chorus line from Skunk Anansie’s Yes It’s Fucking Political.) Well then, does it mean my support for Barack Obama’s candidacy is in any way lessened? Most certainly not.

But if months engaging in what had been a labor of love - writing about the issues in this election - have gotten me absolutely nowhere in terms of fostering open, substantive dialogue with progressives’ common interests in mind, why on earth would I continue with that labor now? (For while it is my candidate’s prerogative - and, indeed, mandate - to respond as needed¹ to constant attacks coming from the Clinton camp, I don’t see that my doing so adds to the current discourse.)

Today, as Pennsylvania voters go to the polls, I’m going to impose a total news blackout in this household (from TV to newspapers to blogs to Twitter) until I know most of the returns are in, and my kids are in bed. Because, in the event Clinton’s last-ditch effort to save her campaign, by deploying that most Rovian of all despicably Rovian tactics - using the image of Osama bin Laden in campaign ads, in an effort to scare voters (remember when Democrats were in universal opposition to this practice?) - is successful (where ’success’ would mean more than a marginal victory in this particular state, with significant net gain in pledged delegates), I am going to be incredibly angry. And I’d rather my kids didn’t see me like that.

Whatever the outcome, this time tomorrow, I’ll compose myself again, and deal with whatever comes next. If, somehow, Clinton becomes the Democratic party’s nominee, I will certainly vote for her, because McCain is by far the more dangerous candidate.

In the Huffington Post guest blog entry referenced above, I included in a footnote this somewhat out-of-place comment: Each post I write on the election, I die a little. Extricating myself from these debates, then - despite a constant stream of outrages to which I might otherwise have been compelled to react - has been in the interests of self-preservation, and I don’t regret it.

Going back to something I jokingly said on Twitter, awhile back:

Feminist blogosphere, I wish I knew how to quit you.

I’m happy to say that with this last post, I finally have.

Good luck, Pennsylvania. I hope you’ll vote your conscience.

__

¹ As Obama said, in an interview to be aired in full on the Today Show later this morning:

This is an old trick, right? Somebody attacks you and attacks you and attacks you, and when you finally call them on it, suddenly you’re ‘engaging in the same tactics.’ We have been extraordinarily restrained during the course of this campaign and have generally responded only to attacks that have already been leveled at us by Senator Clinton.

Recently at Reclusive Leftist, I cringed to read this (not only offensive, but bizarre) characterization of Obama supporters:

[emphasis added; why not use the actual words, which I’m sure were sufficiently sexist that they’d merit being criticized explicitly and specifically?]

Boo! Boo! And: wooga, wooga, indeed.

In the past, I’ve confronted statements like these on feminist blogs in a comparatively distanced way. But Violet, the blogger behind Reclusive Leftist, is someone I’ve been reading for years, and her words matter to me in a way that I can’t just dismiss. So, after letting some past statements (e.g., her call for “Obamabots” to, from within their so called “padded room[s]” for the “fucking insane” to “calm down, take a Xanax, shoot some smack,” etc.) go without a direct response, I finally had to leave this comment expressing my offense that “the entirety of my political consciousness [had] been reduced to cultist, robot-like utterances…” adding that I hoped after the general election, we (”whoever ‘we’ are at this point”) would “be able to move forward in some credibly progressive fashion,” following which time I hoped to be able to read her blog again, “without every other line feeling like the rhetorical equivalent of a knife twisting in my gut.”

She responded, in part:

I’m sorry, Victoria, but it’s kind of like we always say to the men who become irate whenever they see a post about men’s propensity to commit domestic violence or rape: if it doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t apply to you.

(So now I’m the election-year equivalent of defensive dudes saying “but I don’t personally rape women”? Okay…)

And while I vowed that I wasn’t going back there to read any new posts until after the general election (219 days from now! But who’s counting…), I did select the option to receive follow-up comments by email. So it was that tonight I got notice of my friend Lost Clown’s reply to the same thread:

I posted a link to the article [to which Violet had been responding] on my post [here], though with a long intro calling for people like you… to publicly call these people out, b/c everytime I say something about their rampant misogyny I am written off for being a Hillbot. Because you’re not one of the misogynist cultish followers like those Violet mentioned.

First, I want to say a very sincere thank you to Lost Clown. For the above and for so many other reasons (for instance, this hilarious comment), I will always have her back.

Second, I have since spent hours working on a comment in response to hers, until finally I acquiesced to the necessity of yet another election-themed blog post.

So here it is. Note that in this post’s title, my accentuating of “these people” in her call for “people like [me] to publicly call these people out,” my point is that I’m more than a little concerned about both Obama’s and Clinton’s supporters’ use of phrases like these in describing advocates for opposing candidates; we are all, indeed, “these people”; not one of us is immune to the divisive forces that are perniciously tearing us apart.

Obama himself characterized this situation best, back in 2004, when he said:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America - there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats.

…So too, the pundits would like to see (and, sadly, are now seeing) women tearing each other apart, in this election season, within variously productive and destructive discourses of identity politics. So I would posit that we are all, indeed, “these people” - who must confront, and be confronted about, all the varieties of hatred that unnecessarily divide us from each other.

So, while the following reads like a letter to one particular pro-Clinton feminist, I mean it also as an open letter to all of us, feminists and progressives in particular, as we confront all the thorny matters of identity and ambition that lie at the heart of the Obama/Clinton divide.

