Within the late Nineties, studying about one thing obscure took effort. You’d must make your technique to the appropriate bookstore or know the edgy older one that may flip you on to a particular file, a ebook, or a zine. These pre-internet objects have been neighborhood builders; in case you met somebody who had heard of the particular factor you have been into, you made a really cool good friend. That was Bitch journal. I don’t bear in mind the primary second I learn it, but it surely was omnipresent on the planet I inhabited—riot grrrls, punks and hardcore children, girls’s-studies majors, the LGBTQ neighborhood, activists. Bitch wasn’t only a publication—it was an id marker.
Regardless of occupying a distinct segment nook of the media world, Bitch was extremely influential. A self-described “feminist response to popular culture,” it ran media criticism and cultural commentary on matters together with fats politics, nonbinary id, Black feminism, and masculinity, utilizing the confrontational fashion of in-your-face politics usually synonymous with ’90s-era third-wave feminism. It might go on to publish a few of feminism’s most formative writing, together with voices reminiscent of Tamara Winfrey-Harris, Joshunda Sanders, and Katherine Cross. Superstar interviews included underground it-girls reminiscent of Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo. Simply as I sat in a girls’s-studies class criticizing zines like Bitch for not being numerous sufficient, it dropped an interview with bell hooks.
Bitch just lately introduced that it’s going to cease publishing in June. To completely grasp this information requires understanding how a lot it managed to persevere—and the way a lot its ethos has, in methods each apparent and delicate, discovered traction in mainstream media. The story of Bitch is, partly, the story of how feminist publications influenced the protection of gender points writ massive. Nevertheless it’s additionally the story of the difficulties of maintaining unbiased shops afloat, particularly within the face of a feminist backlash. Its evolution displays the tangles inside feminism over the previous a number of many years, and throughout the feminist press. And its finish makes pressing the query of what constitutes feminist media immediately, at the same time as the continued risk to girls’s rights underscores how a lot we nonetheless want that area.
Bitch launched in 1996, its identify a reclamation of a time period used to insult girls who reside exterior the expectations of a demure femininity. “If talking my thoughts makes me a bitch, I’m happy with that,” one of many co-founders, Lisa Jervis, mentioned in explaining the identify. (One other co-founder, Andi Zeisler, has defended the title in opposition to finger-wagging; the journal’s preliminary effort to be included was rejected as a result of the identify was deemed offensive.) It entered on the peak of zine tradition, and succeeded feminist publications reminiscent of Bust Journal (nonetheless in circulation) and Sassy (merged with Teen journal in 1996, which in flip successfully shut down in 2009). It additionally predated and influenced the feminist blogs and shops of the early 2000s to early 2010s, reminiscent of Feministe, Racialicious, Feministing (the place I used to be the manager editor from 2009 to 2012), and later Jezebel, the Crunk Feminist Collective, The Hairpin, The Frisky, and Rookie Journal, amongst many others. Together with a slew of gender-centric verticals like Salon’s Broadsheet, Slate’s DoubleX, and Vice’s Broadly, these websites created an ecosystem that has generally been dubbed a “heyday” of feminist media.
Many of those feminist shops have since folded; Bitch managed to survive them. However its period noticed the rise of publications with an specific mission to create house for feminist voices and evaluation—and, extra to the purpose, to name out mainstream shops that have been nonetheless slut-shaming girls for sexual assault or proclaiming the dying of feminism. Bitch and its friends additionally let younger girls discover their lives exterior the shiny magazines, which have been pushed by company promoting and thus usually mirrored the very points feminists have been essential of—eating regimen tradition, the sweetness business, the wedding-industrial complicated, and luxurious vogue. Feminist media mentioned there was one other method.
Quite a bit has modified since then. Feminism has all the time been messy, its ranks rife with debate about what the struggle, at coronary heart, is actually about: For some, it’s straightforwardly about gender equality. For others, it’s a bigger endeavor that considers the numerous sides of our experiences: race, class, sexuality, sexual id. These tensions are enjoying out immediately as effectively, with some girls shunning the “feminist” label in favor of embracing a wider set of social and political points. That broader tack can generally learn as a kind of “post-feminism,” a rejection of a politics singularly targeted on gender development—and, within the media context, of protection that may appear to focus on gender and inclusion on the expense of the fabric situations shaping girls’s lives. Nonetheless, a lot of that critique is lobbed not at indie feminist media—which have tended to be consciously collaborative of their strategy—however at what’s perceived as mainstream feminism, pleasant to companies and fast to churn out a straightforward empowerment slogan.
