How Feminist Digital Activism is like the Clitoris
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:20
I'm glad she got you a little warmed up. You're not shy, are you?
00:24
Good! Excellent! I am simultaneously a media activist and a sex educator, and so it's a great pleasure to be able to combine my two passions into one talk. How feminist digital activism is like the clitoris. The answers are many, and as you will see as we go through the talk,
00:42
but I think that we have to start with how misunderstood golf subjects are. So for example, just as many, many men need a map to find the clitoris, many, many establishment activists, both in feminism and beyond, need a map to find feminist digital activism.
01:01
Which is mysterious, just like the clitoris, because it is not in reality that hard to find. We do know Susan Faludi recently, the American feminist, went on a whole rant in Harper's magazine about how the young feminists aren't that interested in activism anymore. The head of one of the largest pro-abortion rights organizations in America
01:23
talked about how no young women are interested in feminist activism anymore. And the reason that the generation ahead of us thinks this is because they do not know how to use the internets. At least that is the only conclusion I can draw, because as you will see, there is an enormous amount of feminist activism happening online.
01:41
In fact, all of the examples I am going to be using today are drawn from just the last six months. These are only things that have happened recently. We could go another six months back and have used a whole other set of examples. It is also misunderstood in a way that it is maligned.
02:01
Oh Keith. Keith Olbermann, when he was the target of some feminist activism with the More and Me campaign. How many of you have heard of More and Me? Just to see where we are at. We are going to be talking about it in great length. There was a Twitter campaign when Keith Olbermann, who was a US left-wing talk show host,
02:21
had on Michael Moore, the filmmaker, talking about the sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and we are going to talk about this in great detail today. Among other things, Keith Olbermann called our protests against him a stupid fest. A massive organized Twitter campaign that actually got real results was called a stupid fest.
02:44
So when it is not invisible, it is much maligned. When it is not invisible or maligned, a lot of people tend to think of the clitoris and of feminist digital activism like a button. Right? You press it and get a result. But it is not a button.
03:03
It is not a venting machine. It doesn't work like that. In reality, you have to actually work hard to do feminist digital activism. One of my favorite, by which I mean least favorite, examples of this, if I can make this slide go. Come on. Is this Facebook breast cancer awareness campaign.
03:24
I don't know if it has made it to Germany, but it is sort of all the rage in the US. Last year, it was change your status to the color of your bra to raise awareness of breast cancer. But the trick is like, don't say that this is about breast cancer.
03:41
Just make your Facebook status the color of your bra. The new iterations came like, I like to hang my purse in X place, but don't talk about breast cancer. It is like this trendy thing without any content, right? And I can't tell you the number of times as a media activist myself, I get somebody tweeting at me or Facebooking at me and saying,
04:03
hey, spread this, right? There is no introduction. There is no relationship. I don't know who they are. There is no context. There is just this assumption that you can press the button and because you are using digital technology, you are going to get instant results. And again, as we are going to see, that is not the case neither with the clitoris
04:20
nor with feminist digital activism. So, not a vending machine. This is hard. This is going a little... I am a little behind. There we go. Not a vending machine, nor is it in fact... I will get the hang of the rhythm. It is going faster on my computer than... Here we go. A rhinestone... Okay, so you dress it up. It is still not a button.
04:43
It is not a dispenser of candy. So, what is it? The thing about the clitoris and feminist digital activism is that the part that you see and the part that most people talk about, that is only a tiny part of a much deeper rooted system. So, this is a diagram of the clitoris.
05:01
You will notice that the glands, which is the part that we think of as the clitoris, is a tiny, tiny fraction of what is actually happening, what we consider the clitoris. All of this, except for the urethra there, that is part of the clitoris, right? And similarly, feminist digital activism has deep roots and reaches far beyond sort of the flashy parts that you see.
05:22
So, we are going to talk about More and Me, which is the campaign I just referenced. And here is what happened. In December, Michael Moore, the filmmaker, went on a big MSNBC talk show in the States with Keith Olbermann who we just discussed and called the sexual assault allegations against Assange
05:44
The charges just that the condom broke during sex, which of course, no, demonstrably not true. If you read the charges, they are about somebody being held down, being raped in their sleep. The charges are quite serious. The charges were called lies and smears and a bunch of hooey. So basically, he said, we don't need to listen to it.
06:02
We don't need to take women's rape allegations seriously because we like WikiLeaks. This is all obviously a lie. Now, the reality of the matter is when people in the media dismiss women's accounts of sexual assault, there are real results. There are social studies that follow this and show that when rape myths like, oh, she is obviously lying or minimization of charges,
06:25
things like are perpetuated here, the results are that women are less likely, women not related to the media or the particular story being discussed, less likely to report, right? Because they also, of course, run by people have heard these things.
06:42
Men are less likely to take their behavior seriously. So there are real ramifications when people, especially big left wing establishment people, get up and say things that are quite damaging to women. So that happened and then more and more happened. More and more was a Twitter campaign, a hashtag campaign, led by Sadie Doyle.
