It was also a memorable turning point in the end of my faith in a feminism that wields power by keeping other women in line and forcing consensus.
In private groups dedicated to “supporting” writers, I watched women scold, shame, humiliate, and even dox one another. One of the most prescient things my co-founder ever said to me was, “We’re not calling this a ‘safe space.’ We can’t guarantee that.” I witnessed activists call a woman of color they disliked a “house slave” because she was trying to keep online discussions focused on running a freelance writing career like a small business, instead of on social justice. I spent Fourth of July on a boat in the Long Island Sound, trying to get cell phone reception so I could monitor a coup against the leader of one of the subgroups. I spent Easter weekend housesitting in Los Angeles, moderating a conflict that had something to do with a volunteer I’d fired for disparaging us; she was now ruining a community of travel writers.
Every holiday was a nightmare: people had more time to be online.
All weekend, we were a trending topic on Twitter for the wrong reasons. Women who had never been to our conference, or volunteered to help in any way, were gleefully tweeting about what hypocrites we were, organizing a conference for women that didn’t allow babies! A woman I’d considered a friend, whose house I’d recently stayed at, signed a petition against our organization instead of calling me on the phone. I felt betrayed.
I put out a call for volunteers for a working group to address this issue and survey the community (did our actual conference attendees want us to change the 18+ policy? Or was it just activists on the internet who had never attended our conference who wanted us to change it?) The working group could also research how much it would cost to provide on-site childcare at future events.
I had to personally recruit people for the working group. I think I was able to get six people for the task. We sent out a survey to the community, and then held an in-person meeting at the next conference to discuss the findings. Fewer than a dozen people came. One person showed up just to let us know about how flawed our survey design was; she was a professional and she had ideas for how we could do it better next time.
No one can be “everything to everybody,” so when these women find themselves having to say no in order to conserve a little of their own time and energy for themselves or to tend to the political business of a group, they are perceived as rejecting and treated with anger. Real mothers of course can afford some anger from their children because they maintain a high degree of physical and financial control over them. Even women in the “helping” professions occupying surrogate mother roles have resources with which to control their clients’ anger. But when one is a “mother” to one’s peers, this is not a possibility. If the demands become unrealistic, one either retreats, or is trashed.
Trashing “is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition,” Freeman writes. Trashing “is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.”
As I explore in both Self Care and If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, social media has allowed us to trash at scale. Twitter pile-ons once destroyed reputations and livelihoods; there are anti-fandoms on Reddit where hobbyists can all gather to hate the same influencer together. For as long as I live, I will not forget the image of influencer Dave Hollis, dead from an accidental drug overdose at forty-seven, with his phone in his hand.
But it’s also a satire of the dynamics in online communities of women—where you win a conflict by successfully demonstrating that you’re the biggest victim. Where you assert power and dominate not by going after the patriarchy but by accusing other women of doing harm.
The strangest experience of publishing this book has been learning that most readers completely miss that I’m not only making fun of the influencers—I’m making fun of the activists and protestors, too.
Some readers think the novel is a window and miss that it’s a mirror.
This fall, when I read Helen Andrews’s piece on feminization of the workplace, my first reaction, before I read any of the response pieces, was, “that checks out.” It described precisely what I’d lived through inside my feminist nonprofit:
“Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”
Andrews’s thesis doesn’t explain why our country is run by so many men, but it validated my experience of the dysfunction in women-only groups.
In “Trashing,” Freeman writes:
Rage is a logical result of oppression. It demands an outlet. Because most women are surrounded by men whom they have learned it is not wise to attack, their rage is often turned inward. The Movement is teaching women to stop this process, but in many instances it has not provided alternative targets. While the men are distant, and the “system” too big and vague, one’s “sisters” are close at hand. Attacking other feminists is easier and the results can be more quickly seen than by attacking amorphous social institutions. People are hurt; they leave. One can feel the sense of power that comes from having “done something.” Trying to change an entire society is a very slow, frustrating process in which gains are incremental, rewards diffuse, and setbacks frequent.
oof. ain’t that the truth. while it’s impossible to separate this from gender dynamics as previously (excellently) explained, i would like to note that in my own experience of being in predominantly male or even male-exclusive online leadership spaces (pretending not to be, natch) and from careful observation of the dynamics in similar offline ones, men do actually do this same trashing scenario more often than you would think. they may be far more likely to have conflict out in the open than female-exclusive/majority groups, but it seems that this is more a psychological pattern along hierarchical social structure lines more than anything. men who are lower on social ladders behave in exactly this same way, and even the ones higher up will behave just as passive aggressively (which increases along with wealth and power, as a large marker of class difference is conducting your affairs covertly rather than openly - somehow this is construed as “restraint” rather than the indirect, cowardly dishonesty it is) when doing so among class equals. they often start picking at the supposed masculinity of their target and accuse them of traitorous ideological alignment with “the enemy” - for men, this is usually women at all and is a potent weapon for the destruction of their personal romantic relationships and professional careers simultaneously. it’s a form of psychological and information warfare using emotional intimacy as the payload and vulnerability or egalitarianism as the sin, and just like female-on-female trashing, the goal is to induce a full psychological breakdown and permanent reputation destruction to take another player out of the game. personally, i’ve found men will be transparent in private conversations about their motivations here and insist, sociopathically, that this is just how politics and business operate, while women will truly believe at their core that this is a moral imperative for rooting out whatever ideological crime in perpetual purity wars over the eventual spotless soul.
trashing itself is typically aimed as a form of collective release of resentment and jealousy from peers who encourage those “below” them (in level of influence, not any sort of other objective marker here) to cannibalize their enemies in proxy battles over power, mobilizing anti-elitist populist sentiments as a form of controlled opposition, a classic move to appear themselves as the people’s [whatever] in comparison. it’s the weaponization of bases writ large and by its nature requires the dissolution of any support structure or inhibitors that would take a moment to pause and reflect on who and what, exactly, is gained from this mob mentality. who benefits from any narrative at any given moment? if there is an ideological bent to a complaint (as seen in the example of the post-partum mother here vs the development conference) rather than a pure personal grievance (which is what it often is, see: the ableism accusations in the beginning over the panel reference to the satirical title of “crazy ex-girlfriend”), what precise remedy is being suggested or demanded in calls for a boycott (to do… something?) and what greater harm occurs from cancelling a conference outright vs children not being allowed to attend?
there were once noble attempts to stop this in the digital sphere but just like every other attempt at doing so elsewhere they have failed. rejecting persistent identity online was perhaps the only way to have stopped this, but even then it would have likely only been delayed as the real world melded with the digital rather than inspired either/or. the modern silo’d algorithmic internet in which power seems only to be accrued based on 1. how much of a victim you can be 2. how much of a bully you can be (this is often concurrent with said victimhood) 3. and how much outrage you can induce (all three effectively the same thing: engagement for metrics and training data for algorithms and machine models in a feedback loops) has only exacerbated this problem. making something requires allowing the world the choice to destroy it, and doing that is far easier than making something yourself in conversation. but the easiest of all is to encourage and nurture. it’s an active choice, regardless of what others may try to insist in negation of their agency. and it’s also one that has to be repeatedly made and remade, lord knows i’m being a hypocrite right now having just snarled at someone myself recently and justified it to my own bruised ego as moral disgust…
this entire schema really doesn’t change whether you transplant the participants to chinese imperial harems, the modern american political machine, digital feminist movements, the chaotic anonymous manosphere, revolutionary leftist movements, or fascist authoritarian ones. a lack of consensus causes chaos, and movements gain ground with order. nuance is good for peace, not war. the question remains: who benefits from war?
