by Laurie Penny
The mainstream press has always been a treacherous trough to drink from. As her career continues, you can feel Bly fighting for maturity in her work against a climate that wants one thing from her and one thing only: her own story. She struggles to shake the wide-eyed excitement of the precocious girl-essayist at its proper time. It’s as if Elizabeth Cochran, the anonymous Lonely Orphan Girl, is trying to write her truth, but Nellie Bly, celebrity reporter, is covering her mouth. Her struggle with persona plays out on the page. In the decades after her retirement, Nellie Bly was written about in books, taught about in schools, and memorialised in songs (she appears as a side character in the traditional ‘Frankie and Johnny’, which was covered by Elvis). Until now, though, almost nobody bothered to read her actual work, at least not in a systematic way. It has taken a century for Bly’s journalism to be collected in print.
Bly’s zeal to write about the women the world had failed, the women locked in madhouses, trapped in bad marriages and dead-end jobs in airless tenement rooms, started early. The stories she wrote received space in return for a certain imposed sensationalism. Her editors give a measured investigation into the working lives of young women in box-making factories in Manhattan the pre-clickbait title ‘What It’s Like to Be a White Slave’. The more Bly struggles to expose the conditions of women in the poorest parts of America, the more Bly’s editors treat her as a fascinating trinket. Not only is she a young woman who can spell; she’s actually talking politics.
Some of these interviews and essays are collected in the chapter ‘The Woman Question’, playing neatly into the notion, as popular now as it was a century ago, that there is only one. Bly had many different questions about women. She wanted to know how they lived and worked, where they were permitted to go, why they were paid so much less than men, not only in the professions to which they were slowly being admitted, but in factories, fields and farms. She wanted to know why nobody was talking about women except as ‘dolls’ or ‘drudges’.
The prison interview with Goldman is not included in this collection, although it is among Bly’s finest pieces of political writing. When Bly asks Goldman (then at the start of a long, dangerous career of exile and agitation) how she imagines her future, the political prisoner tells her: ‘I cannot say. I shall live to agitate to promote our ideas. I am willing to give my liberty and my life, if necessary, to further my cause. It is my mission and I shall not falter.’ Entirely unbothered by notions of journalistic objectivity, Bly ties off the piece by calling Goldman a ‘modern Joan of Arc’.
Bly’s rebellion could be rehabilitated; Goldman’s never was. In 1893, when they could not vote, leave their husbands or own property, women could rebel but not too much. You could be the exception to the rule as long as the rule remained intact. Nellie Bly was not permitted to become the writer for the ages that she might very well have been. In the end, there was only one story that editors were interested in hearing from her, and it was not the story of the tenement box-makers or women’s suffrage activists. It was the all-American story of the lonely orphan girl made good.
NEW MEDIA, OLD RULES
One day not so long ago, I was contacted separately by two distressed friends, both writers, both women. One is famous, successful, hard as diamond under glass and trying gamely to brush off fantasies of personal and specific violence being sent to her by people nominally on the left. She is discovering that as a woman writing and speaking about serious politics in public, it’s not enough just to be good – you also have to deal with the overheads of abuse, bullying, dismissal and disrespect, all while smiling and being nice and pretending as hard as you can that it doesn’t get to you.
My other friend is just starting out, is very young and very talented. She was in tears, wondering if she should just kick it in altogether because of all the people writing in complaining that she’s ‘all me, me, me’ and a ‘careerist’. ‘Careerist’ is often directed as an insult against women and people of colour – the type of people in media who are not supposed to have careers. If you’re Ezra Klein, careerism is fine: you’re expected to be proud of your work, to promote your brand of journalism, to behave as a professional would. ‘We have to work on your sense of entitlement,’ I told my young friend. ‘It needs to be bigger.’
Right now, there’s a big global conversation going on about journalism and diversity, but we’ve only just started to realise the scale of violence at play.
Journalist Emily Bell observed in the Guardian that the hot new media startups, backed by serious investment, look suspiciously like the stale old media establishment in terms of demographics. She pointed out, quite reasonably, that the projects that have everyone talking about the ‘future of journalism’ – Ezra Klein’s Vox, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight and The Intercept, helmed by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – have not hired very many women or people of colour. They certainly haven’t been hired in huge numbers in editorial, decision-making roles. The piece prompted a great deal of impassioned response on both ‘sides’, the best of which has been Julia Carrie Wong’s new series at The Nation, in which she takes apart ‘Old Problems In New Media’. To my mind, the real question is: what does an organisation or individual have to do to get feted as ‘the future of media’?
What gets to be a startup, and what’s just one woman, or one black kid, or a whole bunch of angry queers shouting? There’s a magical process whereby an individual or group of individual media workers get transformed from frightening and/or uppity women and people of colour to the next hot thing in the future of publishing. The whiter and maler you look, the more it seems the magic happens.
The magic is to do with being white and male and having various other markers of privilege while still defining yourself as a scrappy outsider, to quote Nate Silver, responding to Bell’s piece: ‘The phrase “clubhouse chemistry” is an allusion to baseball, but the idea that we’re bro-y people just couldn’t be more off. We’re a bunch of weird nerds. We’re outsiders, basically. And so we have people who are gay, people of different backgrounds. I don’t know. I found the piece reaaaally, really frustrating. And that’s as much as I’ll say.’
