Femusings!
Some more vintage Joy is up over at femusings, including a better-edited version of why Janet Yellen is awesome and America sucks for doubting her, and my piece in support of No More Page Three (the one with naughty pictures, tee hee hee!) You can of course read both of those here, but if you do, you'll miss out on all the other sweet stuff they have posted there by people who aren't me, including eight ways to cover up your next political sex scandal, a really good piece about how fat is perceived differently in men and women, and the beginnings of a super informative agony aunt column. You can also join us if you are feeling so inclined!
Copyediting
I have been putting finishing touches on a thing I wrote that is going to Go In A Book! This is extremely exciting, but before I get to the stage of Thing In Book I have to go through the stage of Thing Has Been Copyedited. Which is fun in a whole different ways!
The edits aren't nearly as bad as I thought they would be, although there are more minor fact changes than I am happy with. Did I really get that much wrong first time around? Apparently so. I also had no idea that those luminous rainbow cheerio things are called "Froot Loops" and not "Fruit Loops", which now I think about it is so that you can have as many Os as possible to replace with luminous cheerios. I'm sort of proud of not knowing that until now, because it was one corner of my brain that was immune to branding for a little while at least. I also wrote at one point that India cancelled trees, because why wouldn't you?
#solidarityisforwhitewomen
Again, if you don't know who Hugo Schwyzer is, I recommend that you keep it that way. If you do, and you've been keeping up with The Meltdown and Withdrawl of Hugo From The Internets forever, you'll know that there is some seriously divisive bullshit going on between the women who gave Schwyzer his platform for years, and the women, mostly WOC (Flavia Dzodan and @Blackamazon, to name but two), who were actively calling him out and getting abuse for it. From him. For years. With the tacit consent of platform-giving women. Anybody who is not on the side of the people who were being abused by a man and ignored by the women who could have stopped it are Doing Feminism Wrong, just putting that out there.
Today, both Jill Filipovic of Feministe and whoever that woman is from Jezebel both offered the most mealy-mouthed "oh we're very sad he's not a nice man after all, but we totally didn't figure it out until now so *absolved*" non-apologies that there have ever been in the existence of language. The Jezebel one is worth reading even if you don't know who Hugo is, because it is just the most perfect example of oblique, passive-aggressive, selfish, disingenuous journalism. The comments are split between "er, what is this even about, I have a life off the internet you know" and "we all knew, don't pretend you didn't know", because this is about a guy who made a living writing about the attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend on feminist websites, and also teaching feminism and LGBT studies to young people who he then also admitted to sleeping with and having sexual fantasies with (whoops, now you know about Hugo Schwyzer).
The Filipovice one is better because it has spawned a brilliant hashtag from Mikki Kendall about the disturbing habit of white women (who are generally the ones in power in the feminist movement, because the feminist movement has some serious racism problems) to preach about solidarity and act on threats to each other (see: twitter silence) whilst ignoring or participating in threats to WOC in the movement. It is brilliant and everybody should go on Twitter and look it up, because you will learn many things. Like, how often do you hear people moaning about misogyny in hip-hop, but it rarely occurs to the same people to look at misogyny in classic rock? One example among many many many. I'm not saying that misogyny in hip hop should not be critiqued, just that we should probably examine why we want to do it so often.
I don't write about race on this blog because as a white woman it is not my place to do so. It is, however, not just my place but my absolute responsibility to listen to women who have different experiences to mine, and to understand how my feminism is shaped by my privileges as well as my experiences of oppression. I'm sympathetic to people who go through the experience of discovering you trust a manipulative arsehole (whoops, what is this sentence). But 1) I don't think is what actually happened to the Apologetic Power Feminists and 2) the pain of that discovery does have to go hand in hand with confronting how you might have hurt other people. It's a whole cocktail of painful suck, but it's also a bit of a moral duty, especially in cases like this.
Whoops, soapbox over! And I promise I will try to stay away from Twitter stories for the rest of this week, even though that will be super hard because I just got TweetDeck and it is a disaster for my life oh help help.
This is amaze
Despite being made by a man (I think). Why don't women report abuse more regularly?
