The Trouble With Jezebel

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In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here.

I turned on my computer one morning last summer, and there was a YouTube clip of two women, manifestly drunk, discussing why one of them could not be bothered to call the police when she was raped. Thinking I had stumbled into some rerun of The Jerry Springer Show, I checked again. Nope, the clip was from “Thinking and Drinking,” Lizz Winstead’s then-weekly live interview program from a New York theater. The drunk women were Maureen (“Moe”) Tkacik and Tracie (“Slut Machine”) Egan, then bloggers at the website Jezebel.

As of May 1, Jezebel, part of the British tabloid-style online conglomerate Gawker media, was reaching 892,000 people, 51 percent female, in the U.S. every month, according to the new-media tracker Quantcast. Jezebel describes itself as taking on “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for women, Without Airbrushing.” It’s staffed by bloggers who are expected to produce around 10 high-traffic posts a day. It didn’t take the bloggers long to realize that one way to attract a lot of traffic was to offer up outrageous behavior to the clicking public.

As last summer’s video revealed, the Jezebel editors have pretty vivid lives to share. Moe Tkacik was apparently date-raped and says she has had unprotected sex, and Tracie Egan, in her words, “decided to go home with someone I never would have, had my vision not been impaired by 14 hours of drinking.” Jezebel editor Megan Carpentier was raped and did not report it to the police. Last spring, occasional Jezebel contributor Emily Gould published a story in the New York Times Magazine about chronicling her relationships and sex life online*; the cover photo was a shot of her in her bed.

What is a discussion of Jezebel doing in a symposium on the current state of feminism? Maybe the right question is: Why has the site hit a cultural nerve? And what, if anything, can Jezebel tell us about the state of young women’s lives?

From a certain perspective, the Jezebel writers look a lot like the natural heirs of feminism: young, college-educated, urban (mostly New York), single, hard-working, sexually liberated. And not infrequently, issues of feminist weight show up on the site. Tkacik led a worthwhile campaign to get money to a victim of the honor killing culture in Basra. Blogger Anna North recently wrote several posts about Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, whose 1962 book, Sex and the Single Girl, was an early contribution to the liberated life. She also noted an unfavorable review of the late Marilyn French’s history of women from the New York Review of Books.