BANNED!
So I’ll be following all of this, but if I read “ban this woman she’s a racist” or “that woman is a _______” well I’m going to step back and say hey, what’s this really all about, and chances are it is simply the fact that not all women agree…
-quoting Sheila G.
Sisters, we need to think about the practice of banning women from our blogs.
In general, I do not support banning. We all make mistakes, right? Yes! And we all have slightly different opinions and preferences such that, if we are looking to fight, they can all too quickly and easily escalate into full blown blog wars. Goddess knows, there’s no shortage of material to argue over! What’s more difficult- much more difficult- is to maintain your civility and continue to demonstrate respect in the face of reasonable disagreement.
Now, once again, I find myself in an arguably hypocritical situation. Hey, not the first, and I’m sure not the last time! (That’s what I get for opening my big mouth on the internet.) If you read here regularly you know that I’ve banned people, maybe most memorably, Sheila G. 
However, she and I have been able to resolve the original cause of my outrage and Sheila G has been posting at