Moderation
Oct 8th, 2008 by admin
Once again, I am having moderation policy difficulties. There are a whole bunch of comments in my moderation queue and they will remain there until I decide what to do.
I blog because I care about women and want to engage with women and publicize women’s issues in ways nobody else does. I know that I do that well. I do not want my blog, ever, to be one of the billion blogs people can turn when they get a hankering to watch as women tear each other apart. And I don’t want to read that stuff myself. I’m so tired of it. It is demoralizing and wearisome and I cannot afford that particular expenditure of energy in my life. I’ve already got way too much on my plate to allow for that.
So I’m deciding what I’ll do about it.
Heart
<3 ( … that was supposed to be a heart)
Heart, I send you my support in this, the continuing effort that you make for us.
Your words, Heart, so very true by how you live, breathe and blog: ” I blog because I care about women and want to engage with women and publicize women’s issues in ways nobody else does. I know that I do that well. I do not want my blog, ever, to be one of the billion blogs people can turn when they get a hankering to watch as women tear each other apart. ”
I’ve in the past commented here as “JB” with a last name, and Judy Best is not the name I use for making my own survival compromises with patriarchy — but whether or not there’s time around those survival compromises for me to post here, it’s always a joy to know that you care, Heart.
Heart, I just want to say that I support your decision to not publish certain comments. This is your blog. You can publish anything you want or don’t want to publish.
I’m new to your blog, and I love it. I have run discussion groups over the years, and I wholeheartedly believe in moderation. Too many people on the Internet engage in abuse and call it “free speech.” Too many women say they support women’s issues when, in fact, they are stuck in the patriarchy and can’t see it. Thanks for your wonderful blog and for taking the time to make sure it’s a safe place.
Hi Heart,
I agree with Faith-this is YOUR blog, and you get to do whatever you want. If people don’t like it, they can start their own blog and say whatever they want to say there. If people are just being mean, delete their comments. If people are fighting, and you don’t want to host their fight on your blog, that’s up to you. There are plenty of places to fight on the internet! Don’t let them suck up your energy, there are too many other great ways to spend your time and energy.
Peace
-buggle
Thanks, everyone.
Sis, if you asked Satsuma, she’d tell you there are about six (or more) lengthy comments she’s written recently sitting in the mod queue unapproved.
It’s not Satsuma’s fault, she’s not the only one. Plenty of women out there seem to be unable to resist the temptation to behave like jerks towards other women — in all sorts of ways — and in particular, women whose views, in fact, are more like their own than most other women’s!! I have to read all this stuff behind the scenes; nobody else here does. That’s my issue with moderation. In a way when I moderate, I end up protecting those who read here from the truth about a lot of things, including the really bad behaviors of women towards women. When I don’t approve the bad behavior posts, I end up being the only one who knows about them. This creates a messed up imbalance where women think they are having amicable, productive discussions and don’t realize the crap going on behind the scenes.
Of course, if I approved all the crap instead and stopped moderating, all hell would break loose and rightfully so. And, I don’t want to host that stuff on my blog, that’s not what I’m here for.
At some time or another, I have protected almost every woman here from the jerky behavior of other women — by refusing to approve comments, or by defending them publicly or privately – some more often than others, some by far more often than others. Then I take the hits for protecting those women.
Anyway. I am still thinking about what I want to do, ultimately.
It goes without saying, you blog for you, but also, your community, I assume, or otherwise what’s the point? I also assume you don’t consider the porn/pomo/mra jerks your community. So why read it.
We could register?
I regret responding to Satsuma.
And I do get your point about having to ‘defend’ women who post here. But I don’t believe there’s another woman you consistently allow to bash women as a class, heterosexual women, and the other women who post here, as a group and sometimes, individually. We don’t need an MRA here, we’ve got Satsuma.
I also don’t believe for a minute Satsuma is who she says she is. Can you imagine that bald contempt for your female client getting you anywhere remotely where she says she is?
Thanks for your marvellous work.
I feel guilty that you would recieve some nasty and sometimes quite silly comments about my words and views. I know you have been protecting me and other women who may get triggered by those comments. You are strong in continuing to print my words, and the words and actions of exited prostituted women.
