Guilty Until Proven Otherwise
The Sneaker Girls—a shoe blog worth reading, incidentally—called this journal out for sexism in a tweet that I initially shrugged off and then couldn’t stop thinking about. That’s usually the sign a complaint has some grip on something real.
The accusation is easy to reconstruct: lots of skin, crude language, female bodies used as visual punctuation or punchline, the male gaze running through everything like a watermark. Yeah. That’s here. That’s what this is, sometimes. The question I keep turning over is whether that constitutes sexism in any meaningful sense—discrimination, suppression—or whether it’s something else: frankness about desire, irreverence applied indiscriminately, a specific kind of vulgarity that includes rather than diminishes.
Sexism, as the dictionary has it, is the discrimination or oppression of people based on their sex. I’ve been going back through what’s been published here looking for evidence of that. I don’t find systematic contempt. I find crudeness, which is different. I find a register that is deliberately low and often deliberately dirty, aimed more or less at everything, including myself. That’s not the same as treating women as inferior or as targets.
But I also know that intention and effect aren’t the same country. You can mean well and make something that functions badly. You can be genuinely fond of women as people and still treat them primarily as bodies in the content you’re producing, and at some point that creates a text with its own logic regardless of what you meant by it. I’m not sure I can be objective about my own work on this question.
What I know is that this journal has had contributors—women among them—who were sharper and funnier than me and would have said so directly if they’d felt the project was built on contempt. It wasn’t. It was built on a specific kind of gleeful, unfiltered engagement with the world, which included, yes, a lot of looking at women and being frank about it.
Whether that crosses the line: I’m still thinking. The question is sitting with me in that low, gnawing way, and I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not sure a clean answer would be honest.