The media business has additionally modified. Sexual assault, allegations of office harassment, the struggles of working moms—all problems with long-held concern to feminists—are, total, lined responsibly and with critical sources by well-funded journalistic shops, which additionally make use of columnists providing cogent evaluation from the feminist perspective. Pretty or not, such protection can also be extra prone to be taken by a general-interest public not as marginal, however as central to societal curiosity. (It’s no coincidence that many people who labored in feminist media left for these greater publications. I went to Teen Vogue, Jill Filipovic is writing for CNN, and Dodai Stewart is an editor at The New York Instances, to call only a few.)
Through the years, the feminist message has additionally been co-opted, and generally diluted, by the very girls’s magazines that Bitch and its friends critiqued. Marie Claire, Elle, Cosmopolitan—such glossies, with their give attention to life-style and vogue, weren’t explicitly feminist, however have lengthy printed in-depth journalism on issues that have an effect on girls’s lives. Their elevated protection of social-justice points, together with physique inclusivity and trans rights, doubled as an implicit recognition that such tales and views had gone mainstream and got here with an viewers that might be captured.
Social media, too, has had an outsize impact, permitting folks to specific their opinions by way of Twitter threads or Instagram tales, without having the infrastructure of {a magazine}. These outpourings have changed the stream-of-consciousness weblog posts that outlined early-aughts digital tradition. Web activism can, like feminism itself, generally really feel like a recognition contest, by which infighting and performative one-upmanship, versus earnest and keen debate, are go-to methods. At its finest, although, the participation of traditionally marginalized voices on-line replicates the critique-from-the-margins place that indie feminist shops held.
So what does feminist media even imply immediately? On the peak of the weblog period, it meant cultural commentary and media criticism—much like a few of what seems on Substack as of late—by which nearly anyone may make observations about social ills, politics, and tradition. This type of opinion journalism was helpful, creating an area for writers and bloggers to assume, discover, join, argue, and, generally, sure, rage. Many feminist publications sat between journalism and advocacy. As others have argued, the shrinking of those areas is, largely, as a result of success of that advocacy. You’re now extra prone to see pockets of feminist writing in loads of completely different locations throughout media—maybe by way of a specific creator or argument. However that extra distributed imaginative and prescient of feminist media lacks what devoted areas like Bitch gave us: the conviction of being a part of a neighborhood with a shared objective, clear fashions for writing persuasively about feminist politics, and the unwavering protection {that a} mission-driven publication can present.
Some shops nonetheless explicitly try this work. Jezebel remains to be round, although it’s maybe much less culturally influential than it was; Bust remains to be right here too, although it leans closely into life-style. Autostraddle and Salty Publication cater to girls and trans and nonbinary folks. And Bitch held on for so long as it did as a result of, to its credit score, it took care to achieve out to a brand new era of readers. However the ecosystem is smaller than it as soon as was. There’s a gap the place Bitch and others have been, at a time when sustained consideration on girls’s rights is ever extra vital. The cutbacks to the rights of weak communities—communities that feminist publications have lengthy lined—proceed: full-scale assaults on reproductive rights, the state-by-state warfare on trans youth, moms being pushed out of the workforce, girls nonetheless bearing the brunt of care work. Within the 25 years since Bitch was launched, situations have, in some ways, gotten worse for ladies, not higher.
In 1988, the soon-to-be writer of Sassy journal instructed The New York Instances that she’d present that feminism was a viable enterprise. “Feminism is just not the property of the ladies’s motion … I’m going to show you can run a enterprise with feminist ideas and earn a living,” she famously concluded. Sassy successfully shut down eight years later. Just a few weeks in the past, as folks shared the position Bitch had performed of their feminist upbringing, many decried its closure as the tip of an period, whereas others felt that that period was already lengthy gone. I’m unsure whether or not it’s gone or simply morphing. Mission-driven media include difficulties; staff are typically overworked and underpaid, anticipated to go above and past for the “trigger.” However the objective of an unbiased feminist press, if we are able to determine the right way to maintain it, is completely different from mainstream journalism’s; the targeted, generally seemingly area of interest work it does is a vital additive to conventional reporting and op-ed writing, and a verify in a sea of media monopolies. In that context, the folding of venerable publications is a monumental loss. The very cause we nonetheless want them is usually the very cause we lose them.
