The Trouble With Jezebel

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

I turned on my computer one morning last summer, and there was a YouTube clip of two women, manifestly drunk, discussing why one of them could not be bothered to call the police when she was raped. Thinking I had stumbled into some rerun of The Jerry Springer Show, I checked again. Nope, the clip [3] was from “Thinking and Drinking,” Lizz Winstead’s then-weekly live interview program from a New York theater. The drunk women were Maureen (“Moe”) Tkacik and Tracie (“Slut Machine”) Egan, then bloggers at the website Jezebel [4].

As of May 1, Jezebel, part of the British tabloid-style online conglomerate Gawker media, was reaching 892,000 people, 51 percent female, in the U.S. every month, according to the new-media tracker Quantcast. [5] Jezebel describes itself as taking on “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for women, Without Airbrushing.” It’s staffed by bloggers who are expected to produce around 10 high-traffic posts a day. It didn’t take the bloggers long to realize that one way to attract a lot of traffic was to offer up outrageous behavior to the clicking public.

As last summer’s video revealed, the Jezebel editors have pretty vivid lives to share. Moe Tkacik was apparently date-raped and says she has had unprotected sex [6], and Tracie Egan, in her words, [7] “decided to go home with someone I never would have, had my vision not been impaired by 14 hours of drinking.” Jezebel editor Megan Carpentier was raped [8]and did not report it to the police. Last spring, occasional Jezebel contributor Emily Gould published a story in the New York Times Magazine about chronicling her relationships and sex life online*; the cover photo was a shot of her in her bed.

What is a discussion of Jezebel doing in a symposium on the current state of feminism? Maybe the right question is: Why has the site hit a cultural nerve? And what, if anything, can Jezebel tell us about the state of young women’s lives?

From a certain perspective, the Jezebel writers look a lot like the natural heirs of feminism: young, college-educated, urban (mostly New York), single, hard-working, sexually liberated. And not infrequently, issues of feminist weight show up on the site. Tkacik led a worthwhile campaign to get money to a victim of the honor killing culture in Basra. Blogger Anna North recently wrote several posts about Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, whose 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, was an early contribution to the liberated life. She also noted an unfavorable review of the late Marilyn French’s history of women from the New York Review of Books.

The Jezebels are clearly familiar with the rhetoric of feminism: sexism, sexual coercion, cultural misogyny, even the importance of remembering women’s history. But they are also a living demonstration of the chaotic possibilities the movement always contained. In its origins, women’s liberation meant lifting the restrictions of a sexist and ancient culture. From removing the barriers to women working to striking down the criminal laws against birth control and abortion, feminism was first and foremost a liberation movement. Liberation always included an element of sexual libertinism. It’s one of the few things that made it so appealing to men: easy sexual access to women’s bodies. (And to their stories about sex, which helps explain why 49 percent of Jezebel’s audience is men.)

But unregulated sexual life also exposes women to the strong men around them, and here, the most visible of the Jezebel writers reflect the risks of liberation. Even if the girls gone wild stories are substantially [9] overstated, the emergence of Tkacik and Egan as brand emissaries of Jezebel, and its attendant increase in popularity—as well as the responsive posts from the community of commenters, who call themselves “Jezzies” or “Jezebelles”—forces feminism to confront their public sexual narrative. How can women supposedly acting freely and powerfully keep turning up tales of vulnerability—repulsive sexual partners, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, even rape? Conservatives have long argued against feminism by saying women are vulnerable, and we need to take care of them. Liberals say there’s no justification for repressing sexual behavior.

As a generation of young women is discovering, and as polemicists from Camille Paglia to Ariel Levy have pointed out, there’s something missing in both points of view. Women can pretend they’re female chauvinist pigs, but it’s still women who are more sexually vulnerable to stronger men, due to the possibilities of physical abuse and pregnancy. These Jezebel writers are a symptom of the weaknesses in the model of perfect egalitarian sexual freedom; in fact, it’s the supposed concern with feminism that makes the site so problematic. How can Tracie, who posted this picture [10], criticize [11] the men who go to Hooters? How can writers who justify not reporting rape criticize the military for not controlling…rape? It’s incoherent.

At work, the Jezebels’ strongman is Gawker owner Nick Denton. He has set up a system in which most of his employees, including the Jezebels, work as contract writers. In order to make their expected quota of posts, they write and research for 10 to 12 hours a day from their homes, in sort of a couch-potato version of Dickens’ blacking factory. Although they make good money for online writers, they have no community that might support their collective interest as workers; they mostly work from home and rarely see one another. Last year, Denton tied part of the Jezebels’ pay to their page views. Anyone who raised her page views above a certain number got a bonus. According to one media analyst, traffic at Jezebel increased that year by 83 percent. Seeing his workers’ compensation go up as a result of their efforts, Denton did the obvious strongman thing and terminated the bonus system.

Given the high level of risk the Jezebel life involves, it is surprising that the offense that arouses the liberated Jezebels to real political fury is the suggestion that women like them might be made responsible for the consequences of their own acts, or that there might be general standards that define basic feminist behavior. Suggest that women report the men who rape them for the sake of future victims, say, [8]or that women should be asked why they stay with the men who abuse them, [12] or urged to leave them [13], and the Jezebels go ballistic. Judgmental [14], judgmental! [15]

Doing what feels good to you is the only standard that is allowed. The problem is that no one really wants to admit that some things feel bad, because that admission would threaten the whole system of unlimited individual action.

The substitution of emotive satisfaction for political or social standards is the ultimate challenge that Jezebelism poses for the current state of feminism. Feminism was never only a liberation movement—it was a claim that liberation would open up a better life to women, a life of meaningful work and satisfying sexual relationships (among other things). If women claim that the only standard for a good life is how any person feels at any moment, they have no argument against the individual abuses of the strongmen in the unregulated world they have uncovered. As the Jezebel stories reflect, women begin to numb themselves so that everything feels OK—so that nothing, not even rape, is predictably bad enough to call the police. Hence the jokey, snarky tone that dominates the site. As the feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte put it [16], “a lot of women feel that they have to roll with routine degradations and laugh them off in order to stay on the inside.”

Part of the appeal of Jezebel is that it offers an escape from the logical consequences of 20th century feminism, while still speaking the language of feminism. “The personal is the political” is a demanding standard. Taken to its limit, not only would there would not only be no boob jobs, but there would be no makeup and no hair or shoe heels longer than an inch. There would be no leather shoes and no wedding dresses and even, some have contended, no unambiguously uncoerced heterosexual sex. It’s understandable that young women would prefer the glamorous-looking Jezebels (although compared to the snapshots the photos do seem a little air-brushed) to old-style feminism.

In the face of death, Jezebel, the Phoenecian born queen of Israel, put kohl around her eyes and fixed her hair. That’s how Jezebel got to occupy a part of the feminist real-estate. But surely there must be something between earth shoes on the one hand and drunk party girls in a bathtub on the other [17].

Illustration by Deanna Staffo.

Correction, May 13, 2009: This article incorrectly stated that Emily Gould wrote about her relationships and sex life online every day for a year.