You have real courage in allowing so many different voices of women, many of whom have their lives made invisible and soundless by many “feminist” blogs or left blogs.
I believe blogs have the right to block comments, for it personal blog, and shouldn’t be derail by others who have personal or political agendas.
Your blog has a lot of power, so many will want to destroy it.
In a way it is a back-handed compliment.
Sis, I do blog to connect with women, too, and I really enjoy the back and forth with everyone, but the other gets me down at times. I could go the no-comments route and just blog and people would still read and I wouldn’t have to deal with comment moderation issues. I haven’t wanted to do that for a bunch of reasons, and I really still don’t. I get weary.
Thanks so much, Rebecca.
Note to people who are pro porn/pro-prostitution and who consistently attack anti-porn/anti-prostitution feminists and who have attempted to comment to this thread: I am not interested in what you have to say about my moderation policies. Your comments will be severely, as always, moderated OUT and directly into spam. This blog is a pro-woman, anti-misogyny, anti-subordination blog and it will continue to be so.
Heart, this is such a great summation of the theme of your leadership of this blog: “pro-woman, anti-misogyny, anti-subordination.”
Your words, a lift to the spirit.
Thank you, and to my sister commenters, yay, hey, to all of us who intend to work our way out of the patriarchal introject that has been de-signed to be in every woman’s mind. If our intentions are to care while we think and feel, even when we misstep away from what we might wish in retrospect (something I’ve certainly done), then we’re here, in the right place.
I think it’s worth remembering that people who comment and criticise blog moderation policies are doing so because of their own political (whether they personally refer to it as ‘political’ or not) agenda. Ironically (or not), these are the same people who accuse those who refuse to publish their comments of deleting their comments due to the blogger’s own political ideas. They would prefer it, of course, if we sauntered over to their blogs in order to pick fights, as then their accusations of our unfairness would seem to have some basis. But we don’t. So they have to troll us instead.
Women are always told to be nice to those who abuse, and then when they experience abuse and complain about it, they are told that they ‘encouraged’ the abuse, or (in the time honoured BDSM-mindset tradition) that they did not respect their own boundaries and are therefore to blame, rather than the abuser. We should not have to put up with this shit on our blogs either.
Of course, if I approved all the crap instead and stopped moderating, all hell would break loose and rightfully so. And, I don’t want to host that stuff on my blog, that’s not what I’m here for.
I agree, that stuff does not belong here. I have often wondered why Satsuma does not get her own blog; then she could develop her polemics and hyperbole as much as she wanted. I imagine it is because she gets lots of attention here. That is a tradeoff. I feel much freer writing on my own blog, but I often wonder if anyone reads it. I do not mind; my reasons for blogging do not include a need for attention.
I did envision the Free Soil Party Free For All Message Board as a venue for unmoderated discussion, where all hell could break loose. I thought that might happen between me and the pirate who thinks he represents the Free Soil Party, but he exercised restraint. At any rate, Satsuma, if you want to have this fight out, that seems to me to be the place for it.
Your commitment to making this a safe place for women HAS made it a safe place. I think all of us who look to your blog for our women’s news would support you in whatever measures you need to take to retain this site’s integrity and your own sanity!
Could we please have a link directly to your blog, not the discussion board. I don’t find the blog on the FS opening page links.
Do you mean at the main page, womensspace.org, Sis? If so, there’s a link to this blog at the top of the left hand column where it says, “Women’s Space is Blogging, Check Us Out!”
Having said that, that page needs WORK. I have so much work to do so far as my blogs not to mention getting our radfem store going, and especially now. I have meal plans I used to use to feed my family of 10 on less than $200 per month. I did that for years. And zillions of other ways to get by on nothing, which I also did for years.
One thing I am making a priority right now is getting out the paper publication, Women’s Space Underground, that I have promised everyone. I think it’s really important to get that done now, for a bunch of reasons. That will solve some of the comments/moderation problems I’m having, because the group that will be getting the paper publication is not the same as the group that reads here.
Level Best, Laurelin, Judy Best, everyone, thanks. I get tired, and your encouragement means so much to me.
Aletha: Woman, you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into thinking to run unmoderated discussions on your boards. I’ll e-mail you. Argh.
