The End Of an Era at Shakesville

We have lost another online feminist space.

Shakesville, of course, wasn't just any feminist space, to me. My friend Melissa McEwan's writing has been hugely influential to my thinking around progressive feminism, social media, Internet culture, and politics. I was an active commenter at Shakesville for at least 10 years (I looked at my DISQUS account yesterday and I have posted over 3,000 comments). In addition, Melissa often included links to my writing here in her regular blog roundups, sending readers my way. Then, shortly after the 2016 election, I became a guest contributor at the space she cultivated and led for 15 years.

I was honored to share my writing at Shakesville and mindful of the trust that she and the other contributors and moderators had placed in me. Melissa's contributions to feminism and to the heydey of the feminist and political blogosphere during the late aughts are likely immeasurable. And, like any feminist who rises to a certain level of visibility, she has long been held to impossible standards (although, over the years I came to see that she also holds herself to sky-high standards in her writing, fairness, and accuracy). I saw repeatedly how any real, perceived, or invented missteps were eagerly pounced upon by others before the inevitable "cancellation," while she simultaneously experienced relentless torrents of targeted abuse from misogynists across the political spectrum.

As a contributor and longtime user of Internet, I was appreciative of the Shakesville comment moderation policy, even though it has long been a topic of ridicule and is sometimes put forth as "evidence" that Shakesville was "a cult." My perspective, as I've been a contributor at multiple blogs for more than a decade, is that I've come to see how lax moderation policies at many other platforms, blogs, websites, comment sections, and forums have completely normalized a collective, societal opinion that cruelty is a casual and non-important thing we just have to "deal with" when on the Internet, rather than a thing that is deeply traumatizing to humanity.

"Just don't read the comments," they say, accepting that abuse is just the price we have to pay for being online.

And politically, I think we will be experiencing the fallout of content platforms that have, or long had, relatively "anything goes" or "all sides have a point" moderation policies, like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for a very long time. These continue to be leveraged against our political system today. The zeitgeist of libertarian tech culture has long been "connecting people" and "free speech" rather than building communities and, welp, it turns out there's a difference. It's as though the founders of so many platforms didn't care, or know, or understand how their philosophies could be gamed by extremists and used to silence the marginalized and monetize fascism.

In many ways, social media sites are the anti-thesis of community-building. Or, rather, people have to put a lot of work into making these sites functional online communities, if it's possible at all on a platform. Civil debate about literally any topic, even the most mundane, does not just magically happen. At its core, a comment moderation policy is the setting of boundaries in one's space, used to delineate the bounds of engagement the community agrees are acceptable.

That so many perceived or framed Shakesville's comment policy as abusive and/or cultish, I think, speaks to a deep, longstanding discomfort many people, including women, still have with women setting clear boundaries, building community, and then leading that community.

During the heydey of political blogging, many people eagerly started "weblogs" without putting thought into what their comment moderation policy would be. Most sites in the early days didn't even have a written one. I've run this site for about 12 years now, and I think many people were figuring it out as they went along, myself included. I remember early confrontations with homophobic male Christians who approached commenting here with complete and total entitlement. There are some things I wish I would have handled differently, but never have I wished I would have spent more time in this one precious life engaging with bad faith assholes here.

Eventually, many people in the blogosphere abandoned their blogs. I think they did so for a myriad of reasons: it was a risk, it was labor that was hard to monetize, it became boring, they didn't have instant success, they realized it's a pain in the ass to deal with assholes, it was stressful, they moved on to other things, they started podcasts, and more. Sometimes, I wonder why I'm still here and whether I'll stay, but I suppose that's a post for another day.

Here, I mostly want to say that, as a writer at Shakesville, I was deeply appreciative that I wasn't expected to engage with abusive comments following my posts there. I had done that before, repeatedly, at other sites and eventually the toll made me want to post less and less at that site until I eventually just stopped writing there (or the blog owners just deleted the blog altogether).

