Media Misogyny: Alternet Fail

If anyone would be expected to jump up and down and applaud when a media outlet announces that it is going to work on printing more work by women, it would be me.  For all the work that I have had published, it is still beyond demoralizing when the demographics against getting published are as awful as they are. And the liberal media is by and large just as bad as the mainstream media (see the slideshow on Gender and Media in the right sidebar on the Feminist Peace Network website). However, I have serious issues with Alternet’s notion of how to change the paradigm:

The OpEd project collects data on female bylines from the op-ed pages of the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, as well as from content of online sites such as HuffPo, Slate and Salon. Oftentimes, the numbers are chilling:

• 95% male writers for week of April 12th for the Wall Street Journal;
• 95% male for week of March 15th for the NY Times;
• 81% male for week of April 26th for HuffPo;
• 91% male for April 16th for Salon

While these are among the worst weeks, it was an extremely rare week, over the past 3 months, when any of these media operations had more than 30% women’s bylines, and often much less.

There are several reasons for the gender byline gap. One issue is: Anonymous commenting aims hostility toward women. In addition, American Prospect editor Ann Friedman writes: “Men are socialized to be more aggressive and confident, which translates to pitching more articles and getting published more often. Men are more likely to be well connected. Men are more likely to tout their experience.”

Yes, all those things are true, and goodness knows I have been the target of very hostile comments, on Alternet and other places.  But the reason that women do not get published as often is sexist, misogynist, patriarchal attitudes not only in publishing but in every aspect of our lives.  Friedman has a point, but from where I sit, a good part of it is that it is damned difficult not to mention exhausting to be aggressive and confident when you are systemically excluded. Read on:

At AlterNet we’ve featured 1/3 female bylines for more than four years — it’s an editorial requirement. (We’re not aware of any other major media outlet that has a minimum requirement.) But that is still inadequate. We just surveyed our own content over the past month and the number of female bylines is only 35%. So we are not as cool as we thought.

Doing what we normally do every day isn’t enough. So, we’ve decided to dedicate additional resources and make a special effort — raise money for an editor whose primary job it is to assign women content, raise more money to pay for more women writers, and develop a wider system to distribute great female writers to social networking sites and other media.

“Women content”??  What the hell is women content? I have a much, much better idea.  Take 50% of what you have already available and use it to pay women writers.  And why do you need a wider system to distribute the work of women writers–shouldn’t you be distributing their work in the same way you distribute the work of men.  Or maybe just pay 100% to women writers and let the men writers figure out how to put food on the table for awhile.

I am a great fan of Alternet, they publish a lot of important work, including some of my efforts.  However a few weeks ago I pitched them a story that they rejected.  It was accepted by another publication and then Alternet reprinted it under the Creative Commons license.  So they got the piece for free and there is a 70% chance that the money they didn’t pay me in the first place went to a man.

Alternet owes women writers and their audience an apology.  They are correct that they need to mend their ways, but using their lack of women writers as a fundraising ploy isn’t how to do it. What it does do is speak to why feminist women run media spaces are crucial to giving voice to women’s visions and needs. The donate button is up at the top of our website.

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Addenda:

Further thoughts:  The final paragraph of the fundraising pitch reads,

Recently, a funder agreed with our goals and offered us $15,000 in seed money for this project… but with a hitch. Because one of the points we made was that Facebook was a more positive environment for female writers with no anonymous commenting, our funder wants us to raise matching money directly from our Facebook users. And that’s where you come in.

For starts, that situation might be remedied by getting rid of anonymous commenting which from what I’ve seen rarely adds to journalistic value but makes it so easy for folks to say all manner of hateful, attacking things.  That step might make authors feel that they were posting somewhere other than say Hooters or a dark back alley.

Since originally posting this, I’ve had a number of women I respect greatly tell me that I am way off base here, that we should be thrilled at any funding that enables our work.  I disagree.  I think that if you were to substitute “Black”, “Hispanic” or “men” for the word “women” in the Alternet pitch, it would generally be deemed racist in the case of the first two, and preposterous fiction in the case of the later.  Just because liberal internet media is so important, doesn’t mean we can ignore that for the most part it is as deeply sexist as mainstream media, so while it might be considered blasphemy, I don’t think we can give it a free ride.  I wonder what the reaction would be if we were talking about the WaPo or NYT taking this approach.

Finally, a clarification:  I misspoke when I said that my piece was rejected.  What I was told was that they had a number of other pieces that dealt with the broad topic of which I was addressing a specific niche and that they weren’t paying much although I was welcome to pitch further as my piece developed.  That did not seem particularly encouraging, so I pitched elsewhere.  Creative Commons copyright is a whole other subject, you’ll note I do not use it on this blog, but I’ll leave that for another time.  Suffice to say, I think it makes it impossible for writers to put food on the table.  While it serves a purpose, in general I think it is overused.