Good way to lose all faith in humanity: Have a woman centered blog with many readers and many commenters.
But I haven’t lost it all yet. I’ll never lose it all. I’m just not strung together that way.
xo
Heart
Satsuma, sorry to talk about you in the third person, but I feel as though I should respond to what has been said here about you (also in the third person).
Re Satsuma: I think Satsuma is legit. I’ve known and know several, well, a lot, of women quite a lot like Satsuma who have been independent and lived apart from men all of their lives and who struggle to understand the decisions of women who have lived differently. Satsuma (and other women like her that I know) care about all women not in the touchy-feely mooshy sense, but in the sense that women are their tribe. You see this in Satsuma’s admiration of and support for both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin (which has been hard for many women here to understand, in light of other things she’s written, but I understand it.) I think Satsuma is hugely frustrated by what she sees so far as women goes and feels as though life doesn’t have to be so difficult and hard for many women as it is. She really does want to help but can’t figure out how to other than talking about what has worked for her. She has a deep understanding of Second Wave/lesbian feminism, of its history and leaders. I suppose it’s possible she could have studied really hard so as to masquerade as someone who knows all that stuff, but, I don’t think so, because the things she talks about are not things you can get from studying. What she says is what grows out of many years of thinking about this movement we are all part of. I’ve encountered many fakers and they never get it right and it is never integrated into their analysis of current events the way it is with Satsuma.
Someone e-mailed me and said that she thinks Satsuma would be a good interviewer. Ha! She’s probably right.
I think Satsuma has a lot of good things to say and have found her to be a kind and warm person privately, especially, so the way she comes across here and the things she says and the responses are frustrating and hard for me. I don’t think it has to be this hard. I think the way through is for Satsuma to look towards struggling women with hope, compassion and understanding (as opposed to counseling them (her real life job) and “fixing” them). But that’s her call, always. I think there is always the temptation to get digs in at women when we don’t understand what they’re doing and think it’s wrong. That never helps. All it does is drive women away. Do it often enough, nobody will be around to get the digs in at.
Again, sorry to talk about you in the third person,Satsuma.
I’d like for this to be the end of the discussion about Satsuma.
Sigh.
Hell, I assumed this was about the swarm of wankers who’ve surely been blasting you with defensive and offensive comments to the Max Hardcore post. It never fails.
Oy, nice to know I’ve become a real person again Heart. Honestly, I just laugh sometimes Heart at the women who worship downward mobility and hate success here. This could be the great weakness of radical feminism. It doesn’t know how to soar or party or celebrate or brag. Women (straight conditioning) have to pretend humility! How I hate that! I’m not from the social work school of feminism, I’m from the women figure out their own lives in their own ways school of feminism.
I enjoy integrating the radical feminist vision with a world in which real stuff gets done. If I’d listened to all the feminist stuff and didn’t question the bad stuff about it, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today.
To me, feminism was simply about women taking charge of their lives. Women can easily overthrow patriarchy, and most of the time, just choose to not engage it. Perhaps all great visionary movements fall into disrepair in time.
I remember awhile ago, I think it might have been in the early 90s, Mary Daly was surprised when I told her I used her seven deadly sins of the fathers to great success in business. She was flabergasted by that comment. No one I know actually applied a lot of these theories to the real world; what fascinates me is creative application.
On here I read the radical feminists, and out in the world, I meet all these very successful self-made women that I love, but neither the twain shall meet. There is this cultural divide between radical women, and women in daily life.
I’m from the tough love school for women. It is not popular to say that we are 100% in charge of our own destiny, because this makes women who have fallen through the cracks feel bad. Feeling bad won’t get you anywhere in life.
Women on this blog get mad at success or any woman who thinks this is exciting and challenging. What I have to say, is that my life is a testiment that if you APPLY the wisdom of radical lesbian feminism, and you don’t fall into the trap of ever living with men as an adult, and you throw your mind as far as it will go, you’ll actually have a much better life than all the women who think they need men to prosper. I’m saying you will be healthier and wealthier if you DON’T marry men, live with them or have children.
I’m saying brilliance and cleverness and excitement and accomplishment are what await a true radical feminist.
