Policing feminism online
My weird war with Facebook, Feminist Advice Friday, the role of men in feminism, and more
In this newsletter…
Intro and random thoughts
Toward a philosophy of sexism in marriage
Feminist advice Friday
Work worth reading
I really love Facebook. That’s not cool to say, I know. But it’s the easiest and most amenable platform for me. I can share any kind of content I want, at any length, and there’s a ready-made audience for it.
But lately, Facebook and I are at war.
In the past week, Facebook has flagged my content for:
asserting that men are not innately inferior to women
using the word “nipple”
asserting that fatherhood is a different experience from motherhood
My women friends have caught bans for speaking negatively about their houseplants and about cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, I’ve flagged rape and death threats, assertions that women are innately inferior to men, and a virtual town full of incels and other everyday monsters. Facebook tells me none of these violate their terms of service.
It’s offending crypto bros that’s the real threat to democracy and public safety, you see.
And this is why I decided to move a bunch of content to Substack in the first place. Facebook’s censors do not treat everyone equally. If you’re a feminist, you can expect to be constantly flagged. Threaten to rape women? That’s just free speech.
Then there’s the weird way Facebook deals with links. If you post a link on Facebook, they show it to fewer people than they would if you posted any other content. They also make viewers click a screen confirming their desire to see the link, implying that it’s threatening. So it becomes harder and harder for people like me to get their work seen on Facebook.
This might seem like a small issue. Maybe it is. But when a giant corporation builds up an infrastructure that encourages people to share their work, people become financially dependent on that infrastructure. When it changes, people suffer. And when one of the biggest speech platforms on the globe polices feminist speech but not rape threats, it has the potential to catastrophically silence women.
So I’m going to continue diversifying, including sharing more content on Substack that I don’t share on Facebook. I still fear Twitter, but maybe I’ll dip my toe into the water over there one of these days. With all of that in mind, I’m going to be starting a semi-regular new feature here on Substack.
Over the last couple of years, a philosophy of how sexism functions in marriage has started to congeal on my page. I want to articulate it better, so we can collectively continue to identify the way it works and steadily dismantle it.
Oh and hey, if you want to talk about sexism in your personal life, join us on the Liberating Motherhood private Facebook group. Paid Substack subscribers can automatically get access; your payment helps me moderate the group, and keeps trolls out. If you can’t afford to pay, simply note this fact in the three questions Facebook asks you when you join the group, and I’ll give you a fee waiver.
Anyway, the world may be ending, and Ukraine is terrifying and tragic. I don’t know what the answer there is, don’t know what to do, don’t know how to help. But I do know that we can each do what we can to make our small corner of the world a little better. Pick one thing you can do, one area where you can make a difference, and then do it. Then trust that others will do the same. That’s all we can do in these scary times—try to make life a little better whenever, wherever, and for whomever we can.
Toward a philosophy of sexism in marriage
One of the things we have been talking about a lot in our Liberating Motherhood Facebook group should come as no surprise: how to get husbands to pull their weight, stop being whiny little manchildren, grow the fuck up, and help raise their fucking children. Er…I mean, become equal partners.
The same theme recurs over and over: What magic, special words can I use to get him to see that this is a problem? How can I get him to notice the disparity?
Advice about how to do this is everywhere on mommy blogs and in parenting message boards. Women spend years, and sometimes decades, spinning their wheels on how to come up with the right combination of words to get their male partners to stop acting like worthless fuckwits.
It’s a distraction. A brilliant distraction.
Men know what’s happening. They can see that someone is cleaning the house, and they know that fairies aren’t real. They just don’t see it as a problem. Because, for them, it’s not. It’s the key benefit of marriage.
There is no right way to bring this issue up. There is no magic combination of words to get him to do the right thing. If a few conversations have already failed, he’s not going to change because he already sees it.
Men are not stupid.
They don’t want to give up this privilege, don’t want to pull their own weight, because they know exactly how great the deal is for them.
Feminist Advice Friday: How can I make my husband better about gifts and holidays?
A reader asks…
Another Valentine’s Day has come and gone with no acknowledgment. And maybe I might fall for my husband’s “It’s a made up holiday” if this didn’t happen on every single holiday. He knows when Christmas is. He knows we have an anniversary because he was fucking there when we got married. And yet year after year, nothing. What the fuck? I’m sorry, I meant: what can I do, aside from killing him?
My answer:
I admire your commitment to holding your husband accountable by murder if necessary, as well as your realization that he is fully capable of remembering and acknowledging holidays. This already puts you light years ahead of many cisgendered women, who dismiss such behavior as funny and just the way men are. But don’t sharpen your machete just yet.
I’m a big fan of holding men accountable for this “oops I forgot every holiday but also somehow didn’t forget to expect a present for myself” nonsense. It is not an accident that it’s disproportionately cisgender heterosexual women making holiday magic and disproportionately cisgender heterosexual men benefiting from the magic while offering nothing in return.
The fight over presents, over remembering anniversaries, over treating life as something special rather than as pure drudgery is not trivial.
You have a right to ask your partner to meet your needs, and to respond to your hopes for your relationship, whatever those hopes might be. And when those hopes are something as easy, normal, and normative as giving you fucking presents for major holidays…yeah, it’s fucking terrible that he seems not to care.
Before you burn the marriage down, though, I want you to pause and take a deep breath: Have you asked him, in clear and specific language, to honor this wish? Have you told him how important it is to you? Because some people really do grow up in families where either presents don’t happen or where (it makes me mad to even say this) kids learn that presents flow one way: away from, not to, mom.
It sucks when the people we love seem not to know what we need, especially when it’s something super obvious, but that’s life. We’re all bad at certain things. So give your husband the benefit of the doubt, and tell him that you need presents for holidays to feel loved. Give him a list of those holidays. Emphasize this is important to you. Then wait.
If it doesn’t happen on the next holiday, then you know: This is a deliberate choice.
And a deliberate choice to disregard your needs is profoundly awful no matter what those needs are. Should it happen that your husband continues to refuse to buy you presents or remember holidays, it’s time to answer some questions about your relationship:
Are you going out of your way to make the holidays special, while he sits back and does nothing?
Are there other ways in which he treats your needs as insignificant?
What’s the division of household labor like? Does he make up for his gift-giving failures in other ways, or is this just one of many ways in which you give and he takes?
What is he contributing to your life? The marriage?
Are you happy with this man? Does he make your life better? Do you share goals?
You need to spend some serious time reflecting on whether the gift giving issue reveals something deeper about his character, and about your marriage.
And then, should you consider leaving him? Going on strike? Maybe. He’ll of course say you did it because he forgot a holiday, but it’s never really about a holiday, is it? Only you can decide if this is a small but significant irritation, or part of a larger pattern.
Work worth reading
By me:
By others: