John Darnielle, Jeff Mangum, and a post about things I miss

There’s a live Mountain Goats cover of Two-Headed Boy that John Darnielle introduces like this: “I’ll do my best on this one, because I’m so anxious to cover it that I haven’t really properly learned all the lyrics. So, in the event that I ruin them — and there’s at least one of you out here who probably is living and dying with this wonderful song — I apologize. Please don’t hurt me. It’s by Jeff Magnum — Mangum.”

It’s that intro that really gets me, far more than the cover itself, which is actually quite heart-wrenching in that very specific Darnielle way. The phrase “living and dying with” has lodged itself in my head for years, and I’ve thought of it every time I come across a piece of art that punches me in the gut.

Sidebar: Like many Neutral Milk Hotel devotees, I also made the same transposition error dozens of times when saying Mangum’s name. Below is a handy way to tell Magnum from Mangum based on their personal stylistic preferences.

       

[Image description: The first image is of the television character Magnum PI wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt. The second image is of Jeff Mangum wearing the sweater your grandmother gave you for Christmas.]

I used to be really into music. More accurately, I used to be really into mp3 blogs. The ones that would post full-length mp3s along with adjective-dense descriptions of how fucking great this or that new track was. Not Pitchfork, though. By the time I arrived into the mp3 blogging scene, Pitchfork was already considered uncool. Besides, I never really forgave them for their original weird review of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. Jerks. (The rating was later changed from an 8.7 to a 10.)  

But now, if I’m not the third person in the world to hear the new Penguin Prison song, life goes on. This is called ‘growing up’. Or less charitably, ‘getting old’. Or even less charitably, ‘selling out’.

I was thinking recently that there haven’t been a lot of things lately that I’ve been “living and dying with,” at least not in terms of the art I consume. I don’t listen to music or read the way that I used to, and my passions are a little bit more disposable. Right now, my main obsessions are Season 2 of Work of Art and the Enderverse. The latter is more interesting, because it’s something I would have loved in a much deeper way had I encountered it at 11 instead of 21. I wonder if getting further into academia starts to erode  your capacity to become fully immersed in a piece of art or literature, and whether it’s possible (or desirable?) to turn off the critical lens for awhile.

Or perhaps it’s less complicated than that. Maybe it’s simply that I’ve had to build up enough personal armour in the last few years that it’s difficult to discard it long enough to have a genuine emotional connection with anything.

So, I listen to the things that I loved when I was 15, and I manage to catch glimpses of how I felt about them back then. It’s all just shadows, though.

Occupy Fear and Trembling

I noted with some amusement that one of people whose letter to the editor was published in the latest NOW Magazine stylized themselves as Johannes Di Silentio (fifth letter from the top).

Given that the writer is an Occupy Toronto protestor, I can understand (just barely) the need for pseudonymity. But is it really so ungenerous of me to think that the person who penned the sentence “It’s like this society is becoming a serious joke” probably shouldn’t be comparing himself to Kierkegaard? Or to point out that it’s actually spelled Johannes de Silentio?

Of course, there is the extremely slim possibility that the writer’s parents gave him a name that practically doomed him to a future as an undergraduate philosopher: “Going to university, studying hard and getting good grades landed me here, unemployed and honestly quite upset with this corrupt system.” Perhaps I’m reading too much into the choice of pseudonym, but I’m slightly concerned by what this person believed their prospects would be straight out of university.

This is not to say that people with BAs in Philosophy (or, say, Sexual Diversity Studies) don’t get to be upset about the state of the economy and our “corrupt system”, but this particular letter rubs me the wrong way, because it echoes a theme I’ve seen in a lot of writing about the protests. The Occupy movement shouldn’t just be about disgruntled recent graduates who feel their newly acquired degrees entitle them to economic prosperity. Ideally, the protests should be inclusive, anti-capitalist, and relevant to all members of our society — and that includes custodians, Walmart greeters, hotel workers, waiters and waitresses, and all kinds of people who never had the chance to go to university or college and get a degree.