What pains me here is that women don’t believe this. I think there are a lot of women in the world who are truly afraid of being different. They struggle to fit in everywhere, instead of choosing to live by an inner guidance system or even an inner true light.
Women think other women should fail and suffer. I’m not from that school of thought. I know that education and study advance you, and I know you need no handouts, welfare bureaus or social service agencies to do this. When you leave behind the production machine of patriarchy — which is not factory work, but childbearing, you really are free from personally contaminating patriarchy.
It’s what I find so frustrating here at times, this head in the sand, I don’t give a damn attitude. It’s this worship of poverty and downward mobility, or the belief that a radical lesbian life will not cause you to be better off in the end.
In the worlds I deal with, I succeed in helping women earn more money than they thought possible. I teach them how to weather the storms that cause so many women to fail. I prevent women from doing silly things like selling instead of buying. It is my job to make sure women don’t make the mistakes that lead to poverty in the first place. If I can catch young women soon enough, they won’t waste 25-30 years, and they’ll have more satisfaction and better jobs, and a better life overall.
There is nothing worse than reading about women who can’t afford dentists here. Somehow that gets to me the most. I meet women everyday who are already setting themselves up for this. If they have the good fortune of working with me, they’ll do a lot better. Women need support and encouragement to succeed in life. They don’t need to be belittled for wanted health and wealth in America. There are plenty of countries out there for that, in the U.S. things are somewhat different. Not ideal, but certainly not as bad as eveyone likes to say here.
Every time a woman marries a man and has children and quits work in the state of California, puts her at a greater risk than buying a financial stock right now. The risk is that she is throwing about 10 years away from retirement planning, and stands to get divorced at a 50-60% rate. That means she will probably be the sole support of children and her standard of living will drop immediately. This happens every day of the year.
So I offer a counterargument about radical lesbian self. It has nothing to do with this. There is so much more nuance to what I advocate in the world, and I may not be the kindest writer or the most articulate author of what this radical lesbian self is to me on a personal level. That is hard to explain. I was a pioneer in so many new worlds, that I think I just left the world of downward mobility that so many women see at their lot in life. When I was growing up there were no lesbian role models. There was no understanding of the lesbian child. I was unique, and felt that my special life would take me places. I was harrassed in school, so I learned how to fight back. I thought I would go my own way, and win in the end. It took a long time for a lot of straight women out there to get things i’d already figured out by age 10. I didn’t have to wait for years to discover radical feminism , I was born a radical feminist, I paid my dues, and I intend to celebrate my success in life.
I found poverty actually dull, and thought that I could do a whole lot better than a lot of straight women out there and have a better life. I think heterosexual women often feel they are superior to lesbians, and think our ideas are utopian.
But I believed in the male free life, and I believed that lesbian feminism led to incredible personal, political and spiritual insights.
It’s what causes me to greatly admire ambitious women. It’s what makes me love gritty women like Sarah Palin, when feminists out there think she is the devil. As I said before, I get more hate email about Palin and Hillary from feminists than I ever do from men.
I love smart ambitious women. And there is nothing smarter and more ambitious than women who win high office in politics, and nothing more threatening to women who haven’t risen this far. The irony is the old guard feminists get mad at the Sarah Palins, just because they have personal beliefs that don’t tow a party line. I don’t tow a party line that says be poor, don’t achieve, don’t make a lot of money, don’t have the best in life… that doesn’t go over well. But feminism frees all women, and it comes out looking rather odd. Sarah Palin is a feminist in my book, and she is a fundamentalist christian. How shocking! Maybe a lot of women here simply don’t know how caring and loving fundamentalist christians actually are. Perhaps they haven’t met fundamentalist christians who are lesbian accepting.
You can’t be both right? Well in my opinion, how can you be a free woman if you are living with men and having sex with them. Yuck!! But I am sure feminists here who do this would still think of themselves as feminists, right?
Men don’t trash Palin the way so many women feminists do.
So this contradictory belief may seem mysterious; a love of both Palin and Clinton. Something about their personal struggles I deeply identify with. Something about seeing a woman on stage accepting a VP nomination while her husband holds the baby is so amazing to me.
