Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by GloriaFeldt on June 26, 2009 at 7:05pm

Are both fruits and vegetables good for us? Yes! i say the more good reads the merrier for women, but I agree with Ann that it is insulting when articles about housekeeping are cross filed on Double X and articles about a Supreme Court nominee who will literally hold women's lives in her hands are not.

Fact is, women have always had to be bilingual--to understand the languages of both men and of women, where males as the dominant class only needed to understand their own to get by. All that's changing though as the gender power balance gets increasingly equal.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Alix Kates Shulman on June 29, 2009 at 9:16pm

In 1968 at the fledgling Women's Liberation Movement's first national demonstration, the protest of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, the radical organizers let it be known that they would talk only to women reporters. This was an outrageous gesture that brought the movement many allies among the women reporters who were yanked off the women's pages of major papers to cover this founding feminist event. For many it was their first non-women's page assignment. Among them was (the late) Charlotte Curtis, who eventually became (I believe) the first woman invited onto the editorial board of the NY Times and appointed VP.
Here's the paradox: with the goal of ending women reporters' restriction to the women's pages, the organizers of the action restricted their media contacts to women only. Some version of this paradox has long haunted the women's movement in every area, with no single policy triumphing, but rather a continuing debate and an endless series of temporary ad hoc solutions. Which is probably as it should be. Let a hundred flowers (and media) bloom!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Karen Karbo on June 30, 2009 at 1:40pm

Courtney:
Thanks for the link. I've pondered this question for a while and have this to add to the dialogue -- I was at a fairly tony book event once and one of the door prizes was an autographed copy of my book "How to Hepburn." A guy won the book and when he went to the podium to collect his prize the presenter, a woman, said, "Oh, um, well, maybe you can give it to your wife." The guy said, "I've heard it's good. Why would I give it to her?" There was laughter all around, but I was flabbergasted. The presenter had assumed that no man would want to read a book about a woman written by a woman. And I wonder whether Double X and all the rest is an extension of that sort of thinking. fwiw.
~Karen

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Robyn Su Miller on August 3, 2009 at 12:20pm

Thanks for this bit of history, Alix. We need to bring it forward. Especially after the last election season where the fathead pundits on tv held at least two all male panels (not even a token female!) to discuss whether they were being sexist in their coverage. They concluded they were not and then spent the rest of the time congratulating themselves on that.

Alix Kates Shulman said:

In 1968 at the fledgling Women's Liberation Movement's first national demonstration, the protest of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, the radical organizers let it be known that they would talk only to women reporters. This was an outrageous gesture that brought the movement many allies among the women reporters who were yanked off the women's pages of major papers to cover this founding feminist event. For many it was their first non-women's page assignment. Among them was (the late) Charlotte Curtis, who eventually became (I believe) the first woman invited onto the editorial board of the NY Times and appointed VP.
Here's the paradox: with the goal of ending women reporters' restriction to the women's pages, the organizers of the action restricted their media contacts to women only. Some version of this paradox has long haunted the women's movement in every area, with no single policy triumphing, but rather a continuing debate and an endless series of temporary ad hoc solutions. Which is probably as it should be. Let a hundred flowers (and media) bloom!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Chris Lombardi on August 3, 2009 at 2:34pm

Not Salon, Courtney - DoubleX is spun off of that Slate.com, that Washington Post Company blog, and should have known better. I'd be curious to see what a Broadsheet.com might look like.)

I was just today telling a journo friend how disappointed I was in DoubleX.com, starting with its poofy-pink interface. Like Friedman, I adore writers like Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon; it would have been wild to have a competing product that Slate wanted to copy. That Catholic-school division of the sexes is tiring enough, but DoubleX seems neither as in-your-face as Feministing or OntheIssues or as contemplative and thoughtful as even its brother TheRoot.com (which I read every day).

On a related topic, am I hallucinating or did The Atlantic just quintuple its online presence without adding more than a few women?

• ▶ Reply