__

Dear Lost Clown,

Regarding your comment: “calling for people like you (and arbitrista) to publicly call these people out…

For the record, I’ve been doing that all along. From Yes We Can (do anything): On the elections, feminism, and our future (March 17, 2008):

When this primary season is over, the feminists and progressives I’ll be first to trust will be, among Obama supporters: those who explicitly, and without qualification, opposed this season’s sexist bias against Clinton, and, among Clinton supporters: those who just as adamantly protested racist bias against Obama. (Not clear on the horrific amount of bias directed at both candidates? These examples were collected from only one source, and only during the month of February, but are quite illustrative.)

From Nope, nothing to do with race/ethnicity at all (March 2, 2008):

This post is intended as complementary to, and not in contradiction with, Reclusive Leftist’s recent post, Nope, nothing to do with gender at all. Because the specifically racist and sexist bias, as evidenced in media coverage of both Senators Obama and Clinton respectively, has been enormous, and is seriously offensive to me, particularly given my burning desire to prevent, at all costs, the Bush-legacy-furthering travesty that would be a McCain presidency.

From On Clinton playing the “Terror Card” (January 9, 2008):

…There’s been a lot of discussion in the feminist blogosphere about the media’s sexist treatment of the candidate, and I’m quite glad for that. Because it is, of course, some seriously offensive bullshit, and while Clinton is not, at present, my first choice for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, I’m damn sure not going to act like that’s okay…

Later in the same post, after expressing my criticism of Clinton’s invocation of an all-too-familiar Republican meme (namely, the less than subtle hint that “Al-Qaeda’s gonna getcha if you don’t vote for ____”), I refer to coverage of that story by Keith Olbermann:

…Who has not, alas, always been a beaming example of anti-sexist journalism (to say nothing of his asswipe colleague Chris Matthews; visit the fine folks at Tennessee Guerrilla Women for much, much more)…

And the above is, of course, just a drive-by sampling of criticisms I’ve made on my own blog ¹; I’ve been relentless in condemning the sexist attacks on Clinton not only online (on my blog and on others’), but also in my local community. And I’m hardly alone.

It seems to me that the characterization that I am more alone than not in taking this principled position, is part and parcel of the usual slander about disproportionate “cultishness” among Obama’s supporters. In fact, I’ve seen ridiculously offensive behavior on the part of both candidates’ supporters, arguably “cultish” in quality. I will neither lower myself to participate in it², nor pretend it isn’t happening, on both sides.

For every fool who points to all the nakedly obvious instances of racism in the campaign, as if that were evidence that the sexism of the same campaign is somehow non-existent or inconsequential, there is another fool on the opposite side, pointing to incidents of sexism in an effort to disprove the existence or significance of the racism (here’s one example; I could, of course, furnish hundreds more if I wanted to make that my full-time job). Either position is, of course, absurd; these are not mutually exclusive biases. Rather, these are systems of oppression that (obviously) serve to divide progressives from each other, in ways that break my heart more with each passing day.

Incidentally, if you know of any ardent Clinton supporters who have persistently and passionately maintained a specific awareness of the extent of the racism in this campaign - not as something secondary to the sexism against Clinton, but as something equally pernicious - kindly point me to them. I’m assuming such supporters do exist; when I find them, I’d like to start a joint petition of Obama and Clinton supporters “explicitly and without qualification” opposing both the sexism and the racism we have seen against both candidates. Please note that I am completely sincere in this; for all I know someone is already doing this, and I simply have yet to be connected with them.

Because I am nothing if not a hopeful feminist.

__
¹ Could I have done more? Obviously, but: (a) I am a human being with finite resources and time, and (b) I never intended that my blog should become entirely engulfed by political matters. Each post I write on the election, I die a little, which is to say that the book I am supposed to be working on right now is not getting done, and my daughters get less attention from me than is optimal, even if we do have viable teaching moments (e.g. this rally, where one of my daughters carried signs for Hillary, and the other wore her shirt in support of Obama) along the way.

² Which is not to say that I haven’t had my own less-than-angelic moments during this season, in which I have, indeed, generated more heat than light.

Some time ago, I had the displeasure of finding out that my site’s entire content was being republished, without my permission (and without any links back to my own website), by Blognetnews.com. Its editor, former (and apparently unashamed!) Dubya speechwriter Dave Mastio, who is also, somehow, gainfully employed by The Virginian-Pilot, was apparently scraping all feeds syndicated at RVABlogs.com, creating from this an entire Richmond, Virginia “channel” - again, with no links going back to the sites of origin (either RVABlogs, where various regional bloggers, myself included, are syndicated, or to the original authors’ sites).

Let’s be clear here, that Mastio’s actions do not constitute “fair use.” This is outright theft of content, for the sole purposes of driving traffic to his ad-heavy site. That’s something Jaelithe at The State of Discontent does a great job of explaining in detail. (Seriously, that woman did a ton of research on this matter; many of the links in this post, I first found on her site. Rad work, Jaelithe.)

Now I learn that, in addition to stealing content for his “Richmond channel” (and for many other regional “channels”; see link immediately above for recent material on his “St. Louis channel,” and here for info on his deeds in Iowa; this is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg); he has also created a “Parenting” channel, on which, tonight, one very righteous (and now righteously pissed off) mommyblogger, Erin Kotecki-Vest (a.k.a. QueenofSpain) found her own material being reproduced. (It is, indeed, in honor of Erin, who frequently issues rants about persons who can and should “suck it,” that I have given this blog post the above title.)