Feminism is about paving the way for all women to achieve their dreams. Again, the paradox is, conservative women might benefit all the more from feminism, while radical women are getting left behind. Maybe it has to do with getting to the mountain top and seeing the promised land. I guess I didn’t like that idea. Only a man would get stuck in that, so as a radical lesbian feminist, I wanted to climb the mountain, AND I wanted to GO to the promised land.
It’s not a land many women here are interested in, but it makes me jump up in the morning all excited about life. It’s what causes me to prove the superior lesbian mind by buying when everyone else is panic selling. Perhaps being a lesbian feminist in the big old bad business world is the ultimate long term investment.
Or perhaps it’s something I learned when I first started taking violin lessons. Violin is not an easy instrument, if you have average talent, but great love of the instrument, then you plod along for years until you sound beautiful. The great thing about violin, is that as a child, I could hear my teacher play this instrument, and WOW it was amazing. “Someday, I’ll be that good,” I said to myself. I could hear what my future with that instrument could be, and this was delightful.
This analogy may not “resonate” with women here. But some women will read this and say, “Hey, I’m going to make it big, and I’m going to do it on my own lesbian terms, and I will not have excuses, I will succeed to my own specifications no matter what!”
That to me is the lesbian feminist dream. No I don’t want failure and poverty, and no I am not swayed by everyone else going nuts over a stock market that is quite predictable. The fortunes are made quickly after events like this, while everyone else is still in panic.
it’s the same kind of panic I had to overcome coming out of the closet in corporate worlds or facing incredible social rejection by straight feminists. I knew in the end I would win, and it would be on my own terms without compromise. When you live this kind of life, you feel proud to achieve and succeed, you don’t want to celebrate being poor or worshipping things that cause women to be in such trouble.
You just know what works, and most women in the world don’t know what this is about. They have never had the chance to see how wonderful life can be without men holding you back or not caring who you are in your own home. That’s the horrible compromise heterosexual women are kind of stuck with, or at least they believe they are straight with all the brain washing that goes on in support of that world. How else do you explain women coming out as lesbians in their 40s after being married to men for 20 years? This happens all the time. I meet these women everywhere. I even meet happily married straight women who are lesbians, but they haven’t figured it out yet. I leave them be, just live my life by example, and reveal just how successful lesbians can be.
I can see the promised land and I am living in it now. And some day, I’ll be able to play “The Devil’s Trill!”
— an 18th century piece of music I have been struggling with since about 1973!! I know I’ll get it sooner or later!
P.S. A great way to moderate a blog is simply to say “yes I love it!”
“Yuck I hate it.” Don’t sweat the small stuff Heart. Just dump the dumb stuff and go for the gold. I certainly never have my feelings hurt if something doesn’t get published. I’m extreme, I love hyperbolie and polemic, and that stuff that was so fun in radical lesbian feminism simply is out of fashion. Heck, we’ve got women naming magazines and themselves “Bitch” and that really freaks me out! Dating myself with language use here. I’m an anti-vulgarity feminists. I hate male sexual terms like the F-word etc. Obviously women here are more comfortable with bad language, but less comfortable with blunt polemic, go figure?!
Just call me an unreformed second wave and partial first wave feminist. With each passing year I become more old fashioned by the minute. A few of the young ones who have come into my life find me an endearing classic. Reliable and comforting is a sexually aggressive threatening world, so my insistence on proper English and a swear free zone I think makes them more at ease. That and my anti-porn, no sexual excess self. Young women don’t have those values. They still think that a sexual come on is valid, and I try to explain to them that lesbian feminism has a lot more to do with liberation, and it is not about sexual excess. It gets their attention!
I am not a leftist or even a rightist, I am a woman who really goes for it, and never contaminate themselves with men kind of feminist. I’m not the hippie sex drugs and rock and roll type person. I hated all that nonsense, just wasn’t me. Perhaps a lot of that leftie stuff just annoyed me and still does. Weirdly enough, give me a proper fundamentalist christian any day over a vulgar swearing sexualized lesbian.
I pick and choose what I read here. If I’m bored, I move one, if I like what somebody wrote or have a critique I just put it out there.
In some respects my own ideology is simple — women can free themselves of economic dependence on men, and when they take this cause seriously enough, women will have more freedom in the world than they know what to do with. Think of that!