Also, I’ve just about had it up to here with the “Harper won a majority with only 40%!!!” contextless nonsense I keep hearing. So what? In 1997, Jean Chretien won a majority with only 38% of the popular vote.  That’s how our system works. Yes, it’s ridiculously screwed up, but you should be critiquing the system ALL the time, not just when the Conservatives are in power.

The tenth anniversary of the goat that ate everything

They’d pulled some poor sap out of retirement to teach my Grade 6 Gifted class. Techologically illiterate himself, he spent the whole school year never quite learning how to handle a group of bright kids in the latter part of the Computer Age. He tried to teach us all Grade 10 Algebra, not realizing that ‘Gifted’ was not synonymous with “actually understanding the basic tenets of mathematics”. After that failed, we managed to convince him that playing gory computer games was a learning experience. What I remember best about that class was watching this play on every computer screen. I loved that rat.

That year, the first day of Gifted fell on September the 11th, 2001. Around 9:30 AM, a teacher that none of us knew stuck her head in the classroom and yelled, “They’re bombing the Pentagon!” She removed her head, closed the door, and walked off. I don’t know if she was doing that with every single classroom, or why — even in all the confusion of that day — any educational professional would think it was a remotely good idea.

Our teacher just stood there at the front of the room, staring into space. We waited in perfect silence for something to happen. It’s possible that there were people in that room that had no idea what the Pentagon was, since 10 and 11-year-old Canadians don’t necessarily absorb that information in the course of their education.

My clearest memory of that day was the indecision on the face of the man who was charged with taking care of us. Later, I saw the same expression on George W. Bush’s face while listening to ‘The Pet Goat’.

A relevant sidenote here: according to Wikipedia, “The Pet Goat” was about a little girl’s goat that ate everything in its path, but redeemed itself by headbutting a car thief. As far as I can tell, America has been eating everything in its path for the last ten years (and the last ten decades and beyond), and it still thinks it can redeem itself by simply taking out the bad guys. Maybe these are not lessons we should be teaching our children.

We spent the rest of the day watching the news coverage unfold on a tiny black and white television with poor reception. It’s odd to think that, ten years ago, this was the only way we could have gotten any information at the time. No iPhones, no Twitter, no wireless Internet.

Because the television’s reception was so bad, I remember being even more confused about what was going on than I would have been otherwise, although we all eventually learned that “they” did not bomb the Pentagon. Later, that useless television set felt like a metaphor for the next decade. I felt like I was trying to understand the political climate through a snowy noise pattern. I didn’t understand the Bush years, I didn’t understand how he could get reelected. Hell, half the time I didn’t understand the words coming out of Bush’s mouth. I didn’t understand Afghanistan or Iraq or the massive symbolic importance of Osama bin Laden. And, being on this side of the 49th parallel, I never understood what it was like to be an American on that day.

Everyone has these stories — the “where I was when I heard” stories. For those who were alive at the respective times, there was the Challenger explosion, John Lennon’s murder, Columbine. In this part of Canada, some people even tell the same kinds of stories about the August blackout.

I don’t know what the purpose of these stories is. It always strikes me as a little narcissistic, the centring of yourself in a story that isn’t necessarily about you (at least in my case). But I guess part of the point is cutting an event of such great magnitude into a terminable size, turning it into something that can be processed.

It doesn’t really work, but reading and writing these stories is the best I can do sometimes.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, bin Laden in Abbottabad

On Sunday night, I found myself completely unable to formulate a response to the sudden announcement of the death of bin Laden. I resolved to pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Then I went back to work Monday morning, life went on, and I clean forgot about Arendt. But tonight I was reading To Be Young, Gifted and Black on the subway, and I came across Lorraine Hansberry’s take on the Eichmann trial, which I will reproduce in full at the end of this post.

