It seemed like such a simple request to me. I wrote Riverdaughter of The Confluence asking her to delink, "Riverdaughter, We're getting nonstop complaints about you. Please delink from our site immediately." Simple and easy to do.
If someone were to write us and ask for a delinking, I'd do it. Immediately.
The plan on my end was we'd get delinked and I'd delink here and just note in this edition, "There was a problem, it's been addressed. We no longer link to that site and it no longer links to us." And that would be all I would say. I wouldn't even identify the site, most readers were already aware of it.
But Riverdaughter . . .
What a strange e-mail relationship we've had.
I've asked for two things from her. The second was the delinking to which she replies immediately. I didn't work on the Thanksgiving edition here and thought Ava, C.I. and Jess did an amazing job so I e-mailed Riverdaughter hoping that, since she was allegedly a feminist, she would agree and pick up on an article they'd done by tossing in a link to it.
Riverdaughter couldn't reply to that one.
It was a bit like our earlier e-mail exchange. Where she seemed to want to play dumb (or maybe wasn't playing) so I tried to be as patient as I am with Los Angeles Times and New York Times writers and my thanks for that was getting blown off. You ask a question, I try to answer it. It's usually Dona and me working the e-mails here (thirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com) and, trust me, I have better things to do.
So when she dropped out in the midst of an e-mail conversation she initiated, I wasn't under any impression that she had good manners.
Still I was shocked to find out when I ask for a delinking that she not only refuses but she insists that I give her and her 'fellow' (how very feminist of her) bloggers a reason for it. And, on top of that, The Confluence, a website that came along in 2008, wants to give me tips on how to run a blogroll and how to deal with e-mails. Riverdaughter who doesn't publish her e-mail address online wants to tell me how to handle e-mails.
To her long-ish e-mail, I replied, "I'm done being nice. I'll be writing about this at Third in a 'Ty's Corner.' I believe it's all over the internet already at community sites posting tonight."
And it was.
Why was that?
Blame Ava and C.I. or credit them.
Unlike certain posers, the two of them actually are feminists. And they're the reason Third Estate Sunday Review has an online presence. They're the hook for this site and they always have been. Their feminist viewpoint and feminist humor is what people responded to from the start. It's why we quickly handed off the group writing of the TV commentaries to just them. And they've done amazing work there.
While faux feminists at The New York Times wanted to tell you that damsel-in-distress supporting roles for women were 'feminism,' Ava and C.I. told you the truth. Always.
For five years now next month. We have a reader in Idaho who makes me feel old (and I graduated college just a few years ago) by e-mailing about how she "grew up" on this site. She'll tell you how Ava and C.I. have informed her thinking and made her see that there's nothing she can't do.
And that's a new one on the e-mails. I'm used to the men who write that they didn't get it and didn't get it, but, okay, now they get it. Writing of some piece Ava and C.I. contributed. Or the women who e-mail about recovering from abuse and abusive relationships and how they take strength from Ava and C.I.'s strength.
And they do have strength, they're two of the strongest people I know.
For example, they both know and love Gloria Steinem. One of their things from the start was, "We don't want to be involved in anything that would pick on Gloria." We heard that over and over. There was a guy (in independent media) who used to e-mail wanting links and they'd say no because he prints a false rumor about Gloria in one article and they didn't want to be seen as endorsing that rumor.
But Gloria was part of the women lashing out at Sarah Palin and though they never wanted to call her out, when they had to step up to the plate, they did.
C.I. thinks the world of Danny Schechter. Schechter wrote a piece minimizing (that's my call) the daily terrorism that Tina Turner lived with under Ike. And Ava and C.I. had to write a response piece to that and the other men who were taking part in that. Their original position was they'd pass on that. Then I showed them an e-mail from a reader who had survived an abusive relationship. They put their own wishes and desires on hold and wrote the piece that needed to be written.
And they do that time and again.
They step up to the plate.
They don't run from their responsibilities.
They're feminists first.
Before anything else, they are feminists.
Ask Jim. He'll tell you that. He'll complain about the many good jokes that they've nixed because it might be taken the wrong way. They're very aware of what feminism means to them and what means to so many others and they try to live feminism as much as anyone can while always noting (longterm readers will recognize this phrase), they offer a feminist view, not the feminist view.
Because there's not one feminist view.
But one thing that feminist generally agree on is that it's not okay to bully women. And it's not okay to bully women and then turn around and post nudie pix to your site.
But Riverdaughter's okay with that.
There's a pig who I'll just call Willy Pig for this corner.
Willy Pig thought it was okay. And Riverdaughter obviously agreed because three days after, she's praising his 'artwork.'
Now the illustration in question is attacking Ms. magazine. A man who never found time to praise the magazine making time to attack Ms. magazine?
I'm not saying Ms. doesn't need to be called out. We've called it out many times here. (And I've read all the e-mails from Ms. staffers begging Ava and C.I. not to go further with the internal problems of the magazine. Ava and C.I. didn't back off, they just lost interest. They might regain interest tomorrow, in which case Ms. is in serious trouble.)