Since apparently this guy is still being a huge pain in the blogosphere’s collective ass (and is now specifically messing with bloggers I personally care about), and since I have learned that in some cases, even when contacted by individual blog owners to request removal of their content, Mastio has actually refused - leading another Virginia blogger to take the radical step of disabling all feeds - I feel compelled to reproduce, here, my own previous exchange with Mastio (in the course of which I did get him to not only stop swiping my content, but to delete all my previously swiped content from his database).

Meantime, Liza Sabater (per this message from QueenofSpain on Twitter), is apparently planning to post soon about tools bloggers can use, on a collective basis, to protest Blognetnews; I’m definitely looking forward to that post. Liza points out, also via Twitter, Blognet news obviously isn’t stealing feeds from prominent sites like the Huffington Post “because they have lawyers.” “You and I,” she adds, of individual and independent bloggers, “don’t.”

Here, then, is my exchange from last month with Mastio.

From: Victoria Marinelli
Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 12:48 AM
Subject: Cease and Desist Immediately
To: editor@blognetnews.com

Dear Thief,

I am aware that you are stealing content for most if not all blogs syndicated by RVABlogs.com. My website at http://victoriamarinelli.com is one of those syndicated by RVABlogs; RVABlogs has my permission to reproduce excerpts of my content; YOU DO NOT.

Remove my feed and all content stolen from victoriamarinelli.com immediately. I look forward to your prompt attention to this matter.

This was his (incredibly condescending and insulting) response:

From: David Mastio
Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 11:06 AM
Subject: re: Cease and Desist Immediately
To: Victoria Marinelli

Dear Victoria,

I am glad you are aware we are excerpting content from many Richmond blogs. When we built the site more than 8 months ago, we sent emails to every blogger in the system for which we could find an email. A number of Richmond bloggers wrote about it. If you didn’t learn about this until recently it is not from want of effort on our part.

Regardless, I don’t know what that that has to do with RVAblogs other than the rumor I have heard that they trash us behind our backs. Pretty much par for the course from a company that competes with us. We’ve built dozens of sites all over the country and have been aggregating Virginia blogs since 2006 and any claim we’ve taken anything from RVAblogs is a lie.

BNN sites are built on the same area of copyright law that allows Google and other web search engines to exist. It is called “fair use.” Fair use does not require anyone’s permission. It is what allows bloggers to quote hundreds of words from a news story or a book reviewer to quote passages that he or she criticizes.

We’re happy to remove your blog. All our site does is make it easier to find yours.

Best,
Dave Mastio

BlogNetNews.com
We Serve Blogging

Remember to visit our advertisers

I replied as follows (note: where, below, I am quoting Mastio’s previous message, his words appear in italics).

From: Victoria Marinelli
Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 4:06 PM
Subject: Re: Cease and Desist Immediately
To: editor@blognetnews.com

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 10:06 AM, David Mastio wrote:

Dear Victoria,

I am glad you are aware we are excerpting content from many Richmond blogs. When we built the site more than 8 months ago, we sent emails to every blogger in the system for which we could find an email. A number of Richmond bloggers wrote about it. If you didn’t learn about this until recently it is not from want of effort on our part.

My email would not have been in any way difficult to find. I’ve always had a dedicated contact page with a published email address. So you’re either lying or incompetent or both.

Regardless, I don’t know what that that has to do with RVAblogs other than the rumor I have heard that they trash us behind our backs. Pretty much par for the course from a company that competes with us. We’ve built dozens of sites all over the country and have been aggregating Virginia blogs since 2006 and any claim we’ve taken anything from RVAblogs is a lie.

I didn’t overhear or read about anybody “trashing” you. I figured out you were a douchebag all on my own, thanks very much.

BNN sites are built on the same area of copyright law that allows Google and other web search engines to exist. It is called “fair use.”

What you are doing is not fair use and you know it. (Or else why would you bother to claim you had requested permission from those whose content you were stealing in the first place?)

We’re happy to remove your blog.

And I anticipate that I will never find any of my material reproduced on your site ever again.

Victoria Marinelli

P.S. The “remember to visit our advertisers” in your autosig is an especially asinine touch.

The bottom line? This asshole really needs to be confronted, collectively, by all bloggers whose material he is reproducing without permission and solely for his own profit. Rise up, fellow bloggers! And let’s give Mastio his due.

My then-six year old, adorably gap-toothed daughter with her pal Neziah (whose little sister is at left), World March of Women, Washington D.C., October 15, 2000.

For the last several days I’ve been struggling with how to approach certain issues in the present election season, finding myself even more reluctant than usual. Why? Because the feminist blogosphere is experiencing an incredible rift. My last serious post on the subject was almost two weeks ago; titling it Heat vs. Light, I was struggling to get at my primary (no pun intended!) concerns as a feminist.

And among those concerns is: Once the Democratic Party’s nomination is a sure thing for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, will we be able to speak with a modicum of civility toward each other? Will we be trust each other, and ready to engage in collaborative activism on issues of crucial importance to women and children? And, most importantly (at least in the short term), will we be able to defeat John McCain?

When this primary season is over, the feminists and progressives I’ll be first to trust will be, among Obama supporters: those who explicitly, and without qualification, opposed this season’s sexist bias against Clinton, and, among Clinton supporters: those who just as adamantly protested racist bias against Obama. (Not clear on the horrific amount of bias directed at both candidates? These examples were collected from only one source, and only during the month of February, but are quite illustrative.)

I cannot separate¹ my profound objections to any system of bigotry; they are interdependent, and serve to keep progressives needlessly divided against one another, when we could be working - as individuals, communities, and in coalitions - against common foes. (A necessity which, of course, must extend, both now and in the future, well beyond this election season, as Aurora Levins Morales rightly reminds us.)