07:02
We're going to get into the ins and outs of it in a little bit. And what happened is she sort of staged a campaign tweeting at Michael Moore to apologize and rescind his statements and many, many thousands of people of all genders joined in. And then at the end, a week later,
07:23
this is what Michael Moore said exactly a week later on Rachel Maddow, another sort of big talk show host. She said, Every woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted or raped must be taken seriously and those charges have to be investigated to the fullest extent possible.
07:40
These two alleged victims have to be treated very seriously and Mr. Assange has to answer the questions, right? That's a big change, right? That's a big reversal in a week. That's an awfully big reversal for a little hashtag, isn't it? Well, let's take a look at what really happened because Moore and me was not just a hashtag led by one person. Again, not just a button that you press for results.
08:02
We start with things that happened before Michael Moore opened his mouth on this in the first place. So as soon as the allegations against Assange were revived in November, a number of us started writing in respectable publications and on our blogs wherever we could about how important it was that we separate out the issues, that we can support WikiLeaks and also take rape allegations seriously.
08:24
I published something in the American Prospect. Salon published something. We also saw things on some of the bigger left-wing and feminist blogs. Come on.
08:41
Student activism and feminist and all of this culminated... Sorry, this is going so much slower than it did when I rehearsed it. Come on. Even Sadie Doyle, who later launched Moore and me, published her own broadside about it before Michael Moore opened his mouth.
09:04
I don't know why. I can't make my slides forward. There we go. And then Jessica Valenti published something in the Washington Post. Again, so there was a whole groundwork being laid before Moore and me was even a gleam in anybody's eye.
09:24
And that's really important because, again, this is a much larger, deeply rooted network. If these arguments hadn't been made, the Twitter campaign would have been less effective, A, because a lot fewer people would have known why they should care. That argument had already been laid out in numerous places. And B, these articles and many more like them
09:41
were part of the Twitter campaign. So when we were tweeting at Michael Moore and other people, people would link to these and other articles for further reading. The 140 characters is fantastic, but you can't make a deep, nuanced argument most of the time in 140 characters. But you can forward an article. You can forward material, but that material has to exist. So this is part of that larger network.
10:01
So that happened, and then Michael Moore said his idiotic thing. And then after that, come on. After that, Sadie Doyle, who writes for Tiger Beatdown, and I should say has been writing for Tiger Beatdown,
10:21
her blog, for a couple of years. Tiger Beatdown is already a well-read feminist blog in the US. She had collaborated with other well-known feminist bloggers. She had already established her readership. People knew who she was. She decided that that was too much. Michael Moore was one of her heroes. And how many of you are familiar with Michael Moore's work?
10:43
Okay, so just like Michael Moore and Roger and me stands outside and calls out to Roger, she wanted to call up to Michael and say, like, I'm going to stand here and wait until you respond. And that's what she did on Twitter. She put something out early in the morning. I think it was that Wednesday, the day after the thing aired,
11:02
and said, here's what I want to do. And I responded to her. Again, already established roots. We had our relationship because we are both activists in the same community. And she was like, who's in? And I said, I'm in. And she's like, I want to do the tag Michael and me. And I said, oh, I think we should use Moore and me because it's shorter, got to save characters.
11:21
It was sort of that back and forth. And several of us jumped on the bandwagon and amplified, and a Twitter campaign was born. I cannot exaggerate the impact of this Twitter campaign. There were many, many thousands of tweets on this hashtag every day using the hashtag Moore and me, and then most of them going at Michael Moore.
11:42
There's a whole sideline with Keith Olbermann, who acted like a total child and flounced off of Twitter as previously referenced. And I'm not even going to talk about that unless you want me to during the Q&A. These are just a sample. Not a lot of people saved the feed. By the way, if you run a Twitter campaign, save screenshots. You're going to want to talk about it later.
12:03
This is just a sample. People just talking to Michael Moore, most being respectful, saying, here's why it really matters what you said and what you said is hurtful. We're really asking for an apology. This went on for a week. Thousands and thousands of tweets a day. Of course, trolls jumped in and there were arguments.
12:23
Some people went too far. It was a public conversation. But it was a massive protest led by Sadie, and Sadie was on it morning, noon, and night. Of course, she wasn't alone. Not only were there all of those people, hundreds and hundreds of people from all around the world.
12:41
Literally, as Sadie would go to bed, folks in Australia would be taking over so that it was constantly going around the clock. But the signal amplification from existing outlets was very important. So the feminist blog Jezebel, which is a huge readership, picked it up. The New York Times picked it up. Slate Magazine picked it up. These are already established media networks, again,
13:02
that are part of the network that we're operating in without which this campaign would not have had the impact it had. Again, it's not just about a Twitter campaign. It's about being connected to the entire network. So, there were also a bunch of things happening that you couldn't see at all.
13:22
Many of you are probably familiar with the term back channel or whatever it is in German. This is just a joke. So there are back channel things happening also, right? So Sadie is getting emotional and strategic support from people she knows, including me, and emails back and forth.
