“When we were in college, we used to f*** guys to help us move. The night before moving, we would go out and get drunk, and then we’d f*** guys, and then the next morning we’d be like, ‘Oh, we’re moving, and we just f***ed you,’ and they always helped!”
Which participant in the June 30 edition of Shoot the Messenger–– subtitled Thinking and Drinking, but to be heretofore known as The Jezebel Incident –– is responsible for the above quote? Tracie “Slut Machine” Egan? Moe “I really love alcohol” Tkacik? Nope, it was moderator Lizz Winstead, who, several days later, posted two short clips of the 57-minute session on the Huffington Post, along with an essay complaining that her guests were inappropriately “drunk” and wagging a finger at them for not accepting “any responsibility as role models for young women who are coming of age searching for lifestyles to emulate.” This touched off a firestorm online, resulting in another Huff post, a Salon piece, countless Tumblrings and, eventually, a vague apology and a call for further dialogue from Jezebel editor Anna Holmes.
The majority of these responses were more friendly to Winstead than to the Jezebel girls, who were often slammed for being inarticulate, self-promoting alcoholics. Most of these responses focus on the two clips posted on Huff Post, one concerning rape and the other concerning birth control. They suggest that very few people watched the 57 minute video in full, which is available via Google Video on Winstead’s own site (it’s not embeddable on Google Video). The full video offers invaluable context on the power dynamics that governed the incident and set in motion its ensuing online controversy.
It begins with Winstead laying out her own ostensible agenda, buttering her guests up, and adopting a fashionable faux-laziness of articulation. (It’s also interesting to see Winstead complain about Moe and Tracie’s alcohol in her Huff post; on the video, as soon as they take the stage she asks the girls if they have enough wine to facilitate the thinking and drinking.) In the first half of the session, Winstead often seems to be working extra hard to give the girls the impression that she’s One of Them — she creates this climate of sisterly extremity, where no dirt is too dirty for dishing. And she’s always trying to up the ante. At one point, she tries to get a clearly wary Tracie to agree that it’s cool for girls to use abortion as a method of birth control — THIS is what leads up to Tracie’s “advocacy” of the pullout method, excerpted without context on Huff Post. When Winstead broke the full video up into two short excerpts, she began that segment with her response to Tracie’s joke (”Pullout is bullshit!”), thus rendering the context invisible.
The conversation takes a sudden turn when the topic of rape is raised, and it’s clearly Winstead who’s doing the steering. She’s been joking along with her guests for 20 minutes, but then she suddenly asks Moe and Tracie to seriously assess the consequences of their sexual libertinism. It’s clear that, at this point, the Jezebel girls are just trying to make it fun again. That’s the basis of Tracie’s “The boys of Williamsburg aren’t assertive enough to rape me” joke, and this is where Winstead seems to begin to publicly take the girls to task for their attitudes. The host ignores the opportunity to discuss how the rise of a kind of girl who calls herself Slut Machine both leads to the emasculation of men, and a craving amongst these Slut Machines to know what it feels like to have their power taken away. She instead begins to suggest that Jezebelism (the eventual title of her Huff Post story) is bad feminism.
Because clearly, owning up to one’s rape fantasies is less legitimate on the Feminism-o-Meter than being so proud of one’s own laissez-faire attitude towards abortion that when asked how many you’ve had, you brag, “My sisters call me Terminator 3.” Because clearly, inviting two women of a younger generation onto your stage, encouraging them to drink, making them feel as though they’re amongst friends and then in a sneak attack, tearing them apart and using their confessions of their personal experiences against them –– this is good feminism.
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