My feminism is, and since 1991, has been, rooted in Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Coalition Politics: Turning the Century (from her speech delivered in 1981). This feminism comprises the root system of my political consciousness. Consequently, where racist narratives have wormed their way into (allegedly) feminist discourse concerning the elections, I’m as angered on behalf of Barack Obama, to whom (along with many of his supporters) that racism is directed, as I am outraged on behalf of feminism itself.

Like many other feminists, I have chosen to support Obama’s candidacy; this choice is congruent with (not despite) my feminism; I’ll elaborate on this theme further in the coming weeks.

For now, though, I want to take a moment to address one (apparently quite earnest) concern raised by supporters of Hillary Clinton:

All I know is if Hillary Clinton cannot win the presidency, then face it ladies, there will NEVER BE A WOMAN PRESIDENT!! [link]

Really? Never?

As the thirty-seven year old mother of two incredible daughters, I’m generationally sandwiched between younger and older women voters, who lean toward Obama and Clinton respectively.

That we haven’t had a female President yet is a problem; of course I get that. (This is all the more disturbing, when the U.S. ranks 68th in the world for its level of female representation within national legislative bodies.)

I’m old enough that I do not, for one second, take for granted the brave work of second-wave (and earlier) feminists, nor the rights I enjoy because of those labors. And I’m young enough that the first election I voted in was the so-called Year of the Woman, in which a “whopping” total of four women were elected to the U.S. Senate in one season. (As I lived in Seattle at the time, it was also my privilege to vote for the now-Senior Senator Patty Murray, who ran on a very down-to-earth “mom in tennis shoes” platform.)

I had watched, the year before, the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, wherein Anita Hill was crudely slandered before a committee of exclusively white men. And I felt, then, a deep rage building: not only about Hill’s treatment (read her 2007 Op-Ed for the New York Times looking back on the experience), but also about the gross underrepresentation of women and people of color among our elected officials.

Now a total of fourteen women are serving in the Senate: a marked improvement, in terms of gender balance, from when I was first watching those rage-inducing Clarence Thomas hearings. Is fourteen a sufficient number? Obviously not. (Then again, for an increasing number of feminist voters, there is no vagina litmus test. We vote on issues.)

But I see no reason to believe this momentum won’t continue to build (which is not to say we won’t have setbacks, or that sexist bias won’t continue to be an impeding factor - far from it). I’m fairly sure a woman President will happen in my lifetime (Janet Napolitano, maybe?), and I’m certain it will happen in my daughters’ lifetime.

Just try selling the line that, if Hillary Clinton does not win in 2008, that we will never have a woman president, to my teenager, who was chanting this (at her own initiation, mind you!) at the age of six:

…or to my daughter Annalisa, who was an infant when she met then-President of NOW, Patricia Ireland. (For that matter, I was two days shy of Annalisa’s due date when I was a speaker at Virginia’s Pro-Choice Lobby day in 2000, at which time I met the current President of NOW, Kim Gandy. Alas, I’m unable to dig up those pictures tonight.)

Annalisa meets Patricia Ireland, May 6, 2000, Mid-Atlantic Feminist Conference.

And see, too, both my girls at this recent Democratic rally, where, with my sincerest blessing, the infant shown above (now eight years old) held signs for Hillary, and my now-thirteen year old expressed her support for Obama (seeing no contradiction between this and her earlier “Girls Can Do Anything” chant - because, of course, there was no contradiction).

For these girls, feminism is alive and well (Jessica Valenti, if you’re reading this, please know my teenager passed her copy of Full Frontal Feminism around her Middle School until it was dogeared) - still very relevant. But their notions about what is possible for them, relative to possibilities open to me and to generations of women before us - are far more expansive.

So, do I want to see a woman President? You’re damned right I do. But after a long, painstaking study of each candidate’s positions on a range of foreign and domestic policy issues, I have decided to support Barack Obama. Should Obama fail to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton will have my full support, because she is, by far, a better candidate than John McCain, and I will not sit idly by and allow another right-wing administration to suck even more of the life from our very democracy, if I can help it.

Tennessee Guerilla Women, back in June of 2007, put it best, in writing about Hillary Clinton (though they would later go on to endorse her, and are presently waging what can only be described as an all-out war on the Obama campaign, rife with distortions):

We want a woman to be president, but not a rightwing woman and not a centrist woman. What we want is a progressive president!

And that’s what it comes down to, for me: Hillary Clinton’s habit of erring, when in doubt (which, I am troubled to note, is quite often) with conservatives on issues of critical importance to our country (not least of all, the war in Iraq). And that’s why, though it may seem counterintuitive, many people are presently regarding Obama as not only an acceptable choice, but as the better choice for feminists.

But to return to what had been troubling me so deeply at the start of this post - about the divisions between us.

There is no question but that some of us will carry scars from our internecine skirmishes. I’ve been so bothered about this issue recently, I couldn’t bring myself to express it here; I had to go to a friend’s blog, and let it pour out of me in comments. (That friend being, incidentally, a Clinton supporter, who has been exceptionally fair minded about the present debates among us.)

But there are also real signs of hope (beyond the anecdotal evidence of my own daughters). For instance, in this editorial at the Washington Post, co-authored by two feminists: one of whom backs Obama, while the other backs Clinton. And in at least one writer’s suggestion that when all this electoral infighting is done with, Democrats just might be a stronger collective force for it.