13:41
One of her bloggers decides to take over the comment moderation. On the fly, we had to decide what policies were about people who were using the thread, who were saying hateful things or advocating violence or the kind of fringy people that will come along anytime you have an action. So there are all these things happening literally behind the scenes informally
14:01
that aren't documented at all, and those are also part of the system, and you have to have those networks and relationships to make a thing like this work. If Sadie was literally in this all by herself, it would have been untenable. It practically was. And yet, even more things happened. So partially inspired by the action on More and Me,
14:21
a bunch of women in Sweden got together and launched their own hashtag campaign, which I'm going to butcher. It was called Prata om Det, I think, which translates in English to Talk About It. And the idea of the Talk About It hashtag was to get people talking about times where sexual consent wasn't given
14:40
and people don't treat it like rape and sort of all those complicated issues around consent and sexual consent that we don't talk about. And this, again, became its own phenomenon, huge in Sweden, picked up by the BBC, and really sparked a national conversation in Sweden about what sexual consent means, all on Twitter and partially inspired by More and Me.
15:01
Also, as part of this, because I had written that piece and because of my involvement in More and Me, I wound up going on Democracy Now to debate Naomi Wolf. Now, those of you who have heard of Naomi Wolf may know that she's noted as a big-time American feminist, but Naomi Wolf's position in this case was to really back up Assange at all costs, right?
15:22
And so she had written several pieces repeating that sort of, oh, it was just a broken condom trope, saying that the women had regrets after perpetuating all these rape myths. Many of us were really horrified who had looked up to Naomi Wolf as children. And so when I was asked to go and talk to her about this on Democracy Now,
15:41
I said yes, because I had a lot of things I wanted to say to her. So I went on to Democracy Now and talked to Naomi Wolf, and she actually alleged that the allegations, as described, didn't even constitute rape, which is pretty outrageous. And we had a fairly notable conversation about it on Democracy Now, which I bring up only because that conversation
16:02
got me on BBC World's Have Your Say for an hour talking about whether or not Assange should be extradited to Sweden. And when I heard the news at last that a British judge had ruled that Assange, in fact, can be extradited to Sweden, I couldn't help but think that it's entirely possible
16:20
that that British judge had heard me on the BBC. Am I saying I'm responsible for his decision? Of course not. But may I have been one of the influencers? It's possible. And all because, again, we started there. But the roots and the reach are much deeper and broader. So that's sort of the basics of More and Me, but there are a lot of other things to talk about
16:42
in terms of how it worked and what the impact was. So, just like the clitoris, feminist digital activism can require serious stamina. I asked Sadie Doyle, who is the spearhead on More and Me, how many hours that she thought that she put into this campaign.
17:02
This is a woman who has to pay her bills, has jobs to do. She spent upwards of a hundred of her own personal hours in a week making this campaign, not to mention the emotional trauma, the threats, which we're going to talk about in a minute, and the stress of it all.
17:21
It was beyond a full-time job for the time that she did it. And we also can't overlook that. We can't make the work involved invisible. Again, it's not a button. It's not a vending machine. Feminist digital activism takes a lot of work, as does all digital activism. Just because there's technology which makes things look free and easy doesn't mean they are, in fact, free and easy.
17:41
There are always costs to pay. And in time and stamina are one of them. In addition, I mentioned death threats. Sadie Doyle absolutely got death threats. A lot of people involved in the campaign got death threats. Some of them, people who just did not want Assange to be open to these sorts of allegations
18:01
and just wanted to defend him at all costs. I got called a right-wing CIA glory hound. That was my favorite one. Here's my least favorite one. It'll come up in a second. So this is a charming sample of the mail that I received
18:21
after I went on Democracy Now and talked about the rape allegations. This is just a sample. There were others, and I am not alone. What we know is that any time women speak out in digital forums, they get targeted. If we seem like we're making an impact, if we seem like we have a certain amount of power,
18:40
we're going to get targeted. It happened to tech blogger Kathy Sierra a few years ago. She was not talking about politics. She was just a big shot in the technology world, and some assholes on the Internet decided to target her because she was a woman taking up too much space, and they published death threats against her.
19:02
Not only did that, but they published her address and her personal information info about her kids to the extent where she wound up quitting her career. She quit her career and has shifted gears and no longer has an online presence. And we see this over and over again for women who take up too much space in the public sphere online
19:21
get emails and communications like this all the time. Whether or not this comes to pass, and I do want to say clearly that there is not a lot of evidence that people who write these emails act on them. I can't find examples of times when people have been threatened in this way and people have carried through on the threat, and that's important to note for perspective.
19:42
But none of us wants to be the first time, and you really can't know. So that takes an emotional toll as well as a sort of toll in terms of safety and mobility. You think twice before you say things the next time. It really does have a chilling effect, both personally as well as in the ways that women participate online.
