Feministing

“The blogosphere produces conflict in a writer. It’s a raucous democracy, a global Athens with all kinds of customers striding through the agora. Perverse thoughts intermingle with healthy ones, like bacteria and vaccine in the same syringe. Vituperative cowards snipe from the safety of an anonymous keyboard. Walking psychotics effloresce their symptoms. Yet the temptation is to return again and again.”

—Deepak Chopra, bestselling author and HuffPost blogger (taken from The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging)

I’m not quite sure how to introduce Feministing to people who have never read the blog. I contemplated creating a “Feministing community” blog and presenting my project on the actual Feministing website, but I decided that would be a little bit too exploitative. One of the things that I love about Feministing is the authentic discourse that occurs, and I think that stealing the space for a school project would taint that a little bit. Instead, I am on a Bryn Mawr blog, which feels very isolated from the dynamic community that exists on Feministing. I had to laugh when I chose the incredibly generic template for the site, thinking that I must be lamely channeling TDAR. Although this is a very standard layout, I did find it amusing that the front page is a street scene of Greenwich Village in New York. We often think of the Village as hub of liberal organizing, so in some ways this very generic picture helps to illustrate what blogs have become; a virtual Village, marked by pages of comments, rather than hours spent sitting in a café.

I would highly recommend that people who have never been to the site peruse the archives of Feministing for at least a few minutes. Even a quick glance will give you an idea of what the blog is about. In detailing the history of Feministing, I think it is best to hear it from the source. This is Jessica Valenti on one of the first videos on Feministing’s youtube channel, talking about how Feministing started. (Which I tried relentlessly to embed in the post, but apparently wordpress hates me.)

I think that Jessica’s point at the end of the video is probably more important than any of the specific details.

“I want you to get to know all of us a little bit better, because I feel like we know our readers, and you know us, in this kind of bizarre personal way. Because, we do talk on the blog, and you are part of our lives and you are part of our feminism, and what better way to get to know us than face-to-face. Sort of.

Arianna Huffington reiterates this point, explaining in the intro to the HuffPo book that:

“Blogs are by nature very personal – an intimate, often ferocious expression of the blogger’s passions.  You’re much more intimate w=hen you’re writing a blog than when you’re writing a column, let alone a book – it’s the coversational nature of it, the way that it draws people in and includes them in the dialogue…And this creates a close bond between blogger and audience.”

Blogs help to break down walls and barriers that exist with most other types of writing – including, ironically, the book the above quote comes from.  More than anything else, Feministing is a very involved conversation, in a way that only the Web 2.0 era could possibly allow.  Just through the course of researching this project, I feel like I’ve gotten to “know” the Feministing bloggers and become an ally in their work.