To my sister feminists supporting Hillary Clinton, I promise that, should she secure the nomination, I will vote for her in the general election (and will passionately encourage everyone I know to do the same), even while I am actively (and unapologetically) supporting Obama’s candidacy right now. I also promise you that neither candidate will ever get a “free pass” from me; now and in the future, I will hold them accountable and be forthright in my criticisms as appropriate. Finally, I promise this: That I won’t let my daughters lose sight of the tremendous efforts of women who paved the way for us, that has made possible their completely realistic belief that they will see a woman President in their lifetime - if not in Hillary Clinton, then in another candidate, not far down the path from where we stand today.

__

h/t Faux Real and Meta Water Shed for some of these links.

¹ This is not to say there aren’t distinctions among them, only that they are mutually reinforcing in a profoundly poisonous way.

Check it out.

Damn, but this makes my day (especially after this).

[With sincerest apologies to Jane.]

Folks, here’s the deal. I’m sick to death of people bashing Clinton by citing all the evidence of how Obama is being bashed, and vice-versa. (Can we not just agree that bias is an inherently bad thing, and not refuse to note its existence whenever it does not concern “our” candidate? And from there, simply try to reach the least obfuscated views of the day’s issues, and make the most informed political decisions we can, from there? Please?)

So tonight I went to Media Matters to have a look at their (generally quite excellent and thorough) recent coverage of media bias against both candidates. Sadly, there was a lot to look at. I actually left the site after a while, and instead loaded their feed for all recent items into Bloglines, saving the relevant titles, and later copying each post link into a column: Bias against Clinton, or Bias against Obama. (Note: Specific hits on both candidates’ spouses, where relevant, are included. Also, I could only grab the feed for stories going as far back as February 1, so stories from before then are not represented here.)

Needless to say, there were also plenty of articles tackling bias against both candidates simultaneously, perhaps the most offensive of which detailed how the (perpetually pornsick) Fox News had asked a debate focus group [H]ow many of you want them to make love to each other? Also illustrative: CNN’s Yellin to Dem debate moderator Blitzer: “It looks like you’re going to have to be the grownup” - concerning the network’s characterization of Senators Obama and Clinton as childish, relative to Edwards, who had just exited the race. (My take: The media insists on infantilizing women and people of color; the identities of white men are rarely problematized.)

But that’s beyond what I’m trying to get at here.

You see, when Tennessee Guerrilla Women published a post, after the Potomac Primaries (in which I, as a Virginia voter, had voted for Obama), titled Media’s Candidate Wins, I was a bit taken aback.

To egalia’s statement:

The boys at CNN and MSNBC are pretending to be so amazed at just how well Obama did.

Like they had nothing to do with it.

I had responded, in comments, as follows:

There is an implication here that the actual, measurable strengths and weaknesses of the candidates in question had nothing to do with it. Chris Matthews and his ilk can kiss my ass, and I hold no ill will toward Clinton based on any of the slander that has been directed at her in the media (and blogosphere) any more than I would harbor ill will toward Obama based on any of the slander that has been directed at him in the media (and blogosphere). Reasonable, informed, progressive voters made the choice to vote for Barack Obama. The idea that his sweeping successes of this evening in the Potomac Primaries owes to the machinations of sexist jerkwads like Matthews is pretty insulting.

Further into the thread, in response to one woman’s question, Certainly you’re not denying that the media has great powers of persuasion? I responded:

Certainly, you’re not suggesting that I’m stupid enough to deny something that self-evident - right?

Duh. The media has a role here, and has both helped and hurt the respective candidacies of Clinton and Obama. What I object to is the implication that the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates, apart from their specific representations, have [not] played a role in the victories and the defeats of both candidates.

That is to say, the electorate is NOT comprised solely of MSM-brainwashed automatons. We think. We do research. We discuss matters of import with our friends, relatives, and neighbors.

Obama’s a strong candidate, period. Chalking up his win yesterday, by so significant a margin, to the bullshit-blabbering of Matthews et. al. is tantamount to saying that the people are stupid, don’t know what’s good for them, etc.

The media outlets that have reach where I live in Virginia are also represented, for example, among our neighbors in Tennessee. When Clinton won Tennessee, I assumed it was primarily on the basis of her strengths, not on the extent to which the media has either accurately, or inaccurately, represented same. So too with Obama’s win in Virginia. Why are you so intent to discount the discerning powers, not to mention the very will of the people?

Subsequently, someone commenting as “dmac,” responded to my bit about the media having helped and hurt both candidates’ campaigns:

In all seriousness please give me an example where the media has hurt Obama.

To this, one commenter immediately replied, Good question, dmac. We’re waiting - more of a taunt, of course, than an invitation to clear and constructive dialogue. (On the other hand, another commenter Mary gave concrete answers to the question - which, unsurprisingly, went generally ignored by the TGW readership.)

I replied:

…to the person who asked - rhetorically of course (when a person asks for “an example” of a an excruciatingly well-established phenomena of which there are countless examples, she or he has clearly already decided no such examples exist or will be seen as valid no matter what proof is supplied) [about “where the media has hurt Obama”] - I will be responding to your taunt elsewhere, on my own blog, in the next few days.

Well, I’m now on day 15 of those “few days,” (adherence to even my own deadlines has never been my strong suit), but this post is my response to dmac’s question.

So, after the jump, you will find the results of my informal review - which of course is limited to stories available at Media Matters; I’m not taking on the whole damn world tonight. I’m also not taking on things the candidates have said about one another, much less all that has been said in the blogosphere about the candidates (I dealt with some of that horror and heartbreak last night).

Because I’m only consulting one source, I’m not going to pretend it’s objective, but I think it does present a good snapshot view about the vast extent of media bias against both candidates.