20:03
And again, just in the same way that when media people perpetuate rape myths online, it has a real-world impact on real-world women that have nothing to do with the media, these threats do also, because this was in my private email box, but there were plenty of threats like this on Twitter on the More and Me thread to women just for participating,
20:23
had trolls come along and say heinous, horrible things. And that means that there are going to be fewer women speaking up overall. It has a chilling effect on women's participation in what is now the public square, the Internet. So, it also, because of all of this,
20:41
the hard work that it is, it helps to have a sense of humor. And I really have enjoyed a lot of the ways that we have blown off steam in these campaigns. So one of my favorite feminist digital activist funnies is the Feminist Hulk on Twitter. How many of you follow Feminist Hulk?
21:02
I love the Feminist Hulk. This one isn't super funny. I just included it because I think it's sort of spot-on messaging about Assange in case anyone was unclear about how I feel about these things. But Feminist Hulk and other sort of funny satire, she's not satire, he, I don't know,
21:21
Twitter accounts are a great way to sort of blow off steam and also get message out as well. Somebody started a Naomi fucking Wolf fake Twitter account, sort of mocking sort of Naomi Wolf's shift into the dark side. And these are really great ways, both for us to feel sane and connect with each other and also to sort of, satire and humor
21:41
can be a great way to get message out for folks who don't respond that well to sort of direct confrontation. So it's another approach. Also, my friend Deanna Zant, who's a really amazing media technologist, made Naomi Wolf bingo. I don't know if you can read that because it's dark, sorry.
22:00
But she took all of the things that Naomi Wolf kept repeating in all of her rape apology media interviews and made a bingo card so that we could all just find a way to laugh about it. These are really important ways. And I bring it up not just because it's a useful strategy to think about in your own work, but also because we got some criticism for this, especially when we were sort of,
22:20
a bunch of us were sort of laughing about Naomi Wolf online and kind of mocking her on Twitter. And I heard from feminists who said, like, that's not sisterly. That's not very sisterly to say somebody can be in the club and somebody can't be in the club. There were jokes about, like, Andrea Grimes, who writes for a great blog,
22:42
the name of which is Escaping Me. But anyway, she was doing these very funny, awesome tweets about not only revoking Naomi Wolf's feminist card, which, of course, just in case anyone's unclear, there's no such thing. It's a myth, I promise. But then she was like, I'm gonna take Naomi Wolf's feminist card out to dinner,
23:01
and like, here's a great time I'm gonna have with Naomi Wolf's feminist card. It was just this funny thing. And we sort of brought some blowback from people within the community who were like, that's not very nice. And I'm of the opinion that I don't have to be very nice to rape apologists. And that if I want to laugh at one to make myself feel more sane, that's okay.
23:25
So, another way that feminist digital activism is like the clitoris, or sexuality in general, is that trust can make it more powerful. I've alluded to this in a lot of ways already, but a lot of this work is built on relationships.
23:41
If you just show up and say, hi, nobody knows me, nobody knows who I am or what my agenda is, I want to tell everybody to do this, you're probably not gonna have a lot of good results. The reality is that relationships are what matter here. Technology is a tool. But if you're not using it in conjunction with people
24:01
you have an actual relationship with, you're not gonna get very far. How do relationships matter? Well, you can get help, you can get perspective from people. Sadie Doyle, after the success of More and Me, launched a subsequent campaign called Dear John, which is the name of the Speaker of the House in the US
24:22
when the Republicans launched their war on women's health and women's reproductive rights over these last few months. And it came about because there was a bill to redefine rape. It had to be like violent rape in order to count. Oh, United States.
24:42
And she had learned, she learned a lot from Dear John, from More and Me where she sort of developed a lot of things ad hoc and what she did when she was launching Dear John is she started an email chain with a bunch of other activists that we all know each other. And when I say we know each other, I should point out that many of these people I know online.
25:01
I've not met them in person. But the relationships are no less real. In fact, there's a recent study out that proved that digital social networking, digital connections can release oxytocin, which is sort of the bonding hormone in your brain, right? So those are real relationships and a lot of times we hear that this isn't real, right?
25:21
Like, oh, I don't really know that person. I just know them on the Internet. But those are real relationships and these are people who really have my back in the work I'm really doing and vice versa. And we did that in Dear John. There was a round robin of emails. We talked about strategies. We talked about who would take shifts reading the comments and moderating.
25:41
We really put together a big strategy just totally on the fly because I know these people. I know their work. They know me. And we all trust each other. And so when Sadie said, let's jump into it and do this, we all said, how high, right? But that doesn't come without building relationships. And those relationships also come from those funny conversations
26:01
and from talking about our days and snarking about things and commenting about each other's lunch on Facebook. All these things that are much maligned as sort of the frivolousness of social media are actually about building relationships that feel solid and real and trustworthy when things go down and we need to work together.
