The End of Feminism

Before examining Moira Donegan’s plaintive wail about the loss of the feminist website, Jezebel, we must offer some information about Donegan herself.

For those of us who do not spend our time in the feminist blogosphere, we learned of Donegan during the #MeToo epoch, when Donegan published a list of men in the media who had assaulted, harassed or otherwise sexually abused women.

One man named, Stephen Elliott, sued her for defamation and settled for a six figure sum.

The Washington Post reported on Elliott’s lawsuit:

“The Adderall Diaries” author filed the lawsuit through the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in October 2018, seeking at least $1.5 million in damages after an anonymous contributor accused him of rape, sexual harassment, coercion and unsolicited invitations to his apartment. The parties dismissed the case, which was the first known legal action pursued by a man named in the document, on Friday, according to court records.

Thanks to Donegan, Elliott was effectively canceled:

Elliott added that his life was “permanently changed” as a result of the rape accusation, which he said resulted in him being fired by his agent and not writing or teaching anymore, as well as losing most of the friends and connections he formed throughout his 20-plus-year career in the literary world.

I will question whether feminism is alive and well or dead and buried, but, for the moment, the important point is that writers like Donegan are as much the problem as the solution. #MeToo overreach certainly discredited it. 

In addition, women seem to have figured out that being a movement feminist, belonging to a group devoted to the overthrow of the patriarchy, is self-segregating. How many people want to deal with zealots and fanatics?

Anyway, Jezebel is dead. Donegan explained it in The Guardian:

Jezebel is dead. After 16 years, the women’s news site, launched by Gawker Media under the editor Anna Holmes in 2007, shuttered for good this past week. Its most recent parent company, G/O Media, announced that the site was not sufficiently profitable and that it had not been able to find a buyer. The site’s closure will mean that its robust abortion coverage will cease; so will its investigations into sexual abuse and its feminist critiques of culture and politics. The entire Jezebel staff lost their jobs.

But, was it really the end of feminism itself? After all, the important feminist issue of abortion rights is alive and well, exercising considerable influence on election outcomes. This does not make it feel like feminism died:

There is another way of seeing Jezebel’s death that understands the end of the women’s website as the end of an era of feminism itself. When it launched in the 2000s, Jezebel was one of a number of feminist blogs, both competing with and complementing the work of rivals like Feministing and xoJane. Blogs like these were entertaining, prioritizing the interests of their young readership.

For Donegan the end of Jezebel is yet another reason to whine and complain. Perhaps feminism is losing its luster because it has ceased to be a political movement and has turned into a grievance industry.

By the time of its shutdown last week, Jezebel was the last of these, having long outlasted the rest of the feminist blogosphere and persevered into a new era. (xoJane shut down in 2016, Feministing in 2019.) In their heyday, blogs like these were entertaining, prioritizing the interests of their young readership. There was celebrity gossip and sex advice, television recaps and ramblings about fashion and friendship. There was also politics, and increasingly, the self-consciously frivolous parts of the sites were suffused with an earnest and serious political orientation. They became not just blogs for young women, but a long-awaited intellectual intervention: a defiant revival of feminist commitment in an era when feminism was at a nadir.

Apparently, feminist blogs droned on about various topics beloved by women, only to provide, as a sidelight, supposedly serious political analysis.

If you want to provide serious political analysis, you need especially to know how to think. In many instances the writers on these blogs, to say nothing of academic feminists, do not know how to think. This is a tragic flaw, attributable to the fact that feminist academics are hired for ideology, not for merit.

One recalls the famous feminist scholar Judith Butler, not a Jezebel writer, who declared that Hamas and Hezbollah were part of the worldwide revolutionary movement. Yet, Butler, openly and proudly gay, neglected to consider that these revolutionaries believed that homosexuality was a capital crime, deserving of capital punishment.

One might question the value of said political analysis, but Donegan is implying that these blogs were deceitful, drawing women in with fashion and feelings, while regaling them with more intellectual fare.

Feminist thinking was apparently vapid.

By the 90s, what passed for “feminism” were the self-serving rape apologias of Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe; women hastened to disavow the term. The media encouraged this turn to a smug gender conservatism, depicting feminism as narcissistic, alarmist and passé. As we hit the 2000s, most popular media outlets were more interested in “issues” like Britney Spears’s virginity or whether Jessica Simpson had become too fat.

But then, Donegan suggests that feminist blogs succeeded because they allowed women to vent. They were therapeutic.

From the beginning, the feminist blogs of the 2000s and 2010s allowed their writers to express anger, frustration, sarcasm and delight – emotions that were banished from the tone of more traditional journalism and frequently taboo for public expression by women to begin with. The sites cultivated a profound loyalty from their readers, inviting them into a club of shared conviction and inspiring them to build their identities as feminists, thinkers and allies of the staff writers long before anyone learned the word “parasocial”.

Donegan descends into silliness when she claims that the sites allowed women to write as whole human beings. Whatever could that mean? Aren’t there certain aspects of human experience that one ought perhaps not to expose on the public square?

Apparently, it means exposing the violence done to women, just as Donegan herself had supposedly done and for which she was sued. 

And yet, how many women believe that their cause, whatever they call it, is advanced by filling the media with images of women being violated? Didn’t feminism miss the salient point in the #MeToo movement, namely that many women did not want to come forth because they did not want people to envision them in such a grossly undignified posture.

At a time when the media cannot stop talking about strong, empowered women, portraying women as victims of male sexual violence makes them appear to be weak and vulnerable.

This was because the sites allowed women to write as whole human beings, encountering their world and the injustices and violence done to women within it. In this, feminist blogs like Jezebel were not only inventing a new internet form, but reviving an older feminist tradition; the sites’ use of the first person, exploring gendered experience through often sensationalized but always deeply felt personal essays, was a call back to the second-wave feminist organizing tactic of consciousness raising. By the 2000s, the social movements of the 1960s and 70s had flamed out or been defeated, and none seemed to have fallen so far as feminism. Yet Jezebel and its peers were the first signs that the internet might have a re-radicalizing effect. They were the fertile soil that germinated ideas about the US’s unfinished business of social justice, ideas that eventually bloomed into the social movements of the 2010s, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter.

At a time when social justice warriors are displaying the most grotesque forms of anti-Semitism, we ought to think twice about extolling the virtues of intersectional thinking. 

But the era of explicitly feminist media – as opposed to simply women’s media – appears to be over. Jezebel’s voice, its unabashed political commitment, its willingness to explore questions of freedom and dignity, right and wrong, and to risk making mistakes – these are not present in what remains of the media landscape. We’re at a moment when there is tremendous feminist sentiment – ask any political pollster what has been happening since Dobbs. But there is no feminist movement. Jezebel was one of the last remaining feminist institutions, and now it’s gone.

Is feminism gone? Or have its failings provoked a reassessment?

Without sites like Jezebel, who will carry feminism’s torch? Where will young women, angered and confused by their gendered mistreatment, go to struggle with others in the search for a more just world? I don’t know yet. But I know that Jezebel was a resource for such women, and that they, and we, are worse off without it.

Feminists occupy nearly all the academic positions in the humanities and social sciences. Why does that make anyone think that feminist thinking is over and done?

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