Please boycott Feministing
I know you may already be boycotting Feministing because of, well, because of loads of reasons.
You may have decided not to go there anymore back when Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism came out and it was shallow racist crap predicated on condescending to young feminists, or when the criticism by women of color was ignored, or attacked.
You may have decided not to go there anymore as part of the boycott triggered by Feministing’s transphobia.
You may have stopped going there after their classist “boycott Walmart” post (no linklove for Feministing, sorry.)
Today I am asking you to boycott Feministing because of the bullying, privileged, bad faith way they have treated feminists with disabilities.
The chat, ostensibly held to improve treatment of disability at Feministing, was a joke. It was a lot of denial of responsibility, especially from Miriam, (“do you think we have control over our comment threads?”) capped by Courtney’s tone argument against amandaw.
In the follow up post on Feministing, Courtney said she was “excited” to learn more about disability, but then rattled off the suggestions for improvements without attribution to feminists with disabilities. When feminists with disabilities came to Feministing to criticize the follow-up post, there was no response from Courtney or any other Feministing contributor, even though she commented on the thread itself.
When I e-mailed Courtney, Jessica, and Miriam to ask for an explanation, only Courtney e-mailed me back (see comment thread), to say that she was no longer willing to engage publicly regarding the chat or the follow up post, and that if Amandaw wanted an apology she could contact Courtney herself. This flies in the face of the agreement that feminists with disabilities were very careful to secure, that the chat and subsequent discussion would be public. (Feministing’s consent to that agreement is right at the beginning of the chat transcript linked above.)
I think Meloukhia is right. This is evidence of bad faith. As of now, Feministing’s follow up post is still up, lending credence to the wrong idea that they are working on disability inclusion. In other words, they are getting a free improvement to their image because of the work feminists with disabilities did for them, when in fact they are maltreating and actively marginalizing feminists with disabilities. This is dishonest and I don’t think we should be silent about it.
Consequently, I am asking you to boycott Feministing. This includes:
1) Taking Feministing off your blogrolls,
2) Not linking to Feministing’s posts or community posts, and
3) Raising awareness of the abysmal way Feministing has treated feminists with disabilities and other marginalized people.
I note that meloukhia’s open letter to Feministing is already at the bottom of the first page of google results for “Feministing.” How about raising that signal even more?
Other suggestions and discussion welcome here.
Please boycott Feministing.
Update: See also my post here.
Molly said,
November 11, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Absolutely. I can’t believe that response to your e-mail. They were behaving atrociously before, but that—man.
I guess my e-mail to them was right: “Are we to take it from the radio silence that Feministing has decided it’s too much trouble to stop the hostility against people with disabilities, and too embarrassing to apologize to AmandaW for the shocking hypocrisy of the tone argument?”
Answered: yes and yes.
softestbullet said,
November 11, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Arrrghhh wtf. I hadn’t seen those comments.
Yeah, I’ve been boycotting because of the racism and trans hate and classism. I’ll gladly do it for this reason too.
It really sucks that you guys gave them so much time and energy. They didn’t deserve it. :/
xiane said,
November 11, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Their handling of the disability chat, and the subsequent fallout, was the final straw for me. Everyone makes mistakes, and there’s always more to learn about people with different life experiences – unless you write for Feministing, it seems. I join you in this boycott. I will blog about it later – thank you for starting this ball rolling!
quixotess said,
November 11, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Be sure to link your post here when you’ve written it–I would like very much to read it! And thanks.
Shiyiya said,
November 11, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Linked on facebook for the couple of my friends that are feminists.
Chally said,
November 11, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Thank you, Quix. You are fabulous.
meloukhia said,
November 11, 2009 at 6:50 pm
The long list of arguments you give from the site’s history is strong support for a boycott; this isn’t just about the marginalization of women with disabilities, but about repeated marginalization and silencing of numerous groups of people living in marginalized bodies. Feministing is a major site which is viewed, by many, as the face of feminism; it’s used as class reading in introductory college classes, even.
Let’s get the signal boost on this post up; I’d like this in the top page of search results for “Feministing” too.
quixotess said,
November 11, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Well, all right! Presumably someone knows how to use Twitter or something to link more; I sure don’t.
piny said,
November 15, 2009 at 9:24 pm
It’s also a really good argument for this group approach. Hopefully, referencing several ongoing problems will make it harder for Feministing to argue that it speaks for any plurality. Or that it’s receptive to criticism.