26:21
The organization that I founded, Women Action in the Media, that's one of our goals, is to create a growing network of women who are working for gender justice in media. And one of the ways that we do this is digital activism. And by which I mean we have a really active listserv. Now when I talk about this, I always feel like it's sort of disappointing
26:42
in that like, ooh, a listserv, that's so cutting edge. But the reality is, this is a daily conversation between journalists and media makers and activists who use media and media activists where we challenge each other's thinking, we help each other get jobs,
27:02
we support each other and make jokes and tell each other we're not crazy, we congratulate each other on successes, and it becomes a real, it's a real community. This conversation has been going on for six years. And one of the ways that community works because we know and trust each other is by saying like, hey, this whammer has this campaign going,
27:22
can we all get behind it? Or hey, I have a post up on Fox News, this happened recently, I have a post up on Fox News and I'm getting all these comments and I'd love for there to be some positive comments over there. And we all go over there because we're a community, a real community that happens online and we have each other's backs.
27:41
Those relationships are the foundation of any activism and you ignore them at your peril. Of course, the clitoris, just like feminist digital activism, is part of a larger system and we also ignore that at our peril
28:00
when we only use digital activism to get our work done, we're cutting off a lot of tools. Again, cutting edge is not always the answer. It can be part of a larger system. I'm going to shift gears here and talk about a different campaign. Again, all of these are recent. Most of them are from the States because that's where I do my work.
28:20
So there are a series of billboards going up. This one went up in Georgia in the fall, basically telling black women who have abortions that they're committing genocide against their people. They are, by the way, funded by the same people who did the anti-gay marriage initiative in the U.S.
28:40
So those networks run deep and are all connected on the other side as well. So this is one that went up in Georgia. This next one went up in Soho in New York. The woman whose kid this is freaked out because she had no idea what the picture was for, that her kid was being used in this way.
29:02
This one just went up in Chicago. It says, every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted and it has a picture of Obama on it. This one is up right now all over Chicago. So how do we respond? Well, a bunch of organizations have got together and created a campaign called Trust Black Women.
29:23
And the whole idea is that instead of telling black women what their decisions mean and what's best for the black community, we should trust black women to make that decision for themselves. And Trust Black Women has a great online presence, but that's not all they're doing. So you can see on this next slide,
29:43
if it comes up, you can see the partnering organizations. And again, there's that trust. These are not organizations that just met each other. They didn't just call each other up cold call and say, hey, do you want to work together? These are people who have a network and relationships that have been working together ongoing.
30:01
And these are the multiple strategies they're using. They are using social media to great effect to do this, but it's not the only thing they're doing. Here's their What You Can Do page about how people can get involved, and you'll notice that Facebook and Twitter are only a small part of the campaign. And that said, that's how I found out about it because Twitter, they're using a hashtag campaign
30:22
on Twitter again called Trust Black Women, and women are speaking out about black women are saying, like, here are the choices I made and here are why they worked for me. And it's a wide variety of voices, and it brought my attention to the larger campaign. So seeing the clitoris just as itself
30:41
was probably going to mean you have really boring sex, right? And seeing digital media as the only way to do activism is also limiting yourself in a similar way. Also on the same campaign, I also want to point out that sometimes it pays to get technical. There we go.
31:01
So Ann Elizabeth Moore, who's a really great activist from Chicago where the latest set of billboards, the Obama ones, have gone up. You can giggle, it's okay. Sense of humor, remember? She discovered, she actually knows because a lot of her work is about the commercialization of public space,
31:22
that these billboards are hung illegally, not because of their message, but because the way they got hung required a permit and she found out that they did not get a permit. And so she has now launched a campaign to insist that the aldermen take down the damn billboards because they didn't get permitted. And that's okay, that's a totally legit strategy.
31:41
She is, by the way, using an online platform to do that, the Care2's petition platform, which is a really great, easy petition platform, great for circulation, and it's really okay to do that. Getting change made on a technicality is better than not getting it made at all. Of course, the clitoris is not just part of the reproductive system,
32:04
it's part of many larger systems, so it's part of the nervous system, right? And here, if we're talking about feminist digital activism, I would say that the nervous system is analogous to the media at large, right? And so that's all the corporate media, as well as the independent media that's broadcast and print,
32:25
remember actual print newspapers, and magazines, all the different ways that our media gets done. And if we don't connect it, right? You've seen these examples as we go along of ways that different campaigns have plugged in. If we're not connected to the rest of those media outlets,
32:42
we're going to have less impact. Similarly, that means we have to be interested in what's happening with those other outlets, right? We have to be interested in corporate media consolidation. We have to be interested in media policy, in lo-fi radio. I don't know what the local German media issues are, but when we think,
33:01
oh, well, we have Facebook and Twitter, you know, like we have Foursquare and, you know, whatever media technology you're using, that's not the end-all be-all. In order to get influence at the larger levels of society, you have to be able to connect those campaigns to the larger media network, and that means you have to be concerned about the health of the larger media network.
