must belong somewhere

Why The Washington Post’s new lady blog is wrong for women

jessicavalenti:

Here’s the thing: I will always want more women’s (and feminist) voices in the mainstream media, particularly in politics. There’s an overwhelming byline gender gap and that needs to change. But The Washington Post’s new lady blog, “She the People,” is not a step in the right direction. In fact, I think it’s pretty terrible.*  

I’m all for WaPo featuring more women covering politics, but why oh why can’t they just - I don’t know - feature more women covering politics on the main site or pages? As Steph Herold tweeted earlier today, “why do women need a separate blog to write about politics?”

The logo doesn’t exactly help things either. I mean, “she” is underlined with lipstick? 

And the tag-line, “the world as women see it” not only reeks of gender essentialism, but promotes the idea that women’s opinions and perspectives aren’t normative, but somehow “other” than real, everyday opinions. 

Ann Friedman (my former Feministing bud) has done a lot of writing on this particular issue, so I’ll quote some wise words from her back from when Slate started their lady-site, Double X:

The proliferation of woman-centric sites raises the sorts of questions that keep a feminist editor up at night. If Slate saw a demand for more content about women, why didn’t it start publishing more articles for and by women on its main site? The decision to devote micro-sites to groups that aren’t white men — The Root for black readers, Double X for women readers — implies that Slate recognizes the need for more coverage that caters to women and people of color. But it doesn’t want that coverage mucking up its main product.

…When publishers create separate sites dedicated to women or to black people, they are signaling that they don’t see a need to have their main site serve these people as core readers. They are, in essence, saying, “We want the ad revenue associated with your readership, but we don’t create our homepage with you in mind.”

The site-as-traffic-and-revenue-bait becomes a lot more obvious when you check out the stories She The People chose to highlight:

Uh huh. This is pretty much the same strategy that Slate’s Double X used when they launched - throw some incendiary antifeminist headlines up and get our collective panties in a bunch in an effort to drive traffic via outrage. (Btw, Double X is now the XX Factor and has an equally vomitous tag-line: ”What women really think!”)

I’m glad that The Washington Post wants to appeal more to women. I’m also glad that this blog means that they’re employing more women; that’s great. But there’s a much simpler - and less condescending - way to create a publication that does these things.

You want more women readers? Get more women writers: on the main page, in the opinion section, writing about more than “women’s” issues. Cover more feminist topics.

And for the love of all that is good in the world, drop the fucking lipstick logo. 

*Full disclosure/caveat: I’ve written for The Washington Post’s Outlook section in the past and have had pretty great experiences with my editor there

I read a book every week this year.*

And here are some things I learned:

1) It is possible to keep a New Years Resolution!

2) I read much faster than I think I do.

3) While reading a book is much different from reading the internet (in that books generally have at least one of the following: a sustained narrative, a single author, a single subject or connecting thread/theme, or a style particular to the author/series/book, and plus they tend to be made of paper), on a normal day of internet-browsing I’d estimate that I read the equivalent of about a quarter of a book. What this means is that I read a lot to begin with, so reading a book a week wasn’t such a stretch.

4) I felt incredibly productive, because stacking up all of the books I’ve read (and adding them to my Shelfari “shelf,” which tracked my progress toward my goal of 52) was something I could actually see/my progress had a physical manifestation, unlike reading articles on the internet or in magazines, watching TV shows or movies, etc. Productivity feels nice.

5) My usual excuses for not reading more are entirely invalid (at least for me). The first excuse is that being a student limits my ability to read other books—the way around this, of course, is to overload oneself with literature classes, get bored with 19th century novels and heavy non-fiction accounts, and read fun stuff instead of sleeping (or be bad and read fun stuff instead of school stuff, and then read school stuff at the last minute)! Plus, all of those books I was reading for school? They counted! Because they were books and I was reading them! The second excuse is that there is nothing good to read. If I ever catch myself thinking this again, I will pay someone to bury me alive under a pile of remaindered books.

6) Productive procrastination is the best kind of procrastination. Watching 15 episodes of The Wonder Years in a row is also pretty good, but reading Lorrie Moore instead of that heavy classic for class? Way better.

7) Goals are useful, because they encourage structure. Structure and deadlines encourage stress and pressure, which foster productivity (failing is scary!).

I’m going to do it again in 2012! And maybe this time I’ll keep a running list of those books, and my thoughts about them, here!

*I actually didn’t read a book a week. There were some weeks when I was a lazy jerk, but then there were weeks during which I read three books to make up for it. “I read a book every week this year” sounds much nicer than “I read 52 books this year,” because 52 is a weird number. In the end, I actually read one extra book, but it was only 35 pages long, so I’m hesitant to count it as an actual book. And besides, 53 is an even weirder number.

This has been a terribly written 1:30 AM post. I promise I will never write this badly ever again. It’s been a long year.