Thank you for the detailed rundown, too, quixotess. I saw some references to the chat, but I didn’t know the whole story. Partly because I, er, already don’t read Feministing.
Claire Martine said,
November 22, 2009 at 4:43 am
Yep I read an journal article on Feministing which argued that Feministing incorporates intersectionality really well. Needless to say that when I used this for my thesis, I argued against this.
Ouyang Dan said,
November 11, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Thank you.
As I heard somewhere, “You can’t stop the signal”. I appreciate you keeping it going.
Emily said,
November 11, 2009 at 8:46 pm
This might be a silly question, but would my boycott efforts be in vain if I visited the website at all? I’m not a blogger so I don’t have a blogroll to remove them from, but I don’t want to even visit the site if it would promote it in some way.
“I note that meloukhia’s open letter to Feministing is already at the bottom of the first page of google results for “Feministing.” How about raising that signal even more?”
How does one do this? Just by clicking on the link Google offers?
Shiyiya said,
November 11, 2009 at 9:23 pm
By linking to it, I think.
quixotess said,
November 11, 2009 at 9:30 pm
As I understand it, your individual clicks don’t do much in either case.
Feministing is a wildly popular, large site, especially attractive to new feminists. How do you get to be popular in the blogosphere? Connections. You can write the most brilliant shit in the world and no one will just stumble on it; you have to promote yourself or someone else has to do it for you. The blogosphere is based on people linking to each other’s work and building on it. (Or, you know, stealing it.)
A boycott on such a large site then is predicated on cutting them out of the discourse. Your individual clicks matter a lot less because that’s between you and Feministing. Clicks by themselves don’t do much for a site.
The exact algorithm for how pages get where they are on Google is a secret, of course, but what seems to work best is linking and naming the page in other places. That can include Twitter and Facebook if you don’t have a blog. If that’s not feasible, don’t even worry about it. (:
meloukhia said,
November 12, 2009 at 7:09 am
Yeah, linking as much as possible (in whatever medium you have for linking…if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, etc) and making sure to either include “Feministing” near the link, or to actually use “Feministing” in the text of the link.
Also, yes, not visiting does make a difference. They sell advertising on the basis of page views. That means that they indirectly make money off everyone who goes to the site.
conductress said,
November 11, 2009 at 10:58 pm
This has really turned me off of Feministing. I stuck around after the trans boycott, because I hadn’t been reading the blog long enough to recognize it as part of a larger pattern and assumed that Feministing would eventually improve. This is clearly not the case, so now I will be boycotting Feministing. Like Emily, I don’t have a blog, so it won’t make much difference in terms of site promotion. However, I do not feel that reading Feministing is a good use of my time; I would much rather dedicate my time and energy to reading blogs that are intersectional and can inform my feminism beyond a white, middle-class, cissexual, TAB viewpoint. Thanks to all of you for continuing to draw attention to this issue.
snarkysmachine said,
November 12, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Thank you for this. I have never found that site to be of any kind of use and I’m glad there is a collective effort by WOCs, Transwomen and Women of Differing abilities (of course including any and all intersections) to speak out.
Feminism is not just for white, cisgendered, middle class, able bodied, women. feminism is for ALL people and fuck them for not acknowledging this.
Quixotess: Please Boycott Feministing « Questioning Transphobia said,
November 12, 2009 at 5:03 pm
[...] a comment » Quixotess has posted about the way Feministing treats feminists with [...]
Momo said,
November 12, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Feministing has always been a terrible website, if you ask me. It’s not shocking to me how discriminatory they are, they’ve always came off as extremist and ignorant.
Ceridwen said,
November 12, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I stopped reading feministing after the second time they had a massive thread equating saying that trans women were rapists when they had sex with lesbians (because apparently real lesbians wouldn’t consent to sex with a trans woman). I’m told they just got done with a third and fourth such thread over there, in their attempts to “improve trans discourse” at the site.
And OMG, I read the transcript of the initial chat they had, and I know I shouldn’t have been surprised, but my mouth hung open a little when not TWO SENTENCES IN they were already correcting their hostesses’ tone (not to mention the ongoing ‘TEEEEEEACH MEEEEE!” that went on throught that whole conversation).
quixotess said,
November 12, 2009 at 10:27 pm
OMG I read part of that thread and it was just endless transphobia and I had to stop. Even if the contributors had no control over that, that is a hostile environment and people should NOT be recommending it as a good site for new feminists. D:
Oshaberi said,
November 13, 2009 at 12:44 am
They’ve done that *BEFORE*?!