33:22
Just the same way that if a body's not healthy, you're probably not going to be too much in the mood for sex. So if the nervous system is the media, I would also say that the muscular system, to which the clitoris is also attached, is democracy, right? And as we were talking about,
33:41
a lot of talk about Egypt and the Middle East, right, you can have all the media technology you want. If you don't have democracy, it's going to get pretty ugly. So, again, you have to be concerned not only with the health of the digital media, but also the health of the democracy, and it works both ways, right? Like, sex is good for you. But also, if you're not healthy,
34:01
you're going to be less in the mood, and there's a similar multidirectional feedback loop with the rest of the body politic as well. So let's talk about Egypt. You've heard a lot this week already about the role of social media in revolution, in recent revolutions. It's been used specifically as feminist activism
34:22
among the women of Egypt as well. A great woman launched a photo collage on Facebook, a photo album, of women participating in the protest, and women leading the protest, because this story was not getting told by the mainstream media. Again, we have to be concerned about that mainstream media for this exact reason.
34:43
So here are some of the photos, really fantastic photos that were collected to show that women were taking the lead and women were at the forefront of Egypt's revolution. How did I get this story?
35:01
I got it on Twitter. Similarly, there are also great women activists who have been tweeting that I've been following to get the news out of Egypt about what's happening.
35:21
Here's just one of the women who I found really indispensable to follow. But the reality is that it's not ultimately a panacea, because just a couple of weeks ago on International Women's Day, what do we know happened in Egypt? A march of women were beaten and abused by mobs of men, and women are being shut out of the democratic process,
35:43
the formation of the new government right now. So we can feel great about all that digital media activism, but again, if the larger democracy is not healthy, women are not getting where we need to be. It is not an end-all, be-all. Another thing to think about
36:01
when we're talking about feminist digital activism, as well as orgasms, is that quality can be more important than quantity. At least there are some people laughing over here. This room is a little...
36:20
You're not sure what to make of me, are you? Okay, so quality can be more important than quality, right? Like, if you have lots of mediocre sex, is that as good as having half as much really great sex? That's your call.
36:40
For me, I'd like to have half as much really great sex. I mean, I'd like to have that much really great sex, but if that's not in the offing, I'll have less great sex than more mediocre sex. And the same can be true in terms of how we evaluate the impact of our campaigns. This is an example from an organization called ExHale,
37:01
which is an organization for women who have had abortions. So it's a depoliticized space for them to just be able to talk freely about what that felt like, because the U.S. conversation about abortion is so polarized and intense that a lot of times it leaves the actual women who are involved completely with nowhere to talk
37:20
without being dragged in as an example for one side or the other. So they created this organization just for women to talk about their abortions and how it impacted them. And MTV ran a special as part of one of their Teen Mom shows, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there was this big Sixteen in Love campaign when the organization was featured
37:42
and some of the young women from it were featured on MTV. And the idea was to get people to show love and support for the young women who had spoken who had had abortions. And it got a ton of attention. It got huge Facebook and Twitter numbers. It got hits. All those metrics that we know how to measure.
38:03
But if you talk to the folks who ran the campaign, they'll say that this was actually the best outcome. This young woman who wrote in who said, thank you so much for sharing your story. You are so brave. I haven't been able to talk about this at all,
38:21
but watching you talk about it, I have a little less shame now. That's a victory. That's a success. And because this work is so hard, we have to count our successes where they are. And the numbers sometimes don't matter as much as the results for one person. And I think that's a totally legit way to look at our work.
38:41
We have to decide what's important to us and prioritize that. The next slide says, sometimes restraints make things better. Seriously, no one is laughing.
39:02
Oh my gosh. Okay, what do I mean by this? Well, besides the obvious, one of the things 16 in Love did to get a successful campaign is they had very specific and restrained guidelines about how to participate. This was not a free-for-all. We oftentimes think open is the best, right? The more open the platform, the better the platform.
39:22
But if you're trying to get a result like the one we saw, that's not always the case. So they put down very specific guidelines. Here is how we want you to participate. We want only statements of support. We don't want political statements from either side. And it was heavily moderated to that. And they only got, because it was so heavily structured from the beginning,
39:43
they only got three or five messages out of the many hundreds they received that they even had to turn down. So sometimes it's okay to say, we're limiting how you can participate, right? This is for a specific purpose. Again, if you know what's important to you, then you know what the restraints are
40:01
that are important to you as well. Another thing that's important to keep in mind with the clitoris, as well as feminist digital activism, is to try a proactive approach to satisfaction. Thank you! Finally, I got you warmed up.
40:20
So, a lot of times, and a lot of these campaigns we've been talking about have been reactive campaigns. Something bad happens, and then we all gather together to respond, and that's very important. But it's not always the right approach. For example, my organization, Women Action in the Media, when we read the study that came out a few months ago,
40:40
now that said that only 13% of the authors on Wikipedia are women, did we go protest the Wikipedia offices? No. We didn't. What we did instead was, we put together a webinar to teach women how to use Wikipedia and why they should care about it. What happened with this?