Outsiders. That, as Zeynep Tufekci observed at Medium, gets to the nub of startup culture’s intransigent sexism, racism and classism. Those who have the power right now, in tech but also to some extent in media, see themselves as rejects, weirdos fighting for their place, and there are reasons for that. The emotional patterning laid down in puberty is hard to shake. If you got used to being excluded, being left out, having to fight to survive because you were smart or nerdy or different or all three, that’s a mentality that stays with you. That sort of trauma can be useful later in life – it gives you stamina, drive, a determination to carry your ideas through against the odds, a hunger to prove yourself, fierce dedication to your fellow oddballs and weirdos, and I could go on. But it is still trauma, and it comes with baggage. Part of which is that long after you’ve stopped being an outsider and instead become a privileged pillar of the new establishment, not only do you fail to notice, but when someone points it out to you, you get angry – you get reaaaally, really frustrated – because being an ‘outsider’ has always been a forming part of your identity, and being told there are people further out than you is hard to handle.
These, it turns out, are the kind of ‘outsiders’ the old guard can cope with: outsiders who look almost exactly like them, except younger and cooler. The question the media startups and most critics are still asking is: why are the new flagship organisations so lousy with white guys, whereas the more interesting question is: why do these people still get to set the terms of what ‘the new media’ is? Don’t we live in one of the most exciting times in the history of journalism, and isn’t that change being driven, out of necessity, by women and people of colour? Aren’t the most popular, most viral articles on most mainstream websites – although not necessarily the most prominent or well-paid ones – consistently being written by women and people of colour? Take
a glance down the top articles in the New Statesman, in the Guardian, in Salon, and you’ll see what I mean.
My qualification to talk about all this is that I’ve spent eight years working, largely as a freelancer, sometimes within mainstream publications and sometimes outside them, to change how journalism and commentary was done. I’ve been doing this along with hundreds of women, people of colour, trans people and allies who saw a media world that was closed to them and only spoke to them to tell them lies, and thought, fuck that, we have the technology to do better. So we did. Except that when we did, we weren’t called ‘the future of media’. If we got hired by establishment outfits it was initially as mascots, performing seals who weren’t trusted to cover ‘real journalism’. I’m thinking of the newspaper that hired me on a promise that it would let me do serious long-form reporting and then pressured me to cover only ‘fluffy’ women’s issues, sending me to cover precisely one story in nine months: the Women’s Beach Volleyball at the Olympics.
Modelview. Racialicious. Colourlines. Writers Of Colour (now Media Diversified). The Vagenda. Meta. Novara. Trans Media Watch. Those are just the first few names I’ve plucked out of the air in terms of exciting new outfits that, whatever you feel about their content, are real journalism and criticism and commentary, and are undeniably startups, changing the way media is done. They’re just not considered ‘startups’, not considered ‘serious’ journalism because ‘objectivity’ and ‘seriousness’ are often presumed to be a function of privilege, of whiteness, of maleness, or all three. When Jacobin was profiled in the New York Times, its founder, Bhaskar Sunkara, was rightly hailed as a representative of the future of left media. But when The New Inquiry, the online magazine for which I am an Editor at Large, which was founded by two women, is run by a woman and features a lode-bearing amount of serious writing by women and people of colour, was profiled in the same paper, it was relegated to the ‘style’ section.
There are two problems with the mainstream media for women, people of colour, poor people, disabled people, queers – well, actually, there are quite a lot more than that, but let’s start with two. First, the media misrepresents us, throws out lazy stereotypes that perpetuate oppression. And then it shuts us out, denying us a voice, allowing us to speak only as token demographic representatives rather than as reporters, writers, authors, columnists, critics. The media is an industry that produces culture, and both of those elements need taking apart and ramming back together in a way that works for more of us who actually create and consume it.
As Wong writes: ‘A journalism more aware of the intersections of race, class and power will be much better equipped to ask the questions that might not even occur to reporters who have never interacted with the state from a position of weakness – whether that’s as a person of color subject to intense police repression or a woman whose access to reproductive health care is increasingly under attack.’ And yet this is precisely the sort of journalism that is being dismissed as ‘unobjective’, relegated to the ‘style’ section, to the ‘women’s’ section, written off as marginal because it has been pushed to the margins of an increasingly spiteful, embattled white patriarchal establishment.
This is why, whenever I am asked if I’m ‘really’ a journalist rather than ‘just’ an activist or ‘just’ a feminist, I never have an uncomplicated answer. Because the simple act of doing my job as a reporter, critic, commentator and author would be a feminist act even if I never wrote another word about reproductive justice or consent culture, which is not my intention. Being in the media, making media, changing media, creating culture, activism – these things are not the same, but they are part of the same sphere of activity. We are here because we have to be, and we’re changing the game.
