oh gee, jessica again? I’m shocked.

And what exactly is that supposed to mean?

Loosely Twisted said

I can certainly see the differences between the two sites and I prefer here to Feministing I even to the extent that I took their link of my links page, so there had to be a reason for that. You think your feminists but it’s just misogyny in disguise wake up and smell the coffee.

Excuse me?

That’s one of the reasons I was glad to see the NYT article — it seemed to me that both women did a really good job of defusing the situation and not letting the media spin it into yet another catfight story.

The catfight narrative is never completely going to disappear, but it helps to show solidarity. And sometimes showing solidarity might mean saying “There’s a misguided press release from a feminist group that needs criticizing?

Self-censorship to maintain solidarity in a progressive movement is not only counter-productive in this social landscape as several other commenters noted, but also something that reeks of enforced conformism practiced in Fascist/Communist countries of the not too distant past. This was the very language used by the avowed bourgeois Marxists/Maoists on my undergrad campus to minimize differences and squelch dissent both within their movement and with those who disagreed with their ideology.

And the NOW-NY response was ridiculous, and I am one who checked it out to make sure it was for real before I threw up. I refuse to let that kind of thinking be passed off, unchallenged, as feminism. Further, when we let shit like that stand, we may as well officially form a separate movement in which only white women will be recognized as women, because that’s essentially what that piece was doing.

No response, or a blandly stated disagreement, might have helped defuse the “Feminists vs. Feminists” storyline.

Of course, not responding or a bland response would have fed into the All Feminists Are Irrational storyline so beloved of the mass media, but I guess that’s less important that showing a united front all all times.

The funny part, of course, is that Valenti and Pappas deliberately refused to attack each other or each other’s group and presented it as a rational disagreement between two similar groups, so the NY Times wasn’t actually able to present it as a catfight, much as they wanted to.

If Valenti hadn’t responded, then the Times could have written an article saying something along the lines of, “Oh, the new feminists are too busy having sex and drinking to even recognize what the older feminists are saying, blah blah blah.” Feminists (all women, really) will be lambasted for everything they do, and everything they don’t do; to self-censor in the hope they the MSM won’t have ammunition to criticize feminists is a pipe dream.