But why did we call out (we've also praised it here many times, just FYI)? We called it out because of things they actually did. We called out the cover, to be sure. But we'd noted Ms. before that -- many times, good and bad.
But what does it say about a man who consistently ignored Ms. magazine until he could do an illustration to slam it?
And what does it say about Riverdaughter who could have used an illustration of the actual cover and not the insulting cartoon Willy Pig did?
See we slammed the cover last week. And we talked about the illustration for the article. Should we use the cover? No, we already had two illustrations to run with the article.
But what went through Riverdaughter's head? "Run the actual cover? Or this drawing that makes everyone look like an Oscar Meyer weiner?"
(And has no one else noticed the phallic nature of all of Willy Pig's bad drawings?)
Last week, among other things, we were calling out 'left' website/newsletter CounterPunch for raising money by selling a T&A calendar. Because we don't see that as left, liberal or progressive. Making money off women's bodies?
And we've gone over this repeatedly here.
It's not about being a prude.
You can exploit women's bodies and we'll never say a word . . . provided you also exploit men's body. Baywatch has never been mentioned at this site until right now. There was no reason to. It's hard to accuse it of being sexist when you've got David Charvet and countless others running around shirtless. They were equal opportunity exploiters.
An actress friend of C.I.'s brought up an objection to Pig Willy's posting of a still from a film that I hadn't thought of. The woman did a few topless scenes in the 70s (and a few were actually her and not a stand-in). She said when she did that, she knew it would be in the film, she knew people paying money to see the film would see it. But she also was under the impression that was it. Her contract stipulated that no stills would be provided of that to any publication. But she could be up at Pig Willy's site tomorrow.
She explained how the early 70s were. You didn't have HBO. You couldn't show nudity on TV. If they couldn't release stills to "High Society or some other rag," then the only way anyone would ever see it was in the film itself, surrounded by the scenes and not out of context.
Her big objection to Pig Willy's move is that it rips the actress out of the context. The actress was delivering a performance "she was not posing for a photograph. That's lost in that pig's web" post.
And she makes a good point.
There are many strong points to be made.
But, and here's how it became a huge problem and required that I ask for a delink, Riverdaughter wanted to praise Pig Willy. And then one of her readers objected in the comments. And then others objected. At this point, if we know of it, it's as by-standers. Marcia's boss, for example, saw the post on Monday and read through the comments. She showed it to Marcia. She copy and pasted the comment thread and e-mailed it to a number of us.
But, funny thing, comments started disappearing.
The one where the woman explains she finds Pig Willy "piggish," for example, is gone. All of the comments by women objecting to Pig Willy are gone.
That's when we started hearing from strangers. Women -- including women who are longterm posters at The Confluence (we checked) -- e-mailing us to complain that The Confluence was deleting their comments (and immediately closing off comments).
That's when I actually became aware of the problem.
I don't read The Confluence. It's a little too weak for me. And I tend to cringe over the many factual errors. (In fairness to Riverdaughter, I'm not speaking of her posts.)
And as I read over the e-mails, responded to them, heard about how Pig Willy had already forced a huge number of Confluencians to leave (and how Riverdaughter was 'creative' in her history of that problem), checked out to see that comments by these people did exist as far back as the summer of 2008, I saw the problem.
And then I had the big problem. Martha.
Our own Martha.
Of Martha & Shirley. They read e-mails at the public account of The Common Ills. Each year they do a books in review post at The Common Ills.
Martha called me Wednesday morning. She said she was angry and she'd waited to make a comment. She explained she'd objected at The Confluence "when other women were stepping forward" and that she'd left two remarks both of which were deleted the day after.
Martha: "I seem to recall Riverdaughter playing the ultimate victim and bragging about how at her site no one would be deleted and you could have a free flowing coversation as long as you weren't mean to each other. But I wasn't mean to anyone. I voiced that it was wrong to post nudie pictures of women at political sites and that gets me deleted? She's a joke. She wanted to whine about Kos and people like that doing similar things and it's what she now does or what she's allows to be done."
And that was Wednesday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, it was the only topic in the e-mails here. Ava and C.I. asked why I was so upset and I told them what was going on.
"We delink," said one of them. (I think Ava. But it could have been C.I.) The other nodded.
We delink, they explained, because (a) feminism doesn't allow for silence on this issue and (b) by linking to them and being linked from them, it implies we're in some sort of a state of approval.
"We need to be very clear on this issue. We've spoken out against exploitation and sexualization and to go along with this now would mean we were hypocrites," said C.I.
And it would.
Because it's Riverdaughter's problem.
Until we link to her and until we're linked to from her.
Then there's some sort of relationship that the casual eye can't figure out.
We have no relationship with Riverdaughter.
I -- and only I -- have exchanged e-mails with her.
She began by writing this site. I replied. She replied. I replied. She replied. I replied and she didn't have the manners to reply back. I then wrote her at Thanksgiving and she didn't have the manners to reply back. I then wrote her Wednesday saying to delink.
That's the extent of our 'relationship.'
Ava and C.I. have never spoken to her, have never e-mailed her. They have had no contact with her.
