Women’s Space

The Long Walk Home by Ana Maria Jurpik

I think feminist blogging, so far as the potential I believe it once had for advancing feminist goals, is history.

I’ve read the recent blog post at Professor What If’s place, the comments, and some of the responsive posts and comments elsewhere.  I was thinking as I read about all of the many times in my activist life I’ve been at this same place, this point at which I recognize some movement or work I’d had a few hopes for was effectively done, its potential exhausted.  I’ve been here with the anti-war movement, the peace movement, the back-to-the-land/homesteading movement, the intentional community movement, the home birth movement, the natural childbirth movement, the homeschooling/unschooling movement, the simple living movement, the battered women’s movement and a few other movements.

It’s happened on the feminist blogosphere the way it always happens.    Energetic, enthusiastic people work hard to create a movement.  It catches on and builds, adding new members, grass-roots style, every day.   For a while, the energy of the movement is enough to sustain it through conflicts and difficulties; intra-movement competition remains at least somewhat friendly and works to improve the quality of activist work overall.  Leaders emerge.   People work together harmoniously.  Good work gets done.

Eventually, inevitably, the movement comes across the radar of capitalist, corporate, white male heterosupremacist-based interests. Let’s call these “the Man” for short.   Where there is a buck to be made, the Man will be there to make a buck.  In every last movement I’ve been part of, it has held true that only  a very few people recognized what was happening when it was happening, who saw it in time, in other words. I generally haven’t seen it in time, ever.  I am too hopeful, always, too optimistic, too patient, always giving (undeserved) benefits of the doubt.  Usually people see what went down only after the movement has gone to seed or is completely done so far as its energy and effectiveness.

The Man views activist movements as money-making opportunities and ventures for himself.  He feels he is entitled to a cut.  There is neither rhyme nor reason to his beliefs about his own entitlement, and he doesn’t feel compelled to offer any or to think about it at all.  He gets in by offering activists something they need, like money, or something they think they need, like conference space or speaking invitations or book deals or blogging awards or exposure of some kind, or “networking opportunities”.   All activists have to do in return, says the Man,  is advertise his products,  spread the word about the conferences he is so generously sponsoring,  provide the writings for the books he will sell, accept the “awards” he makes up and circulate them and post them conspicuously.   All activists have to do, in other words, is get the word out about the Man and what the Man is doing, and why it is so important to support him on all of their carefully-created and volunteer-maintained (read: flourishing)  grass roots networks.

There’s a cost to all this, of course, a price to be paid.  Activists will find they must abide by the Man’s rules and agree that he will ultimately be the decision-maker so far as, for example, what goes in and onto the covers of their books,  how the books will be marketed,  who will be invited to the conferences and what will happen during the conferences, and how the conferences and the Man’s other “services” will be marketed and publicized.  After all, he’s publishing the books, he’s sponsoring the conferences, he’s paying for the ads,  he thought up the awards, he made the offers,  the dime is his, and activists are therefore beholden.  At this point, whatever the movement might be or have been, it’s history now. From here it is all downhill.

Regardless the movement, the Man can be depended upon to approach movement people who are the most marketable, the least experienced and therefore the most trusting (and grateful) and the least risky, people he knows will make honest, exploitable, mistakes, and who are already leaders with manipulatable followers.  He’s not all that concerned about what the people he chooses actually believe or the quality of their activism; he just wants to make a buck where a buck is to be made.  Movement people are virtually always naive about these things, and their leaders often have big heads.  They frequently readily believe what their followers have said to and about them and are too quick to believe their own press.  They imagine they have been discovered and chosen because of their unusual skills or gifts or something like that, because the Man is impressed by their ideals, dedication and vision, when usually, it’s more that they are marketable, naive and exploitable.  They are young, they are pretty or handsome, they are white, they are middle class, they have the right kind of education, they say the right kinds of things in the right kinds of ways and so do their followers, and so, people will buy.  That’s all that matters to the Man.

Once the Man gets in, all hell is guaranteed to break loose.   Movement people will now fight, not in the productive ways of the past but in the destructive ways that always follow in the Man’s wake.  They’ll fight over who was chosen, who wasn’t chosen, why the chosen were chosen and the not-chosen weren’t.  They’ll fight over the fact that some who were hardworking weren’t recognized and some who weren’t so hardworking were.  They’ll fight over the way the chosen behave, what they do once they have all of that attention, and what they don’t do. They’ll fight over who did and didn’t get the credit for this or that, who stole this and who stole that.  The chosen will find themselves — always, guaranteed — in a downward spiral of compromise, because you have to compromise to deal with the Man.  The compromises the chosen make will become fodder for ever-worsening, ever-deepening and -intensifying intra-movement conflicts, more blaming, more resentments, increased finger-pointing, increased vigilance.  New people who join the movement unaware of the history will defend the wrong people, accuse the wrong people and will get gobbled up by the Man themselves.  They won’t understand the hostility they then face from other movement people; after all, they’re not doing anything differently from what others have (apparently) done.  And their confusion will be eminently understandable.  In the end, everybody will be drinking from the same poisoned well, and everybody will be sick from drinking there.

