WELCOME TO THE MEDIA: Where a years-old in-fight about you not reporting your own rape can result in you naming and bolding the names of two rape accusers, while minimizing that whole “rape culture” thing, in a piece you write for an online/print newspaper, thereby making their names even more available to the people who are sending them death threats — the very same newspaper for which my primary online feminist friend worked, OH THE IRONY — and putting “rape” in scare quotes, and then tagging it #MooreandMe, in response to a protest that is in part about naming those accusers and the harm it subjects them to, started by someone (i.e. me) who started feminist blogging in part because she thought you were an amazing writer and considered you her chief stylistic influence for some time, someone who thought “I wanna write about women’s issues like Moe Tkacik.”
I mean, I obviously don’t wanna write about women’s issues like Moe Tkacik any more. Because that shit IS SO FUCKED UP, OH MY GOD.
But I mean it. WELCOME TO THE MEDIA, where grudges surpass standards. WELCOME. Because sometimes I think I’m gonna fucking leave.
I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad that my first feelings about Moe (which never changed) were right all along.
Holly mother of all fuck-ups! I missed this post by Sady (probably last night?), but this is beyond all kinds of messed up. I really liked some of Moe’s financial analysis (not from when she was writing for Jezebel/ Gawker, but actually after she left) but I always had a very hard time separating her from Tracie Egan’s shenanigans. Like both of them are/ were problematic in how they only represent one kind of feminism (white, of certain wealth and privilege, prone to erasure of other kinds of issues, prone to ableism and racism and probably transphobia, etc.). And I am not saying these feminisms (mostly white and cis gendered and middle or above class and as such privileged) should not exist because, really, that’s dumb, but that such discourses should be perhaps careful in how they can contribute to social oppression by being oblivious to the realities of all the other people who do not enjoy these privileges. Tracie is the epitome of these issues but Moe always appeared to me slightly above but not really too different from Tracie. During the rape reporting attacks she suffered I felt really bad for her because I thought there was a very high degree of slut shaming and witch hunting going on. It went as far as costing her job at Jezebel (so really, it was a low that no woman deserves and looking in retrospect, I also think Nick Denton had a degree of accountability in that because although Moe screwed up by getting drunk on TV, he also didn’t stand by her professionally when the witch hunting began and instead, fired her from Gawker Media).
With all of this said, WTF, Ms. Tkacik? This is a new low even by Tracie Egan’s standards (which I now use as a measure of dumb shit said in mainstream media). So in the Egan Meter (a new instrument of my invention to measure hyper problematic statements made by supposedly liberal and progressive media figures), this scores at a -90 (-100 Egans being the time when she compared black people to turds).
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