(more…)

Lately, wandering through the feminist blogosphere in which I once felt so much at home, I’ve been feeling a certain sickness, concerning the utter venom being directed at supporters of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign. (And I should not have to specify this, but that does not mean there has not also been plenty of wholly unwarranted vitriol - often specifically of a misogynist nature - directed at Clinton and her supporters. Those two situations, you see, are not mutually exclusive; acknowledging the latter does not mean I, and other feminists supporting Obama, should not be silenced out of critiquing the former. Get it?)

And I’ve been stewing over the situation for weeks, feeling an ethical obligation to deal with in some way that would counteract the incessant anti-Obama drumbeat (don’t get me started on Taylor Marsh) with crystal-clear feminist analysis. (There were two earlier posts addressing the primaries here and here, but these weren’t - by my standards - all that substantive; certainly, they didn’t get into all the details that persuaded me to vote for Obama in the Potomac Primaries.) But each time I’d ventured into the feminist blogosphere, I’d just ended up too sickened, too depressed to do much besides shake my head and offer a few stray comments on other blogs.

Voting, for me, in Virginia’s primary has of course already concluded, with Obama winning by a decisive margin (despite Clinton’s rhetoric that she’d be favored in states not using the caucus model). And despite Obama’s stunning 10 consecutive wins in recent races, this election is not yet a certain thing.

And even if Obama’s (or Clinton’s) nomination were a certain thing at this point, I would feel a need to say something at this juncture, because of the enormous rifts that are presently developing (or deepening) within feminist circles. No matter who goes up against McCain in the general election, I want - no, need - to begin my own work in the interests of repairing that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been at work on a long, detailed essay on the very fine and nitty-gritty specifics on why I’m supporting Obama over Clinton for this race.

Trouble is, attention to the time-sensitivity of certain issues has never been my strong suit. It should be no surprise here that one of my larger blog categories is called The Past is Not Dead. I write much more competently of things that happened 10, 20, or even 30 years ago than I know how to write about what’s happening this week; my wiring is better suited to stuff that falls under the categories of “literary nonfiction” and “memoir” than anything vaguely resembling “journalism.”

But what’s happening at this very moment, in this election? It matters to me. Deeply.

So despite not having my all-encompassing little manifesto ready for public viewing, I have to say something, even if it’s just to say this: leave this blog now, and go visit some other destinations where a lifelong committed feminist, of any ethnicity or age, age will not be made to feel an utter and complete freak (not to mention a traitor to her gender) for seriously considering Obama’s candidacy, including for one’s own specifically feminist reasons. (While I care about a great many issues, I have always voted first on feminist issues - that has not changed for me, nor will it.)

Helpful destinations for feminists and other progressives seeking more comprehensive resources about, and/or cogent analyses of, Obama’s candidacy include the following (note that this is far from an all-inclusive list; also feel free to submit your own links via comments, or contact me privately):

• Culture Kitchen
• Racialicious
• Reappropriate
• Think on These Things
• Jack and Jill Politics
• Feminists for Obama
• Women for Obama
• New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama
• Queen of Spain*

And there is also Feministing’s post (though it’s already a bit dated), Feminist Endorsement Roundup, linking to articles about feminist individuals and organizations who have formally endorsed either Clinton or Obama (Feministing itself has not made an endorsement).

Finally, please read the article in The Nation, Debunking the Media’s ‘Obama Cult’. And also, Melissa Harris-Lacewell on why she on why would have supported Clinton in 2004 (over Howard Dean and John Kerry), but is supporting Obama now.

Now scram! And check out those other links while I work for another week or so on Part II.

Peace.

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*I am aware of feminist criticisms that have been made (including by some whose insights I respect) of recent writing by Queen of Spain’s Erin Kotecki Vest. My response to that criticism will be in the follow-up to this post. 

Or: Not to worry, I’m as sick to death of my blog posts in the “Fragments” category as are you.

Or: An answer to the question, “Just what in the hell is this thing called Twitter?” (A feminist literary mama’s excavations of this technology’s relative merits.)

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Hi there, I’ve been ensconced in the realm of Twitter for a while now (wherein users exchange messages of no more than 140 characters); if you know of what I speak, then you do (feel free to follow); if you don’t, go read Clive Thompson’s article in Wired, which will give you the gist.

Still with me? Cool.

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Recently I characterized Twitter as being “like the alternately idealized & never-good-enough lover you can’t help but be infatuated with at all times.” On one level (I’ll get to the other level shortly), it’s genius: social media at its best, connecting people in variously casual and profound ways across all sorts of divisions of geography, politics, lifestyle, and identity. One thing I’ve been amazed by is the prevalence of moms on Twitter, which seems particularly apt. In the course of a day, a mama has to deal with a lot of crazy, inherently fragmenting stuff. That cliché about a woman’s work never being done? Well, it’s not a cliché; that shit is real.

So what are a mama’s options for staying in touch with the world, between the phone ringing and the baby crying and the husband whining and every other damn thing? (Note: sadly, this may apply almost as often to moms who work outside the home as to stay-at-home moms, given the unequal sharing of domestic duties between male and female partners, which persists despite the necessary gains of feminism and even when both partners have paid employment.) Maybe you don’t have the luxury of Virginia Woolf’s rightly-recommended “Room of One’s Own”; or maybe you had that room once, but then the baby came along and you had to make a nursery somewhere.

