To do : Amanda at Salon.com
Salon.com stepped up to the bat and gave Amanda an opportunity to give her side of the Edwards campaigns' blogging fiasco withWhy I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News. In the process, she gives even more reasons to start a Feminist Bloggers' PAC :
There are few things like having Bill O'Reilly work himself into a pearl-clutching fit while speaking your name over the air, or watching your in box fill to the brim with sexually violent, threatening e-mails. Young feminists certainly picked up on the message. As one wrote in a blog post tracking back to Pandagon, "I will never, ever go into any sort of actual work on any political campaign. I still might have to close off my original teenage wasteland-style blog. People will gleefully tear you apart any day of the week -- but I'd rather not have that done to me over politics."
We owe it to the younger generations of women who are reading us to get the resources we need to change the political media landscape. We need to effect if we are seriously going to fight back the self-hating Malkins and mysogynist O'Reillys of the world, who make a living out of bashing women who speak truth to power.
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Blogosphere | Feminism | Mysogyny | Online Harrassment | Politics | 2008 Elections | Amanda Marcotte | Democrats | John Edwards
Good to hear that because, I'm going to be politely
Submitted by liza on 17 February 2007 - 12:50am.
on his ass.
I liked John Edwards but now I am on the fence. Biggest downer ever ---I am truly disappointed not just on him but more so on his wife.
Sigh...
But Clinton Topped This
Submitted by JJ Ross on 19 February 2007 - 9:27am.
as feminist disappointment to me -- the way powerful poster boy politicians with good hair and ACLU cards (and their smart lawyer wives) treat flesh-and-blood young women in their own real sphere, matters more to me than what they say on the stump, in the studio or in cyberspace.
If you PERSONALLY exploit (meaning screw them figuratively or literally, for your own purposes) individual women, if you care more about your own image, sex and power games -- or even if you do care about daughters and wives and moms, but are too weak and wimpy to stand up for us and with us when it counts most and might cost you the most -- then you fail my feminist test, no matter what your platform or voting record.
Do I sound bitter?
But here's a thought. During the Clinton White House years I was probably about the age you are now, Liza. Maybe this has much to do with our own state of being and becoming, as comparing who lets each of us down the worst? Maybe it's part of each woman's journey to encounter, as she matures through her 30s and 40s, that one oh-so-promising politician she believed could change the world but then makes her finally despair and face the need to let the prince fantasy go, the fairy-tale wish that even a good-looking, smooth-talking electable liberal can be our feminist savior and protector . . .
p.s. - And that doesn't mean we should judge a candidate by his wife these days, or elect his wife instead! It means we cannot be saved by any candidate so why work for them instead of working for ourselves, building what we need directly through NGOs, for example? It means this is not about who we elect anymore, if it ever really was . . .
Just saw Edwards on CNN.
Just saw Edwards on CNN. Wolf Blitzer asked what the lesson was he'd learned from the blogosphere hit job on Amanda-Melinda.
He said there are lessons in everything but what he'd learned from this was (something like) that the blogosphere is incredibly powerful and no one can control it, least of all candidates, and that we have free speech in this country, and the web is grassroots democracy and will just get more and more powerful.