A Google search for “bin Laden” and “Eichmann” shows that my impulse to seek insight into bin Laden’s death by examining the case of Adolf Eichmann is far from original. Given the circumstances, perhaps a comparison between the two is inevitable. But I think it’s important to emphasize that September 11th was not the Holocaust.

Without diminishing the tragedy of the events of 9/11, the motivations of the people who carried out the attacks simply cannot be assessed without also carefully considering the history of American imperialism. In her response to the Eichmann case, Lorraine Hansberry wrote, “Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred millions of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa.” America doesn’t have the right to portray itself as an innocent victim, and the fingerprints of America’s crimes against humanity are all over bin Laden’s death. Even the code name for bin Laden, ‘Geronimo’, is a reminder of Native genocide.

Eichmann and bin Laden were two men who both, by all accounts, orchestrated atrocities. Both were icons. One was tried before a civilian court. One was killed in a firefight without due process.

Over the past few days, I’ve heard a lot of people argue that bin Laden’s death was unjust precisely because he never had the chance to stand trial. But over at The Huffington Post, Thane Rosenbaum questions where there is much difference between the way Eichmann, Hussein, and bin Laden were killed:

“Did Eichmann and Hussein receive true justice by appearing in courts of law and sentenced to death under the rule of law? Was Osama bin Laden notably and unceremoniously treated to a revenge killing for his crimes on 9/11 (and Gaddafi for his act of terrorism against Pan Am Flight 103 from Lockerbie), by meeting a violent and summary end without ever receiving his day in court? Four murderous men with an incalculable and un-washable amount of blood on their hands, and yet two received conventional justice, while bin Laden (and perhaps Gaddafi), met his fate from a swifter and more wrathful style of biblical vengeance. In the end, however, all are (or will be) dead.

But are these methods of final punishment really so different? In the moral universe, justice and vengeance are mirror images of one another. There can be no justice unless victims feel avenged, and revenge is never just unless it is proportionate. In cases of mass murder, retaliating “measure for measure,” an “eye for and eye,” “tit for tat,” is admittedly more difficult, but retaliation is still mandated, even when the math is imprecise, regardless of what form it takes.

In the popular imagination, justice is inextricably tied up with the idea of juries and courtrooms. But of course the courts don’t necessarily mete out justice. How could they? Courts are made up of people, and most of us — perhaps all of us — have a very tenuous grasp on what justice is. While I agree with Rosenbaum that Eichmann’s execution was not necessarily “more fair” than bin Laden’s death, I take serious issue with the direction in which she chooses to take this argument.  She ultimately concludes that bin Laden’s death was just because there is a moral imperative to avenge the deaths of the people who died on 9/11 by killing the perpetrator. That is where we part ways.

Both the deaths of Eichmann and the deaths of bin Laden are symbols. Eichmann symbolized the atrocities of the Holocaust, and he was the first and last person in the history of modern Israel to be sentenced to execution under the death penalty. Bin Laden was the face of America’s ‘War on Terror’, and the cheering crowds down at Ground Zero are a sober reminder of the  importance of America’s so-called “psychological victory”.

Hansberry endorsed the symbolism that Eichmann’s trial represented, in the hope that it would serve as a reminder of how oppression is manifested: ‘what was done — and by whom’. I don’t think bin Laden’s death can be framed in such terms, and I don’t know if there is a lesson to be taken away from how he was killed. If Lorraine Hansberry were alive today, I don’t know what she’d make of it.

I think the central question in the entire matter boils down to this: does justice truly require revenge?

And if it does, when exactly is America’s courtdate?

*   *   *

Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, pp. 187-188:

“The people of Israel, at this writing, are trying Adolf Eichmann. It is, I think, a great if painful moment in the history of the human race. I know that among the Israeli people themselves there is some dispute; natural questions have arisen: Is it right to stir up the hideous memories afresh?  Should the descendants and kinsmen of the victims of the Nazi butcher spend such vast sums of money to “try” one whom the whole world already believes guilty? Nothing will bring back the men and women and little children kneeling at the edge of ditches as they were shot in the heads by SS troopers.

