Happy 8th Birthday to Feministing!

Today is Feministing’s 8-year anniversary!

For 8 years we have been committed to changing the way women are represented in the media and calling out the limited frameworks we use to talk about some of the most important issues in our lives. We’ve congratulated, thanked and celebrated each other and our community. We’ve tackled the most important issues facing young people today. We have supported important campaigns. We have built an invaluable and dedicated community that has proven young people do give a shit about their destiny.

And we’ve done it with almost no money. For our birthday this year, we are asking that you consider making a donation to support our work. It’s really easy, just click the support us button on the top left of the site or go directly to our paypal. Any amount will help (just think if 2000 people gave us 20 bucks?!). Supporting the invaluable work of feminist blogging is one concrete way to change which voices get heard in the mainstream. If our work is sustainable, it will only be more effective.

Vintage Feministing!

Eight years is a long time to be in the blog eco-system. Feministing comes from humble origins–we were a small blog when Jessica and Vanessa first birthed the site in 2004 and even when I joined in 2005.

Today we boast a readership of over half a million per month. We’ve posted over 12,000 blog posts, our community site has over 3,000. And we have been part of a wave of activism that has changed the game online for how feminist issues are represented, not just virtually, but in the traditional press and on the ground. There are very few young feminists that didn’t get privy to the movement through reading about feminism online.

Also today, there is a vibrant community of feminist blogs, veteran bloggers and new bloggers alike, doing the hard work everyday of making sure the way we frame the issues that impact our life will ultimately work in our favor. And it’s not easy work considering how pervasive “isms” are or the aggressive attack on reproductive rights or the daily battle for citizenship or gay marriage rights to name just a few of the important issues of our time.

And while the work is invaluable, we’ve only seen few mid-size blogs like ours survive without proper financial backing. Feministing is a labor of love–but that love has come at the cost of us working our asses off and blogging between full-time jobs, writing paid articles, consulting gigs and speaking gigs to ensure that there is content ready for you every morning. Our commitment to our community has never wavered.

Getting our support from you, our beloved community, gives us the freedom and flexibility to write about the issues we think are important, to have the conversations that aren’t happening in the mainstream and to continually fight for justice. Blogs have changed the ways our communities are represented in the media–but we have so much more work to do and we can’t do it on our own!

So–send us a birthday present so we can keep bringing you the feminist bad-assery you have learned to expect from us.

And thank you for reading, being part of our community and supporting our work for almost a decade!