…
really I shouldn’t be surprised.
But yeah, it was terrible, I don’t know how I read the whole thing (like looking at a video of a train crash).
And it’s still going on. There was another post calling out the commenters on that post for victim blaming, and guess what the first commenter on that *new* post did? Yep, victim blaming.
You’d think that after getting boycotted so much they’d get their act together…
maevele said,
November 12, 2009 at 10:29 pm
signal boosted
uberVU - social comments said,
November 12, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by LittleMousling: I’m boycotting Feministing: http://bit.ly/3klHlJ...
ithiliana said,
November 13, 2009 at 9:13 am
Signal boosted (thanks to Maevele’s post!)
jumpuphigh said,
November 13, 2009 at 10:44 am
Signal boosting
Protests and labors of creation « Reconcile said,
November 13, 2009 at 1:01 pm
[...] (starting? I feel a little uneasy claiming that. hosting, maybe) a boycott on Feministing makes problems for that if I’m not [...]
Max said,
November 13, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I’m down.
voz said,
November 13, 2009 at 4:08 pm
They have a very long history of this bullshit. Feel free to use the graphic I made for any purpose you wish. It is my own creation, with a lil help form their logos.
http://voz-latina.livejournal.com/4425.html
They Want Us To Make A Symphony Out Of The Sound Of Women Swallowing Their Own Tongues « resistance is fertile said,
November 15, 2009 at 12:39 pm
[...] of Feministing, a site I’m partial to (and have advertised the Bonbons on), it is currently being boycotted by those who believe that the Feministing crew are horrible transphobic ableist [...]
louisa said,
November 15, 2009 at 6:19 pm
linking to this on twitter and my personal blog. thanks.
gudbuytjane said,
November 16, 2009 at 11:28 am
I’ve boosted the signal on my blog. Also, there’s a Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=215669251144
The ironic thing about this all is that it is leading us to do what feminism should be about in the first place (in my world, anyway) – women helping other women have their voices heard.
Kali said,
November 16, 2009 at 3:12 pm
If there is a reason I boycotted Feministing it is Samhita. After the original debate on racism, I guess Jessica decided to over-compensate by giving Samhita free reign to label as ‘racist’ anything which met her disapproval. Samhita’s apotheosis was her piece decrying animal-print fashions as ‘racist’. Many people disagreed with her but felt the need to voice their disapproval in the most timid, equivocating fashion, rather than calling her out on a frankly absurd, even offensive premise. When I saw her ‘anti-racism’ hysteria restricting criticism of violence against women in non-white contexts (because that is ‘racist’ don’t you know), I let her know what I, as a non-white woman from a non-Western family background, thought and was promptly banned without warning or explanation of how I violated any policies.
They mods there were such cowards they don’t even tell you that you are banned. Your posts just no longer work.
quixotess said,
November 16, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Kali, I let your comment through, but it was a rather close thing–”hysteria” is a huge no-no for me, and any characterization of saying something is racist as “labelling” and “it’s just something that she personally disapproves of” are also red flags. I don’t know the context of what you describe, so…I let it through. Ta.
Orodemniades said,
November 16, 2009 at 7:27 pm
I haven’t been on Feministing in yonks, but for the love of cheese that chat was redonkulous.;
Thursday Links : A Most Curious Blog said,
November 19, 2009 at 12:35 am
[...] I’ve tried to keep neutral in this issue, because I didn’t read Feministing or Feministe in the first place, but the controversy has grown too large to not link to it: Reconciliate lists reasons to boycott Feministing. [...]
I love you, but your privilege is showing. « monsters and molotovs said,
November 30, 2009 at 11:07 pm
[...] – Another article asking folks to boycott Feministing: http://reconciliate.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/please-boycott-feministing/ – On racist bullshit by Jessica Valenti (the founder and one of the main editors of [...]
Lisa Harney said,
December 6, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Kind of belated, but I found that “They Want Us To Make A Symphony Out Of The Sound Of Women Swallowing Their Own Tongues” title at Resistance is Fertile is telling. Given that pretty much everyone involved on this, from all sides, are women, I don’t see what the point of such a title is. Is she saying that women with disabilities (and trans women, and women of color, and all applicable intersections) are trying to silence white, TAB, cis women, or is she subtly implying that the women who are calling for a boycott are in some way not really women?
It’s also not as if anyone’s calling to shut down Feministing.