Mostly, I will miss Shakesville. A lot.

More broadly, it seems that we continue to lose more and more feminist spaces online and off, precisely when we need them most, including feminist bookstores, cultural events, and lesbian bars. And, I don't say that to imply that I think Melissa should have continued to run Shakesville. She took on the world for so many years at great detriment to her well-being.

I think about these losses of feminist space and contemplate the way that misogyny so often adapts as feminism progresses, in this neverending cycle. For instance, the near-election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 freaked rape culture patriarchy the fuck out and so we're currently in a feminist resurgence that's also a profound backlash. The world has decided that since roughly half of the white women who voted voted for Donald Trump, then white women do not experience gender-based oppression, or else why would they have voted for their own oppression?

Yet women, all women, actually do continue to experience gender-based violence, hostility, and aggression - in addition to, in many cases, additional identity-based oppressions. Even so, some progressives are joining their MRA brethren and starting to concede that "just" being a woman these days, that is - a white cishet woman - isn't "enough" of a marginalized identity to warrant analysis or advocacy. Some progressive/leftist/liberals communities, particularly if they're very keen on how progressive/leftist/liberal they are, act like they exist in a sort of post-feminist "gender-blind" space. In reality, such spaces are really only blind to gender-based disparities, as they replicated the norms of rape culture and patriarchy. 

Mostly, it continues to make me angry that progressive feminists, especially as they become more high profile, have to deal with so much abuse until they/we can't take it anymore. I think a lot about the voices we've lost over the years. And, while we expect the attacks from the right, so many within the moderate-to-left political spectrum are bystanders at best and active collaborators in the abuse at worst. 

Progressive feminists, especially now, just don't fit neatly within the political spectrum in the US. 

So many people casually take it for granted that this or that high-profile feminist is "trash" or "garbage" or "cancelled." Sometimes, that perception is based on honest critique. Yet, in combination with the reality that most women who are public figures get to make maybe one or two mistakes in their careers while white men get cultural forgiveness and redemption tours, the end result is a net positive for white patriarchy and rape culture.

But, many times, the "critique" is straight-up misogyny, abuse, or people being resentful that a woman has set a boundary with them. Many times, the abuse goes viral, on Twitter, with people competing with one another for the hottest, most abusive "dunk" on the feminist, in a process that is profoundly dehumanizing and usually distorts and simplifies everything she stands for. Her entire body of work, discounted because someone with a bunch of followers ridiculed one of her tweets, generating an algorithmic pile-on in which the targeted woman is reduced to a stereotypical "vapid garbage idiot."

It seems to me that it's the fate of every feminist of any renown to be reviled in her own day as "ruined forever" because she is imperfect, "crazy," "idiotic," "hateful," and/or "angry" so that instead of building upon feminist works, new generations of women who have internalized the message that earlier feminists had nothing valuable to say simply start over and over again, repeatedly. In reality, most feminists of any renown have something to teach us, even if they were profoundly flawed in other ways. And, gender-based hostility, discrimination, and violence are ills against which every generation has to be vigilant.

I will end by linking to a Shakesville piece that has long been one of my favorites. "The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck," which Melissa wrote almost 10 years ago to the day. 

It has resonated with me for many reasons. The clear articulation of the usually-unacknowledged dynamic that women contend with on a daily basis when confronted with casual, pervasive misogyny: "Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?" How this dynamic led her to be distrustful of men, rather than - as the stereotype claims of us - hateful toward them. 

And, the critical concept that being an ally to marginalized people is an ongoing act of vigilance wherein we each have to make ourselves trustworthy to those with identities we do not share:

"This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is.

There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day.

I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me.

Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day.

Just in case they're more like me than you think."

The work of progressive feminism will never be finished. Don't let our most valuable tools be taken from us - and, just as importantly, don't throw these tools by the wayside yourself: the insights of those who came before us, and our capacity to build upon these insights.

Maudespeed, sisters.