These are understandable considerations to have arisen. But I feel deeply that the Israeli government is entirely correct to proceed with this deliberate and carefully planned reminder of what was done — and by whom. Confusion on the matter should be alien to oppressed peoples anywhere in the world — including American Negroes; something will in fact be achieved if black men and women everywhere begin to lose their universal tendency to think “racially” as regards the oppression of people. As is perfectly clear, the Jews, the Poles, the Czechs, the Russians, are white people. But the hardly comprehensible determination of the Nazis to destroy them as “inferior peoples” is anything but conjectural.

Thus we need not sympathize with Ben-Gurion’s ambitious insistence that Israel ipso facto represents Jews “everywhere.” It may be more reasonable to observe that Israel represents itself. That is enough. Its “right” to try a Nazi war criminal lies in the fact that it does exist … that by its existence it assumes itself as guardian of what is done “to a people”.

For me, there is a strong and powerful current of justice in the fact: a representative figure of Nazism tried on Jewish soil. Under Jewish justice. By Jewish judges. I am moved by the thought of it.

It is about time.

Footnote: Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred millions of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not yet really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa.

But then — history has not been concluded either, has it? “

Guidance, care, and a bit of rowing before I die.

I work on legal transcripts for a living. I really like my job. Sometimes I have to stop myself from going on about how much I like my job, because I like my friends, too, and I don’t want to lose them.

Last night, after work, I went out for dinner with the boy and another friend of ours.  After I monopolized the conversation by droning on about my Grand Theory of High School English Class (short version: less Joseph Conrad, more Gossip Girl and comic books), my friend asked if I could still go home and read for fun after spending eight hours a day sitting and proofreading great swathes of text.

I said yes, because transcripts are full of bad prose. Likes, ums, uhs, you knows, rights, okays. Semantic satiation is a daily reality. Yesterday, I had to do a “find” on the word ‘So’ to check the consistency of my comma placement. By the time I got through the 179 appearances it made, looking at those two letters made me feel disoriented and slightly nauseous. What does ‘so’ mean, anyways?

But upon further reflection, it isn’t the bad prose that makes me want to go home and curl up in the fetal position with The Wonderful World of Og. The minutiae of what goes on in the legal world is petty, dull, and sad. There are fights over undertakings. There are the sore necks, the 6s on a pain scale of ten, the sexual frustration, the slip and falls. Perhaps worst of all, there are the seemingly endless losses of guidance, care, and companionship.

In Ontario, the “loss of guidance, care, and companionship” is defined by the Family Law Act. It is what it sounds like.  It may come into play in wrongful death cases, in workplace injury cases, in car accident cases, etc.  Essentially, it puts a monetary value on life’s intangibles.

However, some intangibles are worth more than others. There’s an article up on the Risk Management Counsel of Canada website that discusses the six-figure award for a loss of guidance, care, and companionship granted in the case of To v. Toronto Board of Education. The monetary award was given after a family’s first-born son died because of injuries sustained by an equipment malfunction in his high school gym class.

“Before To, awards for loss of guidance, care, and companionship of a child or sibling varied within a range, with the pendulum swinging towards one end or the other from time to time. Through the late 1990s, awards for loss of a child still living at home usually fell in the $20,000.00 to $40,000.00 range, with the occasional greater award in exceptional cases….

Then along came the Ontario Court of Appeal decision in To where the Court declined to roll back the jury’s award of $100,000.00 for each of the parents for loss of guidance, care, and companionship, and $50,000.00 for the sibling.”

(For the purposes of covering my bases, I should mention here that I have never worked on a transcript relating to this case, and the facts of the cases are a matter of public record.)