41:01
Well, the word spread. It was like lightning. Women are dying to find out this information. And then Wikimedia, the folks who run Wikipedia, got in touch with us and said, we're really excited about this. Can we sit in? And now we're in conversations about them, about how to put together a whole series of these so that we can have a whole campaign training women to participate. Sometimes, the best approach to change
41:22
is to try and create positive change instead of protesting a negative one. This is the last specific example we're going to look at. I'll be taking questions very soon. And this is actually happening right now. This is a campaign that started last week, and I couldn't resist talking about it.
41:41
Build intensity. So, this is a Twitter conversation called Things Fat People Are Told. It was inspired by a response somebody had to being harassed for being fat, and as a response, somebody started the hashtag Things Fat People Are Told, and it's become a really personal place
42:03
for people to tell their stories about what it's like to be fat and the shame and sort of censure that comes along with that in American culture and cultures elsewhere as well. Here's just a sample that I stole from the feed. And what's amazing about this
42:21
is people are telling incredibly personal stories in 140-character vignettes. And I think here, the intensity that's building comes from the power of story after story, right? People aren't making gigantic political arguments. No one is proposing policy changes. People are simply using Twitter to tell their stories.
42:42
This is a lot like the Swedish Talk About It campaign. They're telling their stories over and over again. And the collective impact, what Twitter is great about creating a collective impact, right, because it's so easy for everyone to participate in one stream because of the hashtag, and it's because the access to entry, the barriers for entry are so low that you can create.
43:02
There were literally, there have been thousands of these posted in the last week, and if you read them, it's really emotional and it really gives you an amazing overview of what's going on in terms of fat oppression and fat politics right now in ways that if one person had just tweeted it
43:20
without the hashtag, it would never have happened. And I think the power of our storytelling through social media is something that we should always put front and center. Social media makes it possible not only to tell our stories, but to tell our stories together in a way that collectively creates an intensity and a pressure for change that telling a story over here
43:41
and then telling a story over here and sort of that disparate telling of stories takes a lot longer to get to. I'm going to leave you with a basic last thought, and then we're going to take questions for a little while, which is that the whole woman matters.
44:00
What do I mean by this? Well, that storytelling sort of segues into this, right? That if you are mostly focused sexually on the clitoris and that's all you care about, you don't care about if your date's having a good time or maybe other things that you might like or any of those things, again, you're probably not going to be a great lover. And if you are only focused on launching a Twitter campaign
44:25
or how can I use Facebook to do X, you're missing the bigger picture. We have to take a look at our digital activism. It's incredibly powerful, just as the clitoris is an incredibly important organ in the body. In fact, it is the only organ in anybody's body
44:41
dedicated solely to pleasure. It has more nerve endings than the head of the penis. It is a really awesome, intense place to be. But if we only focus on that, we lose the bigger picture. Similarly, we have to keep paying attention to the big picture in our activism. What are we trying to achieve?
45:02
How do we think we can get there? What tools are appropriate? Don't let the tools drive your activism. Use your activism to decide which tools you're going to engage, in what ways. And then also, we need to stay in touch with the fact that all of this work is done by people. And that's the other level at which this operates, right?
45:21
The technology isn't going to do anything for you by itself. And behind every tweet, behind every post, behind every text message is a person. And ultimately, what we're trying to do is create a world in which all of us have better lives, have freer lives, have the ability to live our lives the way that we want to,
45:41
and to connect with other people the way we want to. And that's the whole point of all of this as well. All right. This is just how to reach me if you want to, and let's take questions.
46:03
You had me giggling backstage the whole time. Thank you. Someone was laughing. Do we have any questions? Come on down. You can shout. I've stunned you into silence with my awesomeness.
46:27
There's a question over here. Oh, great. Go for it. Yeah, sorry, there's the microphones down here and over here as well.
46:47
It should be on. Okay. That's much louder.
47:01
Yeah, sorry for the not laughing. I think it's just us being very European. But I was just wondering, because I think, especially with feminist activism, the trolling is a very exhausting part. And yeah, I don't know, there's probably another secret recipe
47:22
how to deal with this the best way, but any advice that you could give here? Yeah, sure. I can talk about trolls. It is exhausting, and I think the very first thing that we can do is acknowledge publicly how exhausting it is and that we are whole people and that we have emotions, right?
47:41
So after I debated Naomi Wolf, I got hundreds of emails and tweets and Facebooks, and some of them were fantastic and supportive, but there was a lot of ugly coming my way. And you know what? More in Me was still going on at the time. It was hot and heavy, More in Me, right?
48:01
And I had to drop out. I basically dropped out. I was like, I can't talk to anyone, I can't deal with anyone, I'm a sexual assault survivor, I'm feeling incredibly triggered. And somebody online, on Twitter, I was still, after the debate, I kept posting, I was really wigged out, and I think I said something about feeling really triggered.
48:22
And this is a lesson, actually. I meant to direct message someone privately on Twitter, but I accidentally posted it publicly. And it was the best thing I could have done, because people, about how triggered I was feeling and how weird I felt, and people just kept sending support, and somebody said to me, like, if you're triggered, you can stop.
