As a Canadian, I didn’t know who US Democratic candidate John Edwards was until he hired Amanda Marcotte, blogmaster of Pandagon to work for him. I was interested and surprised, since Amanda is an outspoken feminist and her writing is pretty edgy at times. As the story unfolded, I learned more about Edwards and his campaign, and was interested to see that he stood by her even when many people were calling for her resignation because of things that she had written in her personal blog.
Unfortunately, Amanda quit the Edwards campaign within weeks, after being attacked by a "volunteer army" of right-wing bloggers who continued to denigrate her and after being denounced by the Catholic League. In a story on Salon.com, she says:
"The right-wing noise machine’s favorite trick, possibly its only trick, is to select a target and start making a fuss, hoping that by creating the appearance of smoke, just enough people will be fooled into thinking there’s a fire."
Amanda’s writing is satirical, and shocking at times, which is what makes it so interesting. I can imagine how it can spur a passionate response. But her detractors are pathetic – instead of coming back at her with an equally clever and satirical response, she was personally attacked in a very sexist way. She says:
"One question that’s hard to avoid is how much of the venom had to do with the fact that McEwan and I were young women entering into a field (Internet communications) that’s viewed as almost monolithically masculine. From my vantage point, it appeared that sexism was one of the primary motivating energies behind the campaign. Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn’t so "angry." Bluntly put, I find it hard to believe that many men would end up being denounced on TV for using words like "fuck" or "cunt" on their blog and expect to receive piles of e-mail offering an opportunity to suck the sender’s dick."
I have been in a number of arguments lately about whether or not sexism exists – how can you say it doesn’t exist when things like this still happen?
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