Recently Seal Press has learned a lesson the the Democratic Party is learning as well. The lesson is simple… When you advance yourself by encouraging people to use their imagined victimization as a weapon, you know they will turn those weapons on you someday.
Seal press sells a whole bunch of books that primarily feed into the victim mentality of it’s readership. In exchange for the cover price those readers get to be righteous about how the man (or someone, anyone really) is keeping them down. I find it interesting that they were surprised once these victimization junkies got done blaming men for the problems and turned on the next target - Seal press itself.
According to the attackers the world is like this*:
- White men oppress everyone
- “Men of Color” oppress women
- White women oppress “Women of Color”
One of the problems is that Seal Press isn’t going out of their way to beg WOC authors to submit proposals to them. Hell, I don’t agree with much of their views on the world, but given how much hate was being tossed their way I thought Krista and Brooke (from Seal Press) were incredibly reasonable when they said the following (note: somehow something in that quotation is supposedly “racist”*** - I sure as hell don’t see it)
“I appreciate the dialogue, ladies. First off, the blog feels very informal, and my language is in response to the language here:
1. You hate us.
2. We have nothing on WOC.I get that you all engage best through negative discourse, but I find that too bad. It’s not servitude when we pay our authors advances. And book publishing is not an industry of outreach as much as it is editors being presented with an idea and engaging would-be authors in creative co-creation. I just find it curious more than anything that you all are wasting your time hating (yes, purposeful reuse of the word) rather than actively engaging in changing something you find problematic. I totally respect the creative space.” - Krista and Brooke over at the hate fest
The problem is that Krista and Brooke are white and they own a business. It should not come as a shock that this makes them the targets of anger and scorn in the radfem community. A community which is mostly anti-capitalism and expects white women to apologize for their coloring every second paragraph. Personally? I think that the quote “you all engage best through negative discourse” is the most insightful thing anyone has written about the radfem / victimization community (other than me of course) for a long time.
Now some of that nightmare resulted from a whole bunch of hand wringing and upset centering on someone named “Brownfemipower” who claimed that Amanda Marcotte plagiarized an article she wrote from a speech Bfp gave at a conference that frankly no one in the real world had ever heard of. Now honestly we all know Amanda is not wrapped very tight and has no ethics to speak of but these folks probably have it mostly wrong this time.
Anyway, things went predictably. Boycotts. Outraged posts. Impassioned defenses and the inevitable self deletion of a blog**. Of course, the fact that this Bfp person has used the time honored tactic of flouncing before isn’t stopping people from losing their minds.
“Bfp has nuked her blog a number of times since she started blogging over some blowup” - Julia states the obvious
Heck, to hear some people say it the Internet as a whole will be lucky to survive and frankly feminism is already dead.
“That group included one of the most important feminist bloggers in the history of the web — who has now taken her blog down. As I’m writing, that link goes nowhere. Perhaps permanently — I don’t know if she will return, though like many others I dearly hope she will.” - Holly explains why we are doomed
It’s all pretty confusing. I am sure there are a few real points made under there someplace but frankly I am a bit tired of the white guilt thing at the moment. If Bfp wants to get published I suggest she hit’s up Lulu and set up an account. Hell, I’ll even buy a copy of the first thing she puts up just so I can be safe when the revolution hits.
Go follow the links. These folks always put on a great circus and remember… no one tears down women like radfems with a good hate on.
* note: Depending on which event of the victim Olympics you are watching you may also see the rick oppress the poor, the pretty oppress the ugly, skinny oppress fat and heterosexuals oppress homosexuals. The list is literally endless.
** note: If you are an author and wonder why people don’t take you seriously, I might suggest you not repeatedly acting like a child.
*** note: the “racist” accusation was made on a blog who’s author (in the comments below, where she links to her blog) has asked me to take down the link. I am going to do it this time because this situation is already contentious enough and frankly the same silly accusation is rampant in much of the discussion of this topic so it wasn’t a unique data point. On the whole, I am not sure if I will always remove links on request so don’t take this as a precedent.