At that point,  the visionaries in the movement will leave it, go their own way.  People will stay and will attempt to stoke the embers and will claw for their own niche  in what is by now the Man’s fiefdom, but they will find themselves up against a lingering deadness, a staleness, that cannot be shaken.  The lights will go out, and no one will be able to turn them back on.  The Man, of course, doesn’t care.  He’ll be there, large and in charge, counting the cash from the movement he has now successfully co-opted and colonized, the movement he now essentially owns because he’s got everybody jumping to his tune.  Bones are a siren song that way, to mix metaphors in an only apparently-unlikely way.  Once movement people get their eyes on the Man’s bones (as opposed to personally and individually supporting one another and their own leaders, including financially), it’s all over.  Done.  History.  Fini.

The end of a movement or of hopes for a movement is not a tragedy.  Movements have natural lives, they begin and they end.   Movement energy cannot be extinguished; it will always break forth again in some new and unexpected way.  What is a tragedy is the way the Man’s colonizing turns us, as dedicated, committed activists and good people, against one another.  What is a tragedy is failing to recognized who really did what, and to whom.

I think Professor What If and Brittany Shoot and Mandy Van Even were trying to do something good in writing and posting What if the feminist blogosphere is a form of digital colonialism? I think they offered some good insights and made some good observations.    But given the back story, the history, the Man’s very successful colonizing of the feminist blogosphere — everything from ads front and center on blogs everywhere you look, including for the absurdly inappropriate, to misogynist blogs and non-blogs being included in some unknown, but affluent, organization’s  “Top 30 Feminist blogs” (who cares about “Fem 2.0″?  What is “Linkfluence”?  Other than some white man’s corporate, money-making venture? Where does all of this fanfare come from?  Why would feminists advertise and promote these people?), to conferences intending to unite the grass roots with the forever-institutionalized-and-set-in-stone, always a hopeless endeavor,  to book deals with feminist bloggers that include something to offend virtually everyone but white, heterosexual men, to pro-feminist blogs owned by pornographers, the effect of their post was to salt a gaping-open wound, to step on an unlanced boil.  If my experience holds true, and I believe it will, there is really no way to heal this wound.  The boil will continue to fester.  What I find unfortunate about the post at Professor What If’s place is, nobody there talks about The Man as colonizer and co-opter extraordinaire.  He just walks, as is usually the case.  But, it’s understandable.  As the saying goes, “it’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head”.

I’ve known it was over for a while now, at least a year, though I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it.    All the signs have been there.   Hostility and cruelty, including of women, towards women, reign in ways they didn’t a few years back.  Attack posts (meaning women attacking women publicly) are the rule, not the exception.  Productive public discussions among feminists are no longer possible on public boards or in blog comments threads; they have to take place privately, on private blogs, in passworded threads,  on private boards, in e-mail, on the telephone.   A lot of good feminist bloggers have gone silent.  Instead of discussing how to prosper and thrive in grass roots ways, via mutual support and independent of the Man, blog communities wonder if they can’t increase their dependence on the Guy.

For my part, I’m going turn my focus towards writing for radical feminist paper publications (there are some great plans for that in the works) and on writing and publishing books.  I was thinking recently about the fact that I am proudest of all of my published writings.  That should be a no brainer,  I know, but it’s easy to lose perspective in the blogosphere, to get caught up in your writings and lose sight of what you really are or are not accomplishing with them.  I’m proud that my articles published in off our backs are available online worldwide, to libraries, colleges and universities via various publishing services, as well as via paper back issues.  My blog posts scroll off into the ether daily, but my  published writings remain and their influence is felt and will continue to be felt in ways blog posts can never be.  For the past year I’ve been thinking about the way most “real” feminist writers don’t blog, don’t write on the internet at all (and their reasons for that), and about the way the ones who do blog so often disappoint.  A recent example is Katha Pollitt who recently dedicated an entire,  in my opinion disgusting, post on the UK Guardian’s Comment Is Free to castigating Nadya Suleman, including referring to her as a “freak show”.   Katha Pollitt, as a feminist writer, has to descend to this sick level to get (and keep) readers?  She sure does.  This is the internet, after all.

I’ll still be blogging here*, but not in the ways and for the reasons I have in the past.  It’s kind of sad, these moments always are, but there are always reasons to look forward to the next chapter, too.

Heart

*Though on the new server when that’s finally accomplished; the last I heard everything was going to be transferred by the end of the day yesterday, they thought, but so far no update.

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