something secret

I wasn't online for most of today, so when I got home an hour ago and saw the furor online about #feministselfies , I had a bit of catching up to do. Trust me when I tell you that I was not in any way surprised to discover that Jezebel had stepped in it  again with a pretty condescending piece about the inherent narcissism of selfies. Plus ça change! After reading the piece though, two quotes in particular stood out to me: "Stop this. Selfies aren't empowering; they're a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness." "Further, self-taken digital portraits are typically posted on social media, ostensibly with the intent of getting people to respon to them that's what social media is. In that respect, selfies aren't expressions of pride, but rather calls for affirmation." Here's the thing; my own relationship with selfies is fairly complicated. I'm a photo...

I'm.... conflicted about this video.  Lily Allen has always been a bit of a socially progressive, feminist badass, and I do love her for that. In her new single "Hard Out Here", Allen discusses the state of the pop industry, and the impossible standards that women are held to in order to be allowed to progress. The lyrics are classic Lily Allen; she calls out sexism pretty blatantly, and points to the ways in which women are expected to conform in order to succeed: If I told you about my sex life, you'd call me a slut/When boys be talking about their bitches no one's making a fuss/There's a glass ceiling to break/There's money to make/ And now it's time to speed it up because I can't move at this pace. [...]  If you're not a size 6, then you're not good looking/Well you better be rich or be real good at cooking/You should probably lose some weight 'cause we can't see your bones/You should probably fix your face or you'll end up ...

Joss Whedon gave a speech the other day and had some things to say about feminism. A lot of it was problematic , but I won't go into it here because it's already been said , and the fact that he said it is only vaugely related to the point I want to make. See, Joss Whedon is free to say whatever he likes about feminism in a "freedom of speech" kind of way. That is his right. But the arrogance of suggesting that a movement centered on women and their efforts to advance their own causes should refocus itself based on the self-serving suggestion of a cishet white guy is, well.... astronomical. But truthfully, the bigger issue here is not what  he said, but the reaction to what he said. While I don't agree with the nitty gritty of his reasoning, there are legitimate complaints to be made about the word feminist, and the feminist movement. Women of Colour, and black women specifically, created womanism for this very reason; to address the issues that were unique to t...

I had originally planned to do a full and proper follow-up piece, but in doing my research (yes, I do my research so I can back my shit up) I ended up down a rabbit hole that basically demonstrated why wasting my time rebutting would be pointless. This thing with Jezebel.... it's happened before , and it'll happen again. Nothing that I could ever do on that site will change the fact that they Jezebel is not intersectional because it does not want to be intersectional .  It's not hard to instigate a paradigm shift, not really. Not when you have so many WoC speaking up, reading and willing to tell their stories.  Jezebel is not intersectional because intersectionality is not cool.  It's not profitable.  It's too gauche  to give a voice to all the dirty brown poors. It took all of this to make me finally see that, but now that I have, I know that I'm right.  I decided I wouldn't rebut, but I ended up vomiting my displeasure all out on twitter anyway, so I'...

via Natalie Dee Last night I quit Jezebel. It sounds like a dumb thing to be writing about, but for me, it's really, really significant. I'm 23. I'm black. I'm West Indian. I didn't have a lot of exposure to feminism growing up. I cringe when I recall the things that I said about other women when I was a freshman in college, and the attitudes that I had towards sexuality and womanhood. I went to a Catholic school in a country that is still largely misogynistic. It was pretty much a given that I'd grown up to be an anti-woman little shit. But then I found Jezebel. I found Jezebel and I started reading. I'm the kind of person who just likes to know  things, so perusing the site pre-Kinja was like a revelation to me. All of a sudden I had this entire vocabulary to explain the little microagressions that I'd faced all my life, and a community of women who were engaged in parsing those issues. I could finally vocalize why I felt an inconsolable rage when I w...

Because it was apparently  so much fucking fun  when Jezebel did it ,  Gawker  just doubled down  on their "Chris Brown is an asshole for getting raped at 8 years old" narrative. I.... See, this is one of those things that makes PoC go on protracted rants about white people. And I know it's not  all  white people, so please don't start. But the the way that CB has been treated in the media since he beat Rihanna has been tinged with racism from the very start (didn't Charlie Sheen SHOOT a woman?!?!?) and this just confirms that the reason white liberals love to shit on Chris Brown is not because he's an abuser, but because he's a  BLACK  abuser.  In the Guardian article that both pieces reference, CB admits to having been RAPED. He says he lost his virginity at 8.  THAT IS RAPE IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD . But it's okay to doubt his story or minimize his abuse because he's black. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he gets a ...