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April 11th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Some great points here. I love to point to these blogwars as examples of leftist lunacy, and how cool it is when “victims” turn on feminists.
Thanks for the link on “flouncing”
April 11th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Please take down the link to my blog.
I also suggest you get a clue.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Uh…no one at BA’s blog was “whining” about wanting to be “included” by Seal Press. Your post seems to be hinging on this assumption and therefore doesn’t make sense. There was only one line in BA’s post that referred to Seal Press - and Seal Press came on down and threw a hissy fit over it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t attack random people on the internet under my workplace’s name.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Um, you know what? You are way off here. Seal Press went to a womans blog, totally discounted her legit critique, and then stormed off in a little huff. End story. The way they treated WoC voices on this issue is NO different then the way sex workers get treated by “various factions”, and you are able to see the bullshit there. Point is, if you are going to claim to care and represent, you need to do that, and on such issues Seal Press failed.
April 14th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I can see how and why you see it the way you do… I just don’t agree. I think the disconnect starts early - I didn’t see her critique as well formed or legitimate. Nor do I think their response on it was at all discounting.
Int he case of sex workers the issue is usually that one group is trying to tell you how your life is. They are ignoring your views on how you are feeling and thinking and what your reality is. I did not at all see seal press telling anyone at all how their reality is. I only say them standing up when their attackers tried to paint THEM as racists (and that is what they were doing).
I simply don’t see a problem with saying “no, I am not a racist” when someone tries to tell me what I am thinking / feeling.
It is of course possible I am way off of course, it has happened before and I am sure it will happen again. I don’t see anything here (especially given how many folks have continued to revel in their righteous indignation) that indicates that.
Thanks for the comment though, I do appreciate it. I’ll look at it again when I have a chance with an eye on having missed something. Your analysis is usually pretty good… so it’s worth a double check on my end.
April 14th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
The fact that you can state that no one in the real world has heard of Brownfemipower or the many many other women of color bloggers who are constantly putting out an analysis of our very real experiences, just goes to show how happily insulated you are. And the point isn’t even about one woman blogger of color, it’s about a more consistent pattern and practice of our voices being marginalized in the blogosphere, just as they are in the real world and how the two worlds work together.
Seal Press made the mistake of going to website “othering” the already “othered” (ie “you all”) without asking for context, without listening, rather just defending and assuming that what was being asked was for inclusion, when rather clearly, Seal Press had already been written off. Not a very professional stance to take from so called professionals.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
“the point isn’t even about one woman blogger of color, it’s about a more consistent pattern and practice of our voices being marginalized in the blogosphere”
How? Honestly. How is it even possible to marginalize you in the blogosphere as a whole? Sure, you can be marginalized at specific places… but overall? it’s impossible for anyone to keep you down.
There are no gatekeepers, no editors to shut you down and no one censoring your words. The web and blogging is the single most level playing field in the history of human communication.
It is possible for you to be on the margins if your message doesn’t find or keep an audience, but thats your doing and not the result of a conspiracy. Personally i think so many activists are so used to blaming their lack of impact on some vast conspiracy that even when it is clearly silly to make the accusation they can’t help themselves.
“The fact that you can state that no one in the real world has heard of Brownfemipower or the many many other women of color bloggers who are constantly putting out an analysis of our very real experiences, just goes to show how happily insulated you are.”
While obviously a slight exaggeration the simply reality is that I could pick 100 people of the street in the center of Manhattan and the odds are almost none of them would be blog readers of any type. Of those almost no one would care or know who Bfp is.
To think that even the largest bloggers (with the exception of a very, very few) are even a tiny blip in the “real world” is delusional.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
“no one at BA’s blog was “whining” about wanting to be “included” by Seal Press.
I suggest you re-read the comments.
“There was only one line in BA’s post that referred to Seal Press - and Seal Press came on down and threw a hissy fit over it.”
The one line was “Fuck Seal press” and the folks from Seal did not throw a fit over it at all. Their response was polite, reasoned and reasonable. Much more so than the abuse being tossed their way deserved.
We can agree on one thing, they shouldn’t have commented at all. they should have known better than to bother when the hatred was already in full force.