48:41
Like, you did your part, let somebody else pick it up right now. You know what I mean? And that was, that's, I think, the best advice I have about when it gets to feel too much or when it's too hard, is to honor that. Take a break, take a deep breath, take a nap, do whatever you need, talk to your friends, sometimes those relationships really matter, talk to the people who you are connected with
49:01
and have trust with, and recharge, but don't go away permanently, because that's what they want, right? What they're trying to do is shut us down. And so taking care of yourself in the short term makes it much easier to keep going in the long term. Knowing you can take a step back and take a breath means that you can also take a step forward again.
49:21
That's the best advice I have. Also, like, sometimes take legal action or at least take documentation, you know, like, tell people. Don't suffer in silence in that respect either, because we need to be able to see patterns, and if the same person is doing this, or there's a pattern of what's happening to all of us, and we think it's all an individual problem,
49:40
it's a lot easier to deal with if we can see what the patterns are and we can strategize together. Thanks. Any more questions? Okay, there's a question. Hi, I hope it's not a big trap, I'm just stepping in, but we have, like, the whole topic is here at the Republica this year,
50:03
and we just had the discussion outside because people are thinking, or at least talking about, there's a Wikipedia roundtable and there aren't any girls, so we'll just, you know, open up a female Wikipedia roundtable, and the question I'm asking myself is, is that the right way?
50:23
I mean, it's there, you can go there, why just separate yourself, I think. Does this whole thing make it worse? I mean, you have a lot of experience with that. Is it the right way to separate yourself? To do a separate space? I think that the question, the answer is both, right?
50:42
So, ideally, I think women do need a separate space where we can talk about our own issues as part of what my organization does, because sometimes we need to talk amongst ourselves, but that's not the way to solve an inclusion problem. There are plenty of smart women doing amazing work on social media, and they should be included,
51:02
and if they're not coming to the media roundtable, if they're not included, that means they don't feel included. They don't feel it's for them. The thing about inclusion and the thing about diversity in general is it's not enough if you're in the majority and whatever community we're talking about bringing diversity into, so if you're a guy worried about women's inclusion,
51:20
or if you're white, talking about people of color, it's not enough to say, well, they can come if they want to, right? Because if this is a historically male-dominated space, women may feel weird or reluctant to come take up that space. They may fear, I mean, you're hearing about all of the stuff we get when we do step up and participate. So what women need are invitations, right?
51:44
You need to reach out to individual women and say, hey, we want you at this media roundtable. It's important for us to come to this media roundtable. Can you make sure to be there? You need to do outreach. You need to figure out, if that's not enough, ask some women. Why aren't they coming? Ask some women you would have thought would show up and say,
52:02
how come you didn't come? And then ask another and another until you see what the patterns are. You have to, it's great that you're concerned, right? I love that you asked the question. But the answer isn't just like, they could come and they don't. Because that's how, that's what happened with Wikipedia, right? That's true of Wikipedia.
52:22
Only 13% of authors on Wikipedia are women. Could women write Wikipedia at any time? Sure, but there's a whole history there, right? Men dominate technology. Women are taught that we're not experts. We're not taken seriously as experts. How do we learn that from the media who doesn't feature us as experts?
52:41
So there's whole social patterns you're dealing in. It's not your fault personally. But to overcome it, you have to do a little bit more work than just open the space. Does that help? Okay. Thank you. I think we have time for one more question.
53:00
One more question. No, you're just grabbing a seat. Or not. Or another round. Oh, here we go. There you go. Hi. One blog post that I've read of you
53:21
was about dating as a feminist or something. At some point last year, somebody sent that to me. And so, after hearing you speak about all this continuous media flood that you're exposing yourself to, I was wondering how antagonizing this entire thing is in your personal life.
53:41
I mean, if you're dealing with this adversity every day, how does that affect you personally on, well, potentially the dating level? Yeah. Just so you know, he's referring to an interview with me. I've spoken about my dating life publicly, so this is not out of bounds. I did an interview about how doing what I do impacts my dating life.
54:02
Yeah. It's hard. Actually, when the whole More and Me Assange campaign was going down, the Democracy Now thing, I was just starting to date this guy who I really kind of liked. I thought it was going really well. And then we got in this huge argument about it. And then it kind of fizzled. Sometimes I wish I was a carpenter.
54:23
Ultimately, this is who I am and what I do. And if somebody can't step to that, then it's not going to happen. But it is hard. And sometimes I wish I could wait longer for people to know. Like, they could get to know me and that I'm a regular person. I'm fun. I'm not serious all the time. But, you know, my book has the word rape in the title.
54:43
So, you know, you're on a first date and they're like, what do you do? And this comes up. So, yeah, it's hard. I think a lot of people, I hear the word intimidated a lot, which makes me sad. I don't think of myself as very intimidating in that I'm pretty open. I'm nice.
55:01
I try to get, you know, like, I'm a fun person, I swear. But it's really hard. But ultimately, I'd rather be me and find somebody who can deal with that. I'm way too old to start changing myself for somebody else. You're here. Thank you very much, Jacqueline.