Seeing how this election went, I know that it’s not easy for women to get elected even when they are really smart. I learned a valuable lesson here — feminists attack Hillary all the time. Feminists I guess are still waiting for some ideal perfect woman to come along in the big parties.
Do I want my own blog? Actually I already have many of them, but they are specialized and have a very small reader base. I don’t have to moderate anything, the subjects themselves kind of keep people away.
Polemic and hyperbolie are honored literary forms women. Lesbians of the old school (I’m old school in case you haven’t figured it out yet) love this style of writing. Young Gen X women freak out at it, not understanding it’s purpose.
I’m from the cold water school. How else to get women to wake up before they end up 65 and poor as church mice? The raod to poverty is slow and steady if you don’t pay attention. Being born with little doesn’t mean you can’t do well in life. It simply means you have to work harder and find new friends who will encourage upward mobility. In other words, don’t settle. I don’t want future women ever to be in that mess. Self respecting lesbians deserve to soar not survive. How to get women to this point? Reason, bluntness… who knows.
So good luck with the moderation. Everyone keep writing. And Heart, just cut it or dump it, and don’t sweat it. I’m up for that. Do real feminists each quiche? :-) Bad joke there
I think heterosexual women often feel they are superior to lesbians, and think our ideas are utopian.
That may be true of some, but for you to say that here? Oh, the irony. Satsuma, you still have not answered my question about where you see worship of poverty or downward mobility. Perhaps you answered in one of your moderated responses, but you must know, disputing your definition of success is not equivalent.
Heart, I know what could happen to an unmoderated discussion, but for some reason, I get very few comments I have to spam. Every once in awhile my blog attracts a fool who thinks threatening me proves his manhood, but the forum has not been touched. Perhaps it is so wide open, the fools feel intimidated. Regardless, if trolls became a problem, I could move a discussion to a moderated forum, or a forum requiring registration. These PHP bulletin boards have amazing flexibility.
Sis, are you saying you could not find a link to my blog? There are three on the home page, two rather prominently displayed, I would think. The Free Soil Party Blog
This blog is a pro-woman, anti-misogyny, anti-subordination blog and it will continue to be so.
Anti-subordination? And you allow somebody to come in here and rant obscenely against the poor?
I don’t think so, Mary. I have repeatedly and often, when I didn’t feel like it, to understate, used my good time and energy to respond, point by point, to those particularly obscene rants. And other rants I find equally obscene.
That is one value I can see in allowing radical feminists/lesbian feminists to say unfortunate, wrong things on my blog. Then, I am able to, and others are able to, at length, respond to those wrong things, and the reading public learns what a radical feminist response to those things might be. If there is nothing but “me too,” “me too,” “me too,” what’s the point of comments at all? If all disagreement or destructive commentary gets spammed, the picture that ends up being painted is false, as though radical feminists/lesbian feminists are in agreement about things, when nothing could be further from the truth. (!) I have tried in vain to get women to write more carefully and less destructively. In the end, women write what they write.
I am a journalist. I am also a historian of sorts. For that reason, it has always been important to me to capture the conflicts and disagreements that characterized interactions between feminists at any given time period. I did this for the homeschooling movement, too, and my series, “Homeschoolers History of Homeschooling” is the result, it has become a classic, read and referred to throughout the world, because it documents movement conflicts and problems carefully, sparing nothing. I did this to some degree for the home birth movement as well.
My blog, my boards, and all of my writings and other women’s writings similarly document the conflicts and difficulties of our movement at this time in history. That’s why I virtually never delete anything once it’s approved. My boards go back to 2000. I wish we had more of this type of documentation from way back, from the second wave, because it would shed light on the difficulties we have now, it would fill in the gaps and might allow us to refute all the lies that are told about us. But we didn’t have the internet then, we just had paper, and, by far, not enough of it, and who knows how much of women’s good writings were destroyed or lost because they did not want their difficulties and struggles to be read by others down the line? I’m betting lots. The same with the Left.
