Perhaps this, then, is what I meant: my ideal website—and we’ll call it a women’s website (what the hell) because I am a woman—would be one that didn’t make these excuses, writing off fun as “filler” or requiring the premise of friendship in order to raise weightier matters. This website would be one where the editors were willing to assume authority in and for their work, even if it meant sometimes seeming argumentative or unlikeable or wrong. It would be one where good faith could be assumed without gussying everything up in the trappings of intimacy, swaddling tricky subjects in chattiness. These are gestures that seem strange and infantilizing to me, because instant friendship regardless of individuality is the kind of assumption that parents make about children (“They have a daughter your age, you’ll have fun!”) and bosses about subordinates and majorities about minorities, but not one equals in power typically make about one another.
n+1: On Ladyblogs by Molly Fischer
A really well-thought follow-up to her original ladyblog critique that discusses follow-up pieces to critiques, among many other things.
