4/10/2023 0 Comments Gawker owner flippant answers![]() ![]() Moe: That’s happening too, but you live through that. ![]() Tracie: People are always saying it’s not safe to go home with strange men, blah blah blah, like Mister Goodbar, whatever… Consider the most controversial part of the interview, Winstead and Tkacik’s exchange about date rape: It’s selfish, dangerous, irresponsible, and a radical departure from the cooperative solidarity that marked the women’s movement in the 20th century.īut there’s another way to think about Tkacik and Egan’s brand of feminism that makes it sound less like a radical departure from Third Wave feminism and more like its inevitable consequence. What exactly is Jezebelism? Winstead’s editorial gives us the uncharitable version: Jezebelism means advocating the pull-out method, shrugging off sexual assault, and blogging about one’s riotous sex life without warning readers that there are risks involved. Watching the video, it’s hard not to interpret the tension between the two sides as the ambition of a couple of young Turks coming up against the anxiety of a fading generation confronted with its rebellious protégés. It’s a shame that their defenders picked up this line of reasoning, because the flap over Tkacik and Egan’s comments could have been an opportunity to give Jezebelism a dramatic debut as a movement worth taking seriously, a new wave of feminism finally come of age. “I mean, to our friends, it was just Moe and Tracie being Moe and Tracie-drunk, irreverent, drunk.” “I thought this thing was supposed to be a comedy show,” explained Egan on her own blog. After all, Jezebel has headlines like “Sex Without Condoms is Actually Better than Diamonds, People!” and “Dad Who Waxes Daughter’s Bikini Area Returns to Tyra.” Two of their writers made flippant comments? Dog bites man. In the days that followed, few feminists defended Tkacik and Egan, and those who did pled for lenience on the grounds that the pair’s irreverent style shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The Jezebel girls set a bad example by being so cavalier about their glamorous, unsafe, sex-drugs-and-indie-rock lifestyle that, or they were just taking a stand against repression and slut-shaming. Either Winstead is a victim-blaming scold for insisting that Tkacik should be angrier than she is about having been date raped in college, or Tkacik is a selfish anti-feminist for letting the guy off with nothing but a reproach over the next morning’s eggs and coffee. Either Winstead blindsided Tkacik and Egan with harder questions than they had been given to expect, or Tkacik and Egan were so irresponsibly drunk by the time they went on the air that no line of questioning could have led anywhere good. To tell the story of what happened on the night of the interview, it is necessary to pick a side or channel Rashômon. The following week Winstead wrote a Huffington Post editorial condemning Tkacik and Egan’s on-air behavior, setting off a controversy over who owns feminism. Lizz : You’re digging yourself into a huge hole darling, really, I gotta be honest. I always wanted to be like, Oh, you should know that you did the wrong thing. Moe: One thing that I would say about this particular guy, and then I want to be done with it, is that this guy, I always felt safe around him even after he date raped me. Moe: Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more. Lizz: Why not? You see, that’s the problem, why not? I’m just curious. I got very mad at him, but I wasn’t gonna f*cking like turn him in to the police and f*cking go through sh*t. Moe: I guess the third guy I ever had sex with date raped me. (Tkacik has since been laid off.) The show included exchanges on controversial issues like date rape and condom use. The trouble started last July when Lizz Winstead hosted Moe Tkacik and Tracie Egan on her Internet talk show “Thinking and Drinking.” Winstead is a humorist who had a hand in the creations of both the Daily Show and Air America Tkacik and Egan are writers for the Gawker consortium’s un-PC feminist blog, Jezebel. These young women took the worst of the media firestorm that followed, but both sides should realize that, in the usual storyline, scandalizing the establishment is the scene that comes right before the new wave’s take-over. One sign that the Third Wave is washed up came last June when two young writers shocked their movement elders by carrying the revolution too far. Whoever was in charge of deciding what to call each generation of feminism knew what she was doing when she settled on the metaphor of waves: Do what you will, they just keep coming. ![]()
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