I can find and post links in which I’ve responded carefully, point by point, to what Satsuma has said about the poor (which I agree, is wrong, and I have said that to everyone and to Satsuma, repeatedly, right here, straight up.) It’s one thing to spam comments from anti-feminists, trolls, pro-porn/prostitution people, etc., I have no problem doing that. I do have problems when the woman is a radical feminist/lesbian feminist.
But yeah. I’m tired. Maybe it’s time for me to do away with comments entirely, I am considering that.
On October 2, I wrote 11 comments encompassing 3,100-plus words in response to Satsuma’s wrong rants about poverty. I was very direct.
The link to the first of the 11 comments is here:
http://www.womensspace.org/phpBB2/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=19855
Based on the response, quite a few people found value in this response. There was value in writing it, and there’s value in it being out there *as* a response.
You know, this is part of a much larger issue I am having with radical feminists, and I can’t decide whether to write about it or go no comments and forget about it. Ha. Bitter ha.
RANT IN THE DIRECTION OF THE GODDESS, LOOKING FOR SOME ANSWERS
Radical feminism, feminism just generally, but particularly second wave feminism which is what many of us here appreciate, was never about women fixing other women or critiqueing them, their lives, their politics, their views. It was about each woman speaking her own truth and then women together analzying the truth that all had spoken in order to create hypotheses about women’s realities and then to strategize solutions and support one another in making those solutions a reality. When second wavers began to be more concerned about other women’s failings than their own, that was the beginning of the end so far as the vitality and strength of the second wave.
It seems to me that everywhere I look, radfems want to fix the other woman somehow, like they have somehow achieved perfection or arrived and are themselves beyond criticism. Go anywhere, you will see otherwise good and fine radfems/lesbian feminists online slagging the other woman off because she is too this, too that, wrong about this, wrong about that, she is too mean, too nice-y nice-y and therefore enslaved to gender stereotypes, or she is too nasty, look, she wants to be a man, or she is too measured and calm or fair and therefore, “phony”, look, she tolerates that woman, look she lets that woman comment, look, she is that woman’s friend, look, she does this, that and the other. The hell. It sucks, it’s mean-spirited, it’s messed up, the way women tend to bond over their common judgments or dislike or resentments of other women. I find this, in the end, to be more destructive than a radical/lesbian feminist coming into a thread here and offering us a piece of her mind she can’t afford to lose, which is what Satsuma frequently does. At least here women can respond and tell her off. Behind the scenes where women are getting slagged off, or on blogs where comments are not allowed but the blogger continually is ranting and raving about other women (!), or in blogs of radfem diva types where the only commenters are sycophants, or in the little digs all over the place that can’t be addressed straight on, it’s just so many foul emissions, so much toxic, noxious anti-woman pollution filling the air, making it impossible to breathe and dangerous to breathe.
I mean, what. I’m going to carefully read all comments, approve only the ones I like, make it look as though everyone gets along just dandy, knowing that’s not at all true (and everyone else knows it too!)? Knowing women are going to be slagging women off all over the place, but it’s okay, here we’re all agreed, or something like that? Except that’s a lie?
Among other things, I have ethical problems with that just as a journalist. It paints a false picture.
END RANT.
Cool Aunt, I meant to say, yeah, I have probably spammed 50 pro Max Hardcore pieces of filth in the last week and a lot of other filth too that I won’t get into right now. Of course, I don’t read all that stuff carefully, but just seeing it is demoralizing. I don’t think I have to “document” that kind of crap. It’s well documented throughout the universe.
It’s feminism I am interested in documenting.
This comments problem is one of the reasons bb stopped blogging.
Thanks, {{{Heart}}}.
It’s a monumental undertaking. There’s nothing about you that lacks ambition!
I continue to be amazed at your stamina and perseverance.
Heart,
The link that you gave takes me to a Wordpress login page.
:-) ?!
Oh, sorry, start on comment #15 here:
http://www.womensspace.org/phpBB2/2008/09/27/what-did-and-did-not-cause-the-wall-street-meltdown/
Thanks, Mary.
{{}}
Heart, this seems like an enormous undertaking. That said. I learn as much from the comments as I do from the posts.
This gets me thinking about the ways women treat each other. A Womens’s Studies professor I know says at the start of each class, she has the students decide how they will treat each other and what is and is not acceptable. She anticipates heated discussions, because looking at sexism can bring up strong emotions.
