feminist blogs

I was all set to dig into some unpleasant political blogging when I got a surprise text from my old friend Julie Tangelder on Kauai. She and I went to high school together - Kapa’a High, Class of ‘88 - and were pretty close then; since that time, we’ve had curiously parallel lives even while never speaking to each other or exchanging correspondence until quite recently.

And amid the rapid-fire texting back and forth, came some unfortunate news; our former classmate (though he was a year ahead of us) Keoni Lucas died recently in a car accident in Santa Monica, California.

I didn’t know Keoni all that well, but, along with Julie (and another friend, Jeremiah Johnson, who died in a diving accident last year; I wrote about this tangentially here, and still have not managed to complete a much longer work in progress about him), we rode the same bus to school.

This was, mind you, quite a distance - about 25 miles, one way, from where Jeremiah and I lived in Hanalei, and at least 30 from where Keoni and Julie lived in Ha’ena. And given that there was such a distance involved, all of us on that bus got to know each other to some degree. The bus had a culture all its own, with various cliques (none of which I ever fit into, of course) - and Keoni was one of the The Beautiful People.

That is to say, he was not only stunningly gorgeous in appearance, but graceful in his movements - owing, in great part, to his already considerable experience as a surfer.

But unlike his close friend, the very differently gorgeous Lyon Hamilton (brother of the now quite famous big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, whom I wrote about here), he seemed relatively unselfconscious about his own beauty. He was simply radiant.

And now, I learn that from the North Shore of Kauai, Keoni had gone on to study filmmaking at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and eventually moved to LA to pursue a career in that industry (even while he remained active as a surfer, and helped start a clothing line).

Here is Keoni happily behind the camera recently in Bali (click through to Flickr for image attributions):

Now there are a great number of people in mourning for him. A memorial service attended by nearly 500 people took place in Malibu on Sunday, while a ceremony back on Kauai is now scheduled for Sunday, April 20th.

I won’t be there, of course (I’ll be lucky if I can scratch together the money to attend my 20th high school reunion in June), but I did want to post something in acknowledgment of his passing. And it seems fitting in doing to recognize some of the success he had begun to enjoy in the film industry, with this clip from his supporting role in the (hilariously titled) independent film, Pee Stains and Other Disasters. He plays the prisoner:

Rest in peace, Keoni.

__

Links:

• North Shore Kauai: Respected Kauai Local, Keoni Lucas, Dies in LA Car Accident (Note: this is a reprint of a Surfline article, but has section for comments)
• Kauai Garden Island News: North Shore surfer dies on Mainland (Note: Article gets details wrong, such as Keoni’s age; he was 38, not 35)
• Donate to Keoni Lucas Memorial Fund

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.

On Monday it was my great fortune to have a coffee date with a new friend, one Ms. Jennifer Jane, a.k.a. @peeppeep, found via the social media wonder that is Twitter. (My profile: here.)

Allow me to provide you with a sampling of her posts on Twitter that quickly established her awesomeness, and made it clear to me we were actually going to have to meet in person. (Besides her reply to my message, “Beck’s ‘Lost Cause’ makes me feel better about being one,” with “that song got me through my last breakup. best played while lying in bed for the third day in a row.” So true, so true.)

• bought jelly shoes today. can’t wait until my sweaty feet make those farty noises. i am a sex bomb.
• @ the mall. Person in next dressing room either having sex or an asthma attack. Kind of worried.
• running only on caffeine and a bite of chocolate bunny. ears, natch.
• If you are one of my customers and i am rude to you today, i am sorry. It’s just that i hate you.
• is it okay to tell someone that you’ll have sex with them if they promise not to talk before during or after?
• my last customer was an old lady who totally farted while standing in my line.

See? Awesome.

So we arranged to meet on Monday, and predictably I was running late because I couldn’t find my ass with both hands, much less stuff like keys, driver’s license, and sunglasses. Once I finally found the first two, I gave up on the third and headed out the door. Of course it was incredibly bright outside, all the more so to me because I had just pulled a writing all nighter. (This post. Worth the effort, but still, oof.)

If you’re not in the habit of pulling writing all-nighters and then walking out into the blazing light of day, let me assure you it is an uncomfortable, squinty experience. Then, once in the car, I scrounged around to see if my husband had any abandoned sunglasses laying about. His head is unnaturally large, so whenever I do swipe his shades (like when I steal his socks; he has boats for feet), they tend to fall off me, but they’re better than nothing when I am in need. Alas, I found nothing.

What I did find, however, was one pair of 3D glasses from when my husband had taken the girls to Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds (in Disney Digital 3D! says the promo). At which time, blissfully, I had been writing, exempt from both the added expense (the tickets were $15 each!) and the emotional overwhelm (see this photo for some indication of how I felt about getting dragged to a Jonas Brothers concert during our last State Fair). See why I love my husband?

And while thinking persons might question the wisdom of wearing 3D glasses for driving, after an all-nighter in particular, I have to say they did the job just fine, tamping down the impossible glare, and enabling me to make it only ten minutes late to my coffee date.

And of course, I made a dashing first impression:

…And we went on to have one of the most pleasing conversations I have had with another human being in quite some time, the actual substance of which would be impossible to recreate here, but suffice it to say, we have enough bizarre stuff in common, and enough about our respective life experiences that is radically different, that we totally bonded, talking nonstop until I had to finally dash off to fetch the youngest girlchild from school. (Also, she has teenagers. All our local friends who finally decided to breed did it late enough in the game that my own teen is always the oldest kid in the crowd, when we have family-friendly parties. The idea of getting our respective offspring to hang out too is pretty fab.)

I go through a lot of angst over friendships, because so many of the people I love (outside the network of friends I pretty much married into) are largely out of state. When I meet people locally, so many of them have no context for the whacked out kind of life I’ve lived (geographically, politically, whatever). When I make connections online with people whom I might, ostensibly, meet face-to-face at some point, it’s much the same, with a few brilliant exceptions.

For example, there has been the wonderful Joriel, whom I first found via the Blogger listings for Richmond (before we both moved to Wordpress). Even without having a (by my standards) particularly insane personal history, she somehow understood me (because she is a real, honest-to-God serious writer, and that’s an altogether unique breed). But then she and her equally wonderful honey moved away, to the very place where so many of the people I already love and miss terribly live: Seattle.

And there is the equally brilliant Jane, with whom I have almost as much radically in common as I have radically not in common, which makes our interactions edifying, stimulating and fun (particularly given her wicked sense of humor). (Also, she is a kick-ass photographer. Go buy some of her Etsy stuff, seriously.) And while she is, at least, here in Virginia, she’s still far enough away that we have not yet been able to make good on our threats to go hog wild someday at Ikea¹. (Don’t ask me why this possibility appeals to me. It just does.)

But Jennifer? Not only gets me (a tall order for any human being, seriously), but she lives right here! Less than a ten-minute-drive away! And it makes my heart go pitter-patter, and feel significantly less angstful about my place in the universe.

Richmond just got a lot better.

___
¹There has also been a proposal that Jane and I might someday see Molly Hatchet together, but when the celestial bodies might properly align to make such a thing come to pass, I couldn’t possibly guess.