The author of this article  says that the new figure doesn’t represent a “new baseline”, because the child was “exceptional”. S/he describes the son’s devotion and closeness to his family, his goals and academic achievement, and the cultural standards that Chinese families have for first-born males. “Clearly, Binh was somewhat of a dream child. The average teenager would not fit the description of Binh. Binh did not display the selfish, rebellious, and disrespectful behaviour that parents of other teenagers may note from time to time. “

After establishing the facts of the case, s/he writes about realistic defence strategies that will help insurance companies ensure that they don’t have to pay out sums that large:

“An effort must be made to establish that the deceased children of future claimants were not exceptional (if that is in fact the case). Understandably, following the death of a child, surviving parents and siblings may not have a realistic memory of the deceased child or their relationship with him or her. Through gentle, empathetic questioning, a realistic picture may be obtained at examinations for discovery. It may also be necessary to go to other sources such as teachers, school records, and coaches for a more accurate description.

… The decision in Rintoul [another legal precedent] may be relied upon as a more judicious starting point for exceptional cases and counsel may suggest that the court should move down from there when dealing with the loss of a child who could not be described as ‘exceptional’.”

I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know much about how these things work. But I know that I was not an “exceptional” teenager, at least not by the standards in this case. I took five years to get through high school. I failed grade 11 French. I showed up late for school consistently, fought with my sister a lot, returned library books late, and whined about going to church.

“Exceptional”, as this writer defines it, seems to mean following the rules very, very well. And nothing is more valuable in law than following the rules and being able to back up your rule-following with documents in triplicate.

I recently bought volume one of Tove Jaansen’s comic strip Moomin.  Moomin’s story is about many of the wonderful and horrible things that happen when you don’t follow the rules. Perhaps to an even greater extent, Moomin’s story is one of a loss of guidance, care, and companionship. Throughout the course of this all-too-short collection, he mourns the loss of his beloved Moomin Mama and Moomin Papa, his girlfriend, and the life he loves.

But Moomin’s world changes quickly.  Nothing stays bad for too long, and just when all seems lost, he once again finds care, guidance, and companionship in the most unexpected places. There’s always a boat just around the corner.

When I’m at work, I only hear about tragedy. I transcribe pages of human misery, and only rarely — if ever — do I hear stories about human resilience. The tape ends, and as far as I know, the deponent stays trapped in that misery forever. The lesson of Moomin’s world is that misery may be inevitable in this life, but it is also transient. Sorrow fades, and the pain gets displaced by  trips to Hollywood, underground caves, and pirate treasure.

I’ve never been good with unfinished stories. When I go home at the end of a day of work, I read so that I can believe that there is meaning in this life, and that it is possible to “live in peace, plant potatoes, and dream,” the way Moomin does.

All we can ask for is a bit of rowing before we die.

I just want a bit part in my life

Academically, the phenomenon of YouTube communities and collaborations is one of my strongest research interests. I recently finished a term paper about the way FTM trans communities subvert the autobiographical imperative. A little earlier in the term, I wrote a paper that, in part, examined the viral Sesame Street/Whip My Hair mash-up. Before I graduate, I have another paper in mind about creative works composed and performed by two or more YouTube musicians that have never met face-to-face.

When I was between the ages of 16 and 18, I spent a lot of time immersed in a particular subsection of the YouTube atheist community. I was only ever an observer, though. I never got up the nerve to participate. I watched thousands of videos, and never posted a single one of my own. I rarely even got involved in the comment section brawls.

The majority of my viewing time was devoted to a group of users who called themselves “The Knighted Owls”. Through these YouTube videos, I got my first introduction to Wittgenstein, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Steven Pinker, abiogenesis, and dozens of other topics that our small-minded Ontario curriculum shies away from. (Un)fortunately, the users in this group were some of the first in the community to seriously critique the constructed atheist identity. Almost simultaneously, they all gave up the proverbial ghost and branched out into different topics (although I think meridianfrost still does Christian pwnage videos on occasion). It was the intellectual quickness of these users and their rejection of complacency that attracted me to this community in the first place, but it still hurt to watch it slowly dissolve.

The videos started being posted less and less often. As soon as the atheist banner was lowered, it seemed that this section of the community was no longer interested in making videos.  It was disappointing, but around this time, I discovered that there was a thriving social justice community on Tumblr. I started spending more and more time reading instead of viewing.