Now, it’s not impossible for a woman writer who is also a mother and who lacks certain resources (time, solitude, individual space, money, etc.) to develop engaged, sustained narrative; Ariel Gore, founder of hipMama, nails that truth in the first three sentences from How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: you need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and a room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom…”

So: not impossible, except in the existential, miraculous sense that for us mamas, everything can be pretty impossible, but we figure out ways to pull it off anyway. And we do it, every day.

And of course, we struggle. And much of what we struggle with is the matter of fragmentation. For the same reason that many women gravitate to poetry over prose, many of us, these days, gravitate toward mediums in which we can express ourselves (and connect with other mamas) even in the milliseconds between erupting crises - whether those crises are deemed “domestic,” e.g., involving the material needs of the bodies of those with whom we cohabit, and/or if they concern our broader engagements with the Body Politic. And Twitter is rapidly becoming that medium, to an even more influential extent than blogs individually.

This is true not least because, in Twitter, one may exchange not only individual, succinct observations, but one can also share links to more sustained narratives elsewhere: whether in blogs, online news media, or audio, video and photo sharing sites (not to mention “mashup” venues which braid such forms together, into fresh amalgamations which, when successful, are worth more in value, by far, than the face-value sums of their parts).

What Twitter does, for many of us, is create the possibility of an alternative to silence. People who have been reading this blog over the years, in its numerous incarnations (from “My So-Called Writer’s Life” in 2003 through “Perpetual Exile,” “Southern Discomfort,” “Vortex(t)” and now this most recent inscrutable moniker “Anachroclysmic“), through its umpteen template overhauls, usually only 25% realized (often with disclaimers posted about the run-down state of the thing, the ever-borked blogrolls and so forth): you know how I struggle with silence.

I might stay up for a few nights in a row, posting stuff that’s incredibly difficult, complex, huge.

Then I’ll shut down, and I won’t post anything for days, weeks, or even months.

Twitter is the technology that has been helping me to stay connected (and keep my sense of humor, which, if you only read my Deep and Serious posts here, you might not know I had) between those rare days of effusive, often brutally honest communiqués. Because, of course, life doesn’t stop just because one is (whether for internal or external reasons, or some combination of both) unable to write about it.

And the feature of the WordPress plugin I use - Twitter Tools - enables me to post a digest of each day’s Twitter entries (”tweets”) in the form of a bulleted list.

The good news: This does, indeed, fill in significant gaps between my other writings here. And, perhaps, gives you a fuller sense of who I am. I’ve had my share of miserable fuckwits take a passing glance at some of the very volatile issues I write about (particularly those pertinent to the sex trade) and make flabbergastingly inaccurate and bizarre assumptions about me which, depending on the extent of their fuckwittedness, they otherwise might not be quite so quick to make. That is, if they understood that the woman here who writes, occasionally, about pimps who are richly deserving of some very swift comeuppance (if not in the form of a prostituted woman personally dispensing righteous justice, then courtesy of the perpetually-imperfect Law), is the same woman who writes joyously and unapologetically about what is, after all, her absolutely marvelous sex life. (Or, alternately, complains bitterly if she’s not getting any.)

Which is not to say that I owe anybody - least of all the pro-sexcapitalism fuckwits - any explanation.

But, just as I am driven apeshit by people who, for example, assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix*), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

…So to am I driven apeshit by people who make other sorts of baseless (sometimes quite innocent, but at other times quite malicious and misogynist) assumptions about me.

So, with these accumulated “tweets,” whoever is still reading this blog (all 4 of you, I think it is) have some opportunity to have a clearer sense of where I’m coming from.

And here’s another merit: It’s a wonderful, fun, geeky challenge to see just how much meaning one can pack into 140 characters. Indeed, a game called “Twooshing” has developed among the particularly hardcore Twitter users, wherein the challenge is to express oneself in precisely 140 characters; yours truly is, at this moment, at the top of the Twoosh Boards. There is levity and, of course, significant triviality being indulged with this activity, but the compressing challenge of the form - as with strict poetry forms - can also lend itself, sometimes, to art. (No, really! I’m completely serious.)

And, it’s good practice; one becomes extremely proficient in cutting away whatever is extraneous in narrative, so that even when one is writing something of more length and complexity, it has a better chance of packing a nice, walloping punch. (And then, whatever adjectives you do choose are like precious delicacies, distributed with care throughout one’s prose which has already been trimmed down enough to convey descriptions well.)

And sometimes the 140-character form is just wonderfully pragmatic. For instance, I recently went to see Cloverfield. I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested enough afterward to write a substantive review of the film - but I did want to weigh in with something, given its present popularity. So, while still in the theater (using my cell phone), I did:

Shorter Cloverfield: Post-9/11 anxiety + generalized fear of unknown + patriotic iconography + fuzzy dialogue/ barf-inducing film technique.

(And really, that’s about all you need to know about that film, in my humble opinion.)

And now, the bad news: (the above-referenced other level): If you’re not on Twitter, some of what gets posted (particularly the items beginning with @[username]) in this manner isn’t going to make a lick of sense to you. (And if you are on Twitter, then you’d probably rather follow all that stuff via Twitter’s own UI, and reading anything here is a bit redundant.) And of course, because individually these “tweets” can only pack in so much in the way of nuanced communication, I do run the risk of being seen as suddenly trivial and light (me!) when I’m writing about certain issues. Do I wish, for example, I’d had more time to develop a fully-realized essay on why I’m supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination? Of course. But if you were reading here and trying to ferret out the basis of that support, you might not be particularly moved by 140-character crystallizations that, necessarily, can only communicate so much.

