I used to read Jezebel. Less so now; their egos started to irritate me almost as much as the commenters. However:
The funny thing I see happening here is that these writers are being lauded for their infamously ‘raw honesty’ and willingness to eviscerate themselves/their lives/their psyches for public consumption while also being expected to deliver some sort of holy and whole truth–it’s not just unfair, it’s fucking impossible.
Winstead goads them into an eerilie neo-con line of questioning via the neo-con tradition of verbal bullying, demanding to know if they feel “any obligation to write about responsibility and safety” when talking so explicitly about their sex lives. Don’t misunderstand, their answers are at times profoundly thoughtless, but it’s a deliberately manipulative question deliberately asked to entrap. And let’s have some real talk, this is what’s below the surface of a question like that: You don’t live a very upright lifestyle, and you don’t have very polite sex. What makes you think that your experiences are valid or valuable to a public dialogue about women?
First, on Winstead’s , she immediately steps off with this criminal underestimation of women, introducing the Jez writers matter-of-factly as “role models for young women everywhere,” so far missing the point of their appeal and relevance that it makes you cringe. They’re admired for their candor, for their willingness to give accounts of their lives even if it’s the wrong answer in the face of some antiquated fascist legacy. They’re admired because they offer a contribution to the way we understand the material realities of women’s lives in a way that feels less encumbered by the tyranny of cultural critics who operate under the assumption that autonomy is an exclusively male phenomena, not because they’ve constructed themselves as “bad girls” who get fucked a lot.
And on a real tip, role models? The idea of role models is square one of the fucking problem. We are a culture of idolaters and fetishizers, always defaulting to a ‘higher power’ for the way to live our own lives. Belief in one’s personal agency and power is systematically devalued over and over again, because every hierarchical structure sustains itself on the erasure of possibility and the illusion of immobility. What makes this lady think that being able to appreciate, admire, or identify with someone in the public sphere means that I must suddenly forfeit who I am so I might better reflect who they are? And why would you reinforce that classically patriarchal mechanism with a series of questions designed to shame these women into self-censorship, or twisting themselves into more palatable representations of impossible ideals in the name of “safety”?
I’ll give you this: words do matter, actions do matter. But I’m having a hard time resenting a couple of potential narcissists even a fraction as much I do the type of self-righteous asshole whose arrogance and unwillingness to fucking listen creates these UNBEARABLE silences in the lives of women.
Oh, and one more thing, you awful dinosaur: way to enforce the ol’ standard that there is a single “right” response one should have in the face of their own sexual assault, and for shaming somebody for not turning to the irreparably broken legal system to prosecute their rapist. Gross. (.) These are exactly the reasons why women feel alienated by and irrelevant to feminism. This shit is girl on girl crime.
