Still Fighting for the Women’s Room

by Diane Saarinen

While I do occasionally blog in the Her Circle Ezine Blogging Circle, I am also the moderator. I coordinate other bloggers’ posts according to the calendar, and on occasional scout out fellow bloggers.

HCE has a mission: Her Circle Ezine has a decidedly political slant and we actively seek creative works that incorporate women’s socio-political issues into the narrative. Therefore, the content of our blogs will work to promote these themes by highlighting historical and contemporary creative works, thereby furthering our mission to generate awareness for women’s socio-political issues and supporting female artists.

One way we would like to support female artists is to provide a woman-only space for us to safely express ourselves. Misty Ericson, publisher and editor, and I have discussed that men have had their own men-only spaces for centuries and as an international feminist ezine/magazine, we would continue to search out representations of the feminine experience — as experienced by women.

A male acquaintance, who we will call Jeff, began asking questions about the new blog I was coordinating.

“It’s for an international feminist literary magazine,” I said.

“Oh! I always wanted to write from the guy’s side for a woman’s magazine. I used to read my sister’s Tiger Beat and Glamour and wanted to be like that column, “Jake - A Man’s Opinion.”

“But it’s really not that kind of magazine,” I said. Perhaps if he had checked out the link I had provided him, he might have known that.

“But I can write as a woman. I can write under a woman’s pseudonym. I want to be one of the bloggers.”

This seemed ridiculous to me. Jeff had never struck me particularly as feminist. Why would we have a so-called feminist blogging, when it was in fact a man writing under a female pseudonym? Were we so desperate for bloggers that we would try to pull the wool over the collective eyes of our readership? Of course not! I found his request frankly amusing, even silly. I told him, perhaps condescendingly in retrospect, that for now we were “no boys allowed,” but that I would check with Misty in any case.

Misty and I decided that there would no men writing under female pseudonyms in this blog.

I didn’t know quite how to tell Jeff that his plans were thwarted. “No male writers” sounded hostile — as well as so final. Perhaps we would have male writers some day. But for the female pseudonym? I simply decided to tell him “Sorry, no boy bloggers.”

That gave way to a side of Jeff I had not seen before. Snidely, he wrote in an email: “Congratulations, you’ve managed not only to be sexist but racist in the same sentence.” For further clarification, he mentioned that African-Americans would take offense at the use of “boy.” Jeff is Italian.

“Sexist, racist, anti-gay, fill-in-the-blank go away” went the protest chant. I wondered how he did not somehow deduce that I was against homosexuals while he was at it.

I thought about feminists as sexists and research proved that it was hardly an original accusation. In the f word , Catherine Redfern has this response to the same insult hurled at her:

“You can just imagine the guy’s thought pattern as he sits tapping away at his keyboard: ‘She’s a feminist; feminists are against sexism. I’ll call HER sexist! Hoisted by her own petard… Hah ha! Oh, I’m so clever! I bet she’ll never have heard this one before.’”

Later, I had a short conversation with Jeff. I mentioned my supposedly being sexist. We were on the phone now. He wasn’t able to hide behind email. Just as he would never be able to hide behind a female pseudonym.

“I was kidding. You know that. I was kidding.”

Very funny.

And I knew he had still never once checked out the link to HCE as well.