So that’s it, my imperfect system du jour. (Which I may well turn upside-down tomorrow.)

Tweetcha l8r.

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*This was on a short-lived blog called Queen of the Bean; someday I’ll recover and make some substantive use of the old posts.

*A very few worthy anti-war blog links are cited here. Submit your recommendations in comments if you wish.

Please check out Dulce Et Decorum Est, a “A collection of anti-war cultural artifacts” compiled by the same cool dude who graciously set up feministblogs.org, and whose Rad Geek People’s Daily has been regular reading for me for years now. (This was the first post with which he earned my respect.) I might not have run across this blog if he hadn’t linked to an old post of mine (featuring the searing words of Otep Shamaya when we were merely a couple of years into the recent Iraq imbroglio).

I tend to avoid blogging extensively on the war, or about any among the specific idiocies of the Bush administration because I find the exercise heartbreakingly redundant, but others have a better grasp on the material and can make constructive use of it in their works, for which I’m grateful. If you’ve seen Dr. Violet Socks’ Just Impeach the Stupid Freak category at The Reclusive Leftist, then you know what I mean. Also, for the record, the Iraq category at Appletree is handy one-stop repository of war-specific If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention material.

I’m leaving tons of worthy sites out, mostly on account of my own hazy, persistently traumatized feelings about the subject, but for now this will have to do.

Now, for those inclined to offer them, your “Best of anti-war blogging” link recommendations are welcome in comments.

I hereby interrupt my own half-assed hiatus to clarify something. Belledammit Belledame has deviously generously tagged me for the Thinking Blogger Awards, and while my response in turn is nowhere close to being ready, her characterization of me in her post gave me pause:

Victoria is a thoughtful, empathic*, and eloquent radical feminist, with much to say both personal and political. We challenge each other, I do believe; and yet there’s enough common ground to make a connection, which pleases me, as she’s good people.

Now I’m going to have to add to my paradoxical working list of things Belledame has in common with Twisty Faster. (Thing #1: She routinely sends me running to the dictionary, as I have bitched previously. Thing #2: she’s frightfully prolific; there’s no damn way for me to keep up with the volume of her posts and commentaries.)

But my third item for this queer** little list is that I wind up spilling shit in comments on her blog that are mini-blog posts in their own right. As with a recent post of Twisty’s, which prompted my recent declaration of Oh no, I’ve said (perhaps) too much.

Which brings me to my point (yes, I have one!). Namely, that I dunno if I really qualify for the “radical feminist” moniker at this point.

Yet to offer, whether at Belledame’s blog or right here, an apparent public refutation of my “radical feminism” per se is problematic in all sorts of ways. For one thing, it might be (incorrectly) assumed that I think radical feminism is a bad or somehow undesireable thing. Nay, this is hardly the case.

Fact is, radfems kick ass, and I loves ‘em.

Rather, I no longer label myself as a radical feminist because, given an objectively unknowable ratio of “freely chosen to compelled-by-life-circumstances” decisions I have made in my life, both in the psychic aftermath of leaving Minnesota, and in the verifiably post-emergency years following, when I might have made a very different set of choices, with a different partner in a different part of the world, I believe I’ve lost the right to call myself that. (Like I lost the right to call myself a lesbian when I married Jeff. Yeah I know, there are self-declared lesbians who have freely chosen sex with and/or marriages to men, but I just don’t get that, and I’m not going to insult the lesbian separatist I used to be with any such bizarre assertions, no matter how authentically woman-identified I will always be.)

Nor do I mean to imply, with the above assertions, that radical feminists have themselves (as individuals or en masse) somehow kicked me out of any radical feminism “club.” Sure, I’ve taken some of the expected snark about being a “hasbian” and whatnot, but those are really uncontestable charges, and as such, it doesn’t personally hurt me.

Bah. What I mean, in any event, is just what I said over at her place, so I’ll go ahead and do the ol’ copy-n-paste (full text here):

…For the record, I don’t necessarily describe myself as a radical feminist, as much as I identify with radical feminism and with radfems much more often than not.

Yes, I have recently described myself as “radical” (in the sense of getting to the roots of things… ironically, you’re the one who offered that characterization in your comment here), and I’m certainly a feminist and I’ve posted a great deal of meandering autobiography about my lifelong adventures in radical feminism as such. (For that matter, I’ve written about my adventures in lesbian separatism, too, yet the bona fide Big Hairy Man I live with rather disproves the premise that I can still be credibly called that.)

Maybe what I mean is something like this: if radical feminism were a country, then I would be one if its most curiously nostalgic exiles ever.

(More on this and related themes in my damned near complete manuscript which, nonetheless, I keep managing to not send out: How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land.)

And now, the postscript:

Certainly, I’m not the only soul on earth grappling with the matter of one’s identification (or, as the case may be, former identification) with radical feminism, in ways that aren’t hatefully distorting and dismissive of radical feminism and/or of radfems personally… certainly, there’s no shortage of that available on the internets, which I’m not going to link to here.

Most notably, AradhanaD does an awesome, deeply thoughtful job of discussing her own struggles with this moniker in this brilliant comment at Witchy Woo’s . Her struggles, of course, are distinct from mine, but I find much in her comments to relate to; had I been aware of that discussion at the time it was in active percolation mode, I would have tossed in a comment or two, but as a latecomer I’ll just have to post this linkage instead, and hope it means something.

*Dunno if she meant to say I was empathetic, or if, indeed, she meant to infer that I have awesomely spooky psychic powers. Damn, I’d hate to have to choose between the two.

** In various senses of the word.