Maybe we should talk about how we want to be treated and how to treat each other.
I wanted to write to say thanks for your brave way that you moderate.
I find that you allow many voices of feminism is very interesting, and may, if preserved, be one record of recent feminisms, and how it is constantly changing and staying the same.
I really hope that my words have not caused you a lot of stress, especially with hateful words from the pro-sex industry lobby and “feminists”.
I know you have been protecting survivors of the sex trade from their lies and very damaging attacks. It is very hurtful, but like most women who exited the sex trade I had to live tough, so I have many barriers to their attempts to undermine my views.
So if you ever need support, I will do what I can.
After all that is the least I can do.
“Cool Aunt, I meant to say, yeah, I have probably spammed 50 pro Max Hardcore pieces of filth in the last week and a lot of other filth too that I won’t get into right now.”
I’m sorry to hear you have to cull through that dreck. Anyone who would defend a woman hating, rapist cretin like Hardcore isn’t worth reading.
I agree with Faith and others: your blog, your choice. Moderate however you like.
” It was about each woman speaking her own truth … and then to strategize solutions and support one another in making those solutions a reality.”
I really like this Heart. I’m going to keep it.
Re: comments. I see it largely as the dilemma of herstory: to remember or to invent? If we remember too much we remain too entrenched for discourse. I don’t mind that some comments stay in neverland. (though it is not neverland to you Heart and that’s bothersome–maybe you could just e-mail them back to the commenter and never look at them again?).
If we invent peace do we then remember peace? Do we have to remember everything? A question of set backs or jumping off points, I wonder.
re: feminisms, I am not convinced that accusing antisubordination feminists of hating success is less offensive than accusing antisubordination feminists of hating sex.
That’s not an argument about anything. I certainly don’t know wtf I’d do if I were in charge of moderating here, and I also don’t think that’s relevant. Heart has to make tough decisions about how to make her space into what she wants it to be in the face of a lot of people who want it to be something else entirely, for one reason or another. Many of whom are willing to entirely disregard things like her clearly stated wishes, as laid out in her moderation policy.
Good luck, Heart. in the end, the only right decision is the one that seems worth it, to you.
I appreciate that it is difficult to moderate your fine blog. And right now, you need another person to comment on how you moderate your blog, like you need a hole in the head. However, it bothers me that some of your posters (it happens to be Satsuma right now) are allowed to make comments that are hurtful to other posters/readers (Mary Sunshine for one) and partly because they disregard (don’t try to understand) other poster’s views and feelings altogether. I should read your policy for the making of comments to your blog, for the section on “being considerate of other people’s feelings”. Even if your blog was only a place for discussing radical feminism theory (which is the writing style Satsuma uses), feelings are involved in how the ideas are communicated. Hope that makes sense. It won’t bother me if you leave my comment out. Just needed to express this and to let you know what one (probably more) lurkers (of this particular blog posting) are thinking. I don’t want to add to the con side of your deliberation about keeping the comments. I find the comments in blogs enhance the blog. Even the struggles for understanding, as is happening right now.
“Cool Aunt, I meant to say, yeah, I have probably spammed 50 pro Max Hardcore pieces of filth in the last week and a lot of other filth too that I won’t get into right now. Of course, I don’t read all that stuff carefully, but just seeing it is demoralizing. I don’t think I have to “document” that kind of crap. It’s well documented throughout the universe.
It’s feminism I am interested in documenting.
This comments problem is one of the reasons bb stopped blogging.”
Hey, I’m glad you don’t document that garbage. And if you did, I can tell you with near 100% certainty that I wouldn’t read it. (I leave a fraction of 1% wiggle room in the event that an online friend asked me to read a BS comment.)
Heart,
I return to this blog again and again because for the most part people discuss things in a civil, thoughtful way here. I think we all appreciate how much work that entails on your part with the moderating, editing, etc. My only suggestion would be that you stop agonizing and expending your energy worrying about being fair. Just block things quickly. I think the discussions won’t suffer. And best of luck!
Rubber stamp for what Twitch said.
Thanks, women. I do agonize over things too much, very true, twitch! Thanks for the encouragement.