From Riot Grrrls to “Girls”: The Birth of an Inspiring New Feminism | Alternet
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According to recent studies, women are active members of the blogosphere, online at the same rate as, if not slightly higher than, their male counterparts — leading to what some have described as the rise of the “lady blogger” movement. Blogs and other forms of Internet publishing have thus helped to get women’s voices heard in a way that more traditional forms of media have, so far, failed to do. For example, according to the feminist OpEd Project, in 2012 women constituted only 20 percent of the authors featured on the opinion pages of major newspapers, all of which are now also online. While some well-known opinion writers of both sexes focus on feminist issues — for example, both Gail Collins and Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times regularly write about gender inequality — in general, such concerns do not make it into the front section of the paper. Feminist blogs have thus provided a much- needed service in keeping feminist issues at the forefront of the national — and international — discussion. And such blogs have become a major part of the blogosphere: a 2006 British study found that feminist blogs made up 6 percent of active blogs, or 240,000 of four million active blogs. Feminists also used Twitter, Tumblr, and other Web applications to analyze pop culture and share feminist ideas, such as in Feminist Disney Tumblr, which deconstructs Disney movies. While the Web is not a utopian space in which sexism has been eliminated — indeed, evidence suggests that the anonymity of the Internet makes hate speech and misogynist attacks more common than in face-to-face encounters— the Web has made it possible for feminists to respond to sexism in new ways, both individually and collectively. The lively presence of feminism in the blogosphere has made feminism more accessible than it has ever been, and it has also ensured that feminist ideas can reach audiences that previously would not have encountered them. In short, a fourteen-year-old girl today is much more likely to discover feminism online than at her local library or bookstore. That means she is much more likely to discover feminism in the first place.
Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has proven to be the primary means by which feminist ideas have circulated and feminist actions have been organized. “Our activism is inseparable from technology,” said Shelby Knox. “We began our activism online. Blogs are our consciousness- raising groups. … Blogs serve the purpose of helping us figure out our ideology, have disagreements with each other, and figure out what actions might work best without having to all be in the same place. They have equalized feminism, because you don’t have to have the money to be in a women’s studies class or be able-bodied enough to attend a consciousness- raising group every week or to stand on a picket line.” Requiring only that someone have Internet access, blogs have helped to democratize contemporary feminism and have enabled a wide variety of people to make their voices heard— not just a small group of anointed feminist leaders. The blogosphere has been compared to an earlier form of feminist action: consciousness raising. “From our homes, offces, or schools, the Internet permits us to do what feminist consciousness- raising groups did in the 1960s and 1970s — cross boundaries and make connections among and between diverse feminists, diverse women.”
As Vanessa Valenti and fellow feminist blogger Courtney Martin described it in a 2012 essay: “Contrary to media depictions of online activity as largely narcissistic and/or ‘slactivism,’ young women across the country — and all over the world, in fact — are discovering new ways to leverage the Internet to make fundamental progress in the unfinished revolution of feminism.” A protest that same year at Seventeen magazine illustrates their point. Activists, many of whom were teenage girls, demanded thatSeventeen stop using Photoshopped images of girls, arguing that such images led to unrealistic body ideals, eating disorders, depression, and low self- esteem. An online petition to Seventeen, on Change.org, gathered eighty-six thousand signatures, and an online video documentary on the subject, made by two teens, was viewed by over thirteen thousand people. Protesters also demonstrated outside of Seventeen’s New York offices, holding a mock photo shoot to honor what real girls look like. These actions worked: Seventeen editor in chief Ann Shoket publicly committed to ending the magazine’s practice of Photoshopping girls’ bodies in a special “Body Peace Treaty” in the August 2012 issue. In many ways, this protest echoed the one held forty years earlier at the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1970 one hundred feminists held an eleven-hour takeover of the magazine, demanding that the Journal hire a female editor in chief, end its discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, and devote more of its pages to serious issues. Both protests were successful; both led to changes at the magazines being targeted. The Seventeen protest, however, reached a far greater number of people through the power of the Internet, undoubtedly raising the consciousness of thousands, most of whom never set foot in New York.