This site was not part of PUMA. Ava and C.I. defended PUMA but made very clear that they were not part of it. Before some PUMA-ers suddenly discovered feminism (we called out the 'feminist' who forgot she'd presented as a lifelong one only to later confess in an online comment that she'd never been a feminist until a few months prior), Ava and C.I. were paving the ground that the meek faux feminists now skip across.
Long before the first group of women staged a Kos walk-out, Ava and C.I. were already presenting a feminist view online and not in the do-me way. Not any of that defocused, did you pick up a magazine today, let's talk celebrity gossip, and can I tell you about my party?
They presented themselves as functioning adults with critical thinking abilities who would take on the tough subjects. And they did. They tackled sexism and racism while covering TV. They called out efforts to demonize those who suffered from autism and all other attempts at "the other." They called out the Iraq War so much that for the longest time, before C.I. proposed the short Iraq feature we now do, we'd ask, "What do we have on Iraq this edition?" and Jim would reply, "Don't worry about it, Ava and C.I. can cover it in their TV review."
And they always could. Covering a bodywash operetta, they managed to cover the Iraq War.
And they write strong, and they write witty and they write funny.
And that's why so many men who dismissed feminism would still rush to read them every week. They have had an impact. We could shut down tomorrow (which would thrill Ava and C.I.) and they could walk away knowing they had an impact. Knowing they touched people's lives for the better. As Dona has said here before, when this all ends, she'd save some of the editorials we wrote and she'd save everyone of Ava and C.I.'s commentaries.
"We don't whore."
I believe I first heard that from Ava but it could have been C.I. They were fighting with Jim over something. He wanted them to write something or the other and they weren't doing it. It went against everything they believed in.
And they don't. And they don't back down.
"I was still a girl when I met Ava at college," Dona told me for this article. "With the example she and C.I. provided, I became a woman. I completely understand the girls and women who e-mail and feel like they know Ava and C.I. and feel like only Ava and C.I. can understand what they're going through. Because you read them and it feels that way. You read them and it feels like no one is going to rip apart another woman and just walk away while everyone falls silent. They are the avengers, they are Catwoman here her roar. They are the women who take no s**t. We're talking about the two who, in the midst of the most sexist years of my lifetime, 2008, managed to write 'The Vagina Strikes Back!' which charted some of the accomplishments women had and made you proud to be a woman, proud of the strength and courage that four women had shown in 2008. And so filled with truths, like pointing out if Hillary or Cynthia just wanted praise from the media, they would have dropped out immediately because 'A woman always knows the way to garner the easiest applause is to stop fighting.' That's just so true and that's the entire piece. It's just amazing. And when you factor in that while they were writing this woman-affirming piece all of the feminist 'leaders' were busy ignoring Cynthia's presidential run and ripping Sarah Palin apart."
And that is their job and that is their role. Avanadc.i. The two-headed monster, Jim used to call it. The first weekend, Ava felt on her own. C.I. didn't know anyone (Jim snagged C.I. after she was done speaking on our college and asked her to help us start our site). The two of them ended up completing each other's sentences, backing each other up. It would later turn out that Ava's aunt was one of C.I.'s closest friends (and there's a picture of C.I. and other women with Ava at her ninth birthday party). It would turn out they knew many of the same people. But all of that would emerge later on. They bonded immediately because?
"C.I. saw I was out in the cold," Ava says. "And I was. Jim and Dona were interested in each other. You and Jess were roommates with Jim. I barely knew any of you and my ideas were being shot down and C.I.'s the one who ended up saying, 'Woah, stop. Are you listening to what she's suggesting?' Why? Beause she knows women can be shut out very easily. And I know that too. And our role is to see that it's combatted."
"Is there not a woman that we can cite?" In the early days only Ava and C.I. would be asking that question. Now you're apt to hear it from any of us during the writing session. As much as Ava and C.I. have impacted our readers, they've also impacted our lives. We've changed even Jim -- even Jim -- is now a feminist.
So no, we can't be silent. Everything we have stood for for almost five years online goes against silence.
Riverdaughter wants to endorse Pig Willy posting images of naked women? That's her dance and she'll have to dance it alone. There was no reason to post that image. Supposedly Pig Willy is writing about the films of Stanley Kubrick. Women don't really register in Stanley's films or did anyone miss that point? Whether it's Nicole Kidman with a meager walk-on or Shelly Duvall, Kurbrik was more likely to give huge chunks of dialogue and huge numbers of scenes to a talking computer rather than a woman. Stanley Kubrick has no image of women from any of his films that immediately leaps to mind. Next month, Pig Willy posts stills from Straw Dogs!
Feminism, for Riverdaughter, is something you toy with it. Something you grandstand about and finger point at Barack Obama over, you decry his refusal to fire a speechwriter who groped a cardboard of Hillary or maybe you slut shame the speechwriter's girlfriend for doing an underwear shoot. But you never, ever call out Pig Willy for posting nude images of women -- as grotesque as he can find, mind you.
Riverdaughter treats feminism as a fad, this site has always treated it as a fact of life.