Every so often, I return to YouTube and find myself mildly shocked that the atheist community has managed to soldier on in my absence.

Tonight, I caught up on a dozen or so videos made by hairyreasoner, also known as Earl. I found this one particularly affecting.

I like the delivery and the thoughtfulness, but mostly I admire Earl for simply picking up the phone and asking his question. For involving himself in his world.

Speaking of being involved, what I didn’t do tonight was go out for drinks with students from a class I really enjoyed last semester. I stayed home and watched YouTube videos and a Yale Open Lecture on game theory. I am still an observer. I am still working up the nerve to participate.

Pink Slipped Proverbs: “She that troubleth the blog-o-sphere shall inherit the wind” Edition

I made some mistakes in my initial Susannah Breslin post. (Yeah, that’s the right link. You have to scroll down past the BSG joke to find the section where I write about her.) The first mistake, obviously, was forgetting that “trackbacks” are a thing that exist. Before Breslin linked to me, this blog had a readership of about two: my boyfriend, and my friend Shannon (well, she claims to read this, but I have my doubts!). It didn’t even cross my mind that Breslin would read that post, and so maybe I was a little meaner, a little more dismissive than I would have been otherwise.

In response to my post, she wrote this, where she referred to me as Dreary (ouch!) and used “feminist blogger” as an epithet.

“Only a fool would think I’m not terrified. Only a blogger would write such a thing without asking the subject whether or not it was true. Only the privileged believe they have the privilege to decide who among us is privileged and who is not.”

Okay. Mea culpa on the “terrified” point. She said, right in the Pink Slipped article that  I linked to, that she was terrified. “I was terrified,” she wrote.

Another confession: I spent maybe five minutes writing the Pink Slipped portion of that post. (I’m a busy girl, after all. Tumblr posts to read, Gemcraft Labyrinth to beat, eyebrows to pluck, plus that whole school and work thing — it’s a wonder I even have time to maintain a blog no one reads!) Clearly I didn’t make my point well at all. Instead, I snidely said that Breslin’s privilege was showing (more on that in a second).

My real objection was to the sentence, “I don’t get why people trade their lives for nine-to-five jobs they don’t even like.” That sentence was why I characterized her as privileged. Because, hey. Um, I get why! It’s because some people don’t have any other option. In fact, there are plenty of unemployed people that would be dying to land the kind of nine-to-five job that gives Breslin hives. Without diminishing the very real fear that Breslin experienced, I would like to posit that there are very different levels of “terrified”.

Re: the privilege accusation, the joke was on me. I was making fun of my own argument. At the “What Would Phoebe Do” blog post I linked to, Phoebe talks about how throwing accusations of privilege is unproductive. WELL. That doesn’t seem to have been the case here! (Also, I should point out that I am massively privileged in like, every way.)

Clearly I’ve spent more than one and a half seconds on Breslin by this point. In fact, I’ve even continued to read Pink Slipped! Sometimes I’ve actually enjoyed it. I quite liked the SXSW article. Or perhaps I’m only invested because I liked getting attention. That sure would be in keeping with my character!

So, taking a cue from my debate club history, I am now going to respectfully disagree with the worthy article written by Breslin on the feminist blog-o-sphere, and do my best to engage with the actual arguments instead of making character attacks. Can it be done? LET’S SEE.

“There are many reasons why women’s blogs have become ghettoized. Women’s blogs focus on issues that matter to women. They form communities that help more women connect to other women. Their singular focus on the female demographic makes it easier to sell them to advertisers.

This is the problem. They are easy. They are safe. They are comfortable. You’re in the sisterhood, and there’s no need to find out what’s happening on the other side of the wire, beyond that distant ridge.”

First of all, I’d like to point out that one of the problems of using “safe” as an insult is that many feminist/social justice blogs make a concerted effort to maintain their blogs as “safe spaces”. There’s a reason why Shakesville, for example, uses trigger warnings. There are many survivors of sexual abuse reading that blog, and McEwan works really hard to prevent triggering her readers.

