I was a ways into writing a long post in similar vein to what I wrote earlier today about the alliterative asshole Ann Althouse when I realized that this whole brouhaha, this assault on Jessica of Feministing (and now Vanessa from Feministing and Jill from Feministe, too) can be summarized quite briefly [Edit: It turns out that this post doesn’t stay short after all]. In fact, Austin already did so in a comment on Althouse’s blog earlier today:

Shorter Althouse commenters: I reject Jessica’s intellect because she made my pants move.

There is no ideology under discussion here. There has been no right wing rebuttal to the outstanding work of feminist bloggers today. There hasn’t even been an attempt to reject feminist theory by any of the right wing heavies who joined in on this attack. Instead we’ve had thousands of words spent shouting about the fact that some people (Althouse, her commenters) find it offensive that Jessica (a) has breasts and (b) those breasts were still attached to her body when she was photographed with a former president.

If I honestly believed that again pulling out a dozen comments and quotes from the assholes who belittled, insulted, and sexually assaulted via pixel and use them to highlight the fact that Althouse, Glenn Reynolds, and Ace are fuckwits who should be shamed into insignificance for their casual, frequent, and unabashed use of misogynistic, anti-woman language. Attacking Jessica for being photographed while having breasts is the same as attacking her for being a woman. It also sounds an awful lot like what attacks for Jessica having the audacity to be photographed with the president while black or while gay if either those traits were true.

I don’t raise the last point to equate one thing with the other. Rather the commonality is the hate that these right wing bloggers and their doting commenters have directed at Jessica (and again, now Jill and Vanessa too). This is hate speech and it should be treated as such. There is no logic to it, only an existential disdain for the very presence of young feminists on the internets. It gets worse for these regressives because Jessica’s writing is powerful and she’s garnered an audience for her work. Worse still, she has crafted a voice that is so compelling that the organizers of an event with Bill Clinton that included the tiniest fraction of influential liberal bloggers had to include her. And so they hate her for the power of her voice.

Then these regressives see her picture and worlds collapse around them. So they flat out lie and say that Jessica is the had that they want feminists to be. [It truly saddens me to say that the number of comments that take this tact are so overwhelming that I refuse to link to any of them.] The myth of the ugly feminist is busted in the most abrupt way. Shock of shocks the right wingers look at this picture of Jessica, proud and standing next to a president, and an urge comes over them. So they look for more and more pictures of her, hating her every second for the fact that she is a feminist and she turns them on. The only rebuttal that they can possible muster while their blood rushes downward is that she simply was wrong to pose in a picture. Instead of placing herself in a Shepard Fairey-like framing, she dared look at the wrong camera. Now misogynists worldwide are turned on by staring at her breasts all afternoon and god damn it, it’s hard to be hard for so long. In the twisted logic of Ann Althouse and Ace that makes Jessica a whore, a bad feminist, and probably bad for your teeth too.

I’ll expand on my previous post and say this, Ann Althouse and Ace are fucking assholes.

What pisses me off most of all, beyond the attacks on Jessica, beyond subjecting her and Vanessa and Jill to the Photoshop swimsuit contest of misogynistic hornballs everywhere, is that today’s assault on Jessica has been so utterly devoid of intellectual content. You’re not a feminist? Fine, we can talk about your points of difference. But when the sum total of the objection is that these people just don’t like the fact that Jessica is an attractive feminist, well, I just don’t know what else to say other than these little, miniscule people are cowards who hide behind their diminutive intellectual stature and lob ad hominem attacks about Jessica’s appearance from behind the safety of a computer screen.

I don’t recall being so physically angry at what I’ve read on right wing blogs in a long time. This can easily be explained by the fact that Jessica is my friend (as are Jill and Vanessa) and one of my favorite bloggers. Without question, the four blogs that I visit the most during the course of a day are Atrios, FDL, Feministing, and Feministe. I say this because I believe Jessica (and Vanessa and Jill - again with the damned parenthetical) to be worthy of far greater respect than Althouse and her cohorts afforded them today. All of the authors of these sites are adults and they can deal with any attacks levied against them far better than I - Jessica’s, zuzu’s and Jill’s posts on the Althouse bullshit are evidence of that fact.

My outrage is not directed at the lack of civility coming from the right today. I abhor that faux standard of discourse and would not use it in a non-snark context. What makes me furious is that these people - Althouse, Reynolds, Ace, and commenters on the coattails - are so far below the intellectual level of these feminist bloggers that the best they can muster is attacks on their physical appearance. Turning your comment thread into “Hot or Not” is not something to revel in Ace. Spinning your wheels in the mud of your own comment thread is no achievement Ann, even on a Friday afternoon. It makes me sick to read their comment threads. Yet again the difference between the debates on the liberal blogs and the pure hate spewed on the right-wing blogs is apparent. Hate that would never be tolerated in left blogistan is cheered and canonized on the right, particularly by proprietors like Althouse and Ace.

I’m sick and tired of reading my friends attack and objectified by cowards from behind a computer screen. Oh, and here’s a quick heads up for those wingnuts who’ve attacked Jessica, Vanessa, and Jill today: attacking the physical appearance of feminist bloggers will not succeed in cowing them into abiding by your regressive world view. Stop wasting our time.

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For what it’s worth, check out what other smart people who don’t need to devolve one hundred years to talk about women are saying about Althouse’s vacuous attack on Jessica.


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