Why I left "women's issues" blogging

Meanwhile, every ladyblogger is placed under an insane expectation to agree with all of the others. “Online feminism has more and more rules lately,” Jezebel editor Emma Carmichael told the Longform podcast last year. “There are only so many things you can say.” Feminism is an amorphous concept, which can make it seem like a big tent—every feminist defining the movement for herself. But it can also function like an invisible electric fence—nobody knows how far she can stray before she gets zapped. I have been called “bad PR for feminism” by a feminist sympathizer and “a voice of reason inside the feminist movement” by an anti-feminist commentator, but I’ve come to see “feminist writer” as a dig regardless of the context in which it’s lodged. To me, a great writer investigates her subjects with skepticism, reports them with nuance, and delights in surprise. An effective activist succeeds in the opposite way: She flattens complex ideas into slogans, cultivates loyalty to her cause, and skips the inconvenient details. I get why an activist might own feminist, but why would I agree to reduce my worldview to a single word? And why that one? Last year, I told the New Republic’s Alice Robb that I suspect “feminist writer” is just the latest euphemism for “woman writer”: one more way to qualify a woman’s opinion before she opens her mouth.

When my work wasn’t being classified on the feminist-to-not spectrum, it was diagnosed as a personal vendetta. Because I wrote about a group of which I’m also a member, I was often accused of pursuing a calling as opposed to a craft. Some critics wondered why I was so obsessed with gender (that was the job) or how I could afford to waste my time writing about it (on account of the money). Others traded opinions on which portions of my biography or biology could possibly explain why I thought the way I did. They speculated about my relationship status, the races of my sex partners, the color of my pubic hair, how my weight will fluctuate as I age, and of course my daddy issues. When I took a detour from the lady beat last year to write an essay about a childhood spent hiking with my father, one commenter observed, “She had a good relationship with her dad. I would not have guessed that from someone who seems to hate men.”