Breslin is mostly writing about the big players: Jezebel, Feministing, Double X. However, there are plenty of lady blogs that aren’t backed by Gawker. Many women’s blogs are not first and foremost concerned with making money. (In fact, there are plenty of lady bloggers who object to the very existence of “professional feminists”.) Having mentioned that, I’m going to presume Breslin is talking specifically about the major for-profit blogs.

Now, are all gendered blogs “ghettos” or does that label just apply to women’s blogs? Is AskMen a ghetto? Men’s Health? What about sports blogs? (Of course, many women read sports blogs, but the target audience is usually men. For the record, I also know a number of men who read Jezebel.)

Rita of Nobody Sasses A Girl In Glasses made a point about this a few years ago, in a post entitled “Chicks in Suits” that has stayed with me since the first time I read it, way back when I was in Mary Ward summer school, wasting my time reading blog archives instead of finishing up my grade 12 English units:

“As far as I can tell, Megan McArdle is no less serious a blogger (insofar as one can be a serious blogger) than, say, Ezra Klein, who blogs on many of the same topics. But most people do not speculate about what size his pants are and whether he can get a date in his comments section.

…Shoe-blogging. Why is it bad, and why do men get away with being as irrationally obsessed with sports as women are with shoes? The obvious problem is that, if you want to be taken seriously, you should not speak publicly about frivolous things. Shoes fall into this category. (Professional sports do too.) But if you do insist on blogging about shoes, there is also an explanation for why you will be dismissed or belittled more quickly than men who blog about sports (except by the shoe and sports communities, respectively). Fashion is closely tied to bodies and love lives, and all the other subjects that are inappropriate for public discussion. Blogging about fashion usually means blogging about your fashion–it indirectly reveals things about your body, your income, your friends–in sum, your private life. And when the snipers come out, it makes some sense that they’ll take aim not at the shoes, but at you, since you have armed them with all the relevant information and personal insults hurt more. Sports is more removed from personal scrutiny; calling a player a good pitcher doesn’t implicate your own pitching ability or lack thereof.”

Breslin is writing from an explicitly “post-feminist” point of view. I’m writing from a feminist (and, hopefully, intersectional) point of view. She thinks feminism is over. Mission accomplished! Experience has shown me that minds aren’t easily changed on this issue, so I’m not going to go all 101 on you and repeat the arguments for why feminism is still necessary. There are plenty of places out there for that.

“Today, it’s women who have ghettoized themselves online. Unsure or unaware of how to compete with the big boys, women bloggers have retreated to the safety of their own lady blog reservations. Purportedly, this is sisterhood. What it looks like is secession. Where’s the empowerment in that?”

I strongly dislike this argument. It reminds me of that “stop hitting yourself!” game that children play. “Stop oppressing yourself! Stop oppressing yourself! Haha, why are you still oppressing yourself?” The major player feminist blogs came about because there were very few spaces where women’s voices were valued. Their popularity shows how much people, particularly women, wanted and needed these spaces. Breslin’s argument about these spaces being ghettos puts the blame on individuals, instead of more correctly examining the culture that systematically devalues women’s experiences. A culture where sports are more important than shoes.

(Also, there are plenty of feminist bloggers who also write for mainstream publications, like Sady Doyle and C.L. Minou, who have both been published in the Guardian. Just because you maintain a feminist blog doesn’t mean that’s the only place you write.)

Breslin has experienced this kind of discrimination herself. In fact, she opens her piece with a description of a man who is incredulous that a woman could be writing for Forbes when he himself wasn’t. Her own experiences show that there are plenty of places that are hostile to any woman who dares step outside of the so-called “pink ghetto”, even when these women are exhibiting classic Cool Girl behaviour.

(Oops! That one was kind of a character insult. Maybe I’m still bitter about being called a fool.)