Yes, it’s fucking political. For me the politics are in the stories I choose to cover, the perspective I bring, and the fight I have to engage in every single day to stay present, aware and professional while trolls and harassers attempt to bully me off the Internet just for daring to be female with a public platform. That harassment is an overhead that women and people of colour, and particularly women of colour, have to face in a quantity and quality that those who do not experience it often find difficult to comprehend, especially from their own ‘side’. Whatever you think of Suey Park’s work, the backlash against her has been terrifying in the scale of its racism and sexism – she told Salon that she has had to stop her speaking work because of the threats she’s getting.
Technology was supposed to help us move beyond all of this, and it has. If there’s one reason that women, people of colour, queers and everyone else on the margins of the mainstream press have been able to build their own future and set the agenda so successfully, that reason is the Internet. And the reason the Internet has become so fraught for women and people of colour attempting to carve out public careers or just do some decent journalism and criticism is that the Internet is where we’ve been changing the world. Challenging power.
My biggest fear is that old-school media bros, making the jump to digital-only ventures years after the rest of us set up shop here, will decide they invented it, and that everyone else will agree. That Ezra Klein, Nate Silver et al will get to be the pioneers, sticking their flags all over the vibrant existing ecosystems of online journalism. Preventing that from happening is about more than just lobbying for shiny new startups to hire more women and people of colour. It’s about getting the media that women and people of colour are already making properly recognised, properly remunerated, and given the respect and credit it deserves for creating the future of journalism – because we have, and we are.
GIRLS LIKE US
Hey girls, we’re all the same, aren’t we? At least, that’s what they’d like us to think. We are living through an unprecedented glut of narrative richness, at a time when people from an enormous range of backgrounds, including women and people of colour, are finally beginning to share stories about their lives across boundaries of class and distance in numbers too big to ignore. But you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream press, which still reserves a very few places for female creators, who are expected to represent all womankind, then excoriated when they inevitably fail to do so.
Take, for instance, the ongoing storm of publicity around the HBO show Girls, which follows the lives of four young white girls living in Brooklyn. I am often asked if I relate to Girls. Well. I’m a white, middle-class media professional in my mid-twenties living and dating in a major Western metropolis. Of course I relate to Girls, and I think it’s smart and funny and fun, although there are still bits that don’t speak to me at all. What’s more important is whether or not any piece of art to which some women relate – particularly women from a certain privileged demographic – can be considered definitive.
The vivisection of Girls, and of its creator, Lena Dunham, has become a cultural project involving hundreds of writers, critics, blogs and TV pundits worldwide. Alongside serious issues of race and representation, there have been articles obsessing over whether Dunham’s jawline was tightened in her photoshoot for Vogue. There have been interminable debates over the nudity in the show, and whether it’s necessary. There has been barely disguised rage that a woman who isn’t a standard Hollywood beauty is allowed to display her body in public, to place her less-than-perfect flesh at the centre of her show, to play a character who sleeps with good-looking men.
The popular blog Jezebel offered $10,000 for un-airbrushed images of the Vogue photoshoot, as if having one’s hips narrowed in post-production were hard evidence of betraying the sisterhood, of not being that perfect poster girl for global feminism who has, to the best of my knowledge, never existed, and who would need to be destroyed if she did. As Dunham told the Huffington Post in 2012: ‘The idea that I could speak for everyone is so absurd.’ But the reactionary trend of taking any rich young white girl’s story and making it a totem for young womanhood everywhere is bigger than Dunham, and it’s a brutal beast to battle.
Nobody is s
aying that Lena Dunham doesn’t deserve critique. Debate and discussion is part of the life of a piece of art, particularly when it comes to episodic television, which has replaced film as the dominant medium of collective storytelling. What is curious is that no male showrunner has ever been subject to quite this sort of intense personal scrutiny, this who-are-you-and-how-dare-you. No male showrunner has ever been asked to speak to a universal male experience in the same way, because ‘man’ is still a synonym for ‘human being’ in a way that ‘woman’ is not.
Men do not experience the personal being made universal. When men direct honest, funny television shows about young men living their lives, it’s not ‘television that defines the young male experience’, it’s just television. When men write ‘confessional literature’, it’s just ‘literature’. Male artists and writers produce deeply personal content all the time, but as Sarah Menkedick once wrote at Velamag, for them ‘it’s called “criticism” or “putting yourself in the story” or “voice-driven” or “narrative” or “travelogue” or “history” or “new journalism” or simply a “literary journey”’.
Forbidding any woman simply to be an artist, forbidding us from speaking about our experience without having it universalised and trivialised, is the sort of broad-brush benevolent sexism that undermines the real threat that a multitude of female voices might otherwise pose. It comes from a culture that puts up endless barriers to prevent women and girls expressing ourselves honestly in public and then treats us like fascinating freaks when we do. It is still so rare, so unbelievably, fist-clenchingly rare, to see young women depicted in the mainstream media with anything like accuracy, as human beings rather than pretty punctuations in somebody else’s story, that as soon as it happens we want it to be more than it is. So Girls is asked to speak for every young woman everywhere, and then torn apart when it inevitably fails to do so, because nobody can, because nobody ever could. And that’s the problem.
