By Jessica • 17 years ago

Feminism Online, Feminism Offline

Last month, I spent a lot of time traveling doing speaking events for Women’s History Month. Besides it being amazing because I got to meet awesome young feminist women from all over the frigging place, it was also really head-clearing to step back from the work I do online. Because let me tell you, doing the majority of your work from behind a laptop can be exhausting.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the online community we have here and my heart is blogging – but spending some time with people outside of the internet really invigorated me in a way I didn’t expect. Here’s why…
While blogging is an amazing activist outlet and energizer, I don’t think it’s a secret that we get a lot of negativity thrown our way. And though we take the power away from online misogynists by posting things like our Anti-Feminist Mailbag, that shit takes a toll on you. There are only so many times you can get called a cunt, whore, slut, bitch, etc, before it starts to get to you.
And, as sad as I am to say it, the same can be true of our own comments section at times. The vast majority of our commenters and community members are incredible, but it can be really difficult and frustrating to continually get comments criticizing what we choose to write on, personally attacking us or our feminist and political cred, or just folks being plain jerkie/sexist/racist/transphobic/fat-hating.* I really started to think about this more critically in the last month because I met so so so many young women who read Feministing but who told me they didn’t comment because of the sometimes-hostile environment in our threads. That just made me sad.
But hanging out with all of these incredible young feminists – women and men – who were so excited to be talking about feminist issues, who were doing all sorts of activism, and who were just genuinely stoked about creating change…it was beyond wonderful. I had a spring in my step after every event – and I’m not the spring-step type!
Doing online feminism, I feel like it’s easy to get caught up in threads and user names and forget that there are people behind those computer screens – whether you’re talking about bloggers or commenters. So I guess I’m just wondering how we can take the humanizing interaction of real life activism** to create better communities online: feminist communities that support each other; comments sections that are critical and contain progressive debate, but that do so without attacks and with accessibility; blogs that are informed by offline activism and visa versa.
Now, I may just have some online fatigue – after all, Feministing started almost five years ago! – but I get the impression that a lot of folks who do online work are asking themselves the same questions. What do you think? How can people doing online feminist work re-invigorate each other, especially in the face of so much misogyny? How can we create even better feminist spaces online? (Cause despite the downsides, I still think they’re pretty darn great!)
*I am not saying that comments sections should be free from criticism and constructive debate. That’s one of the things I love about blogging!

** “Real life” activism can be a real drag too, believe me I know. That’s part of the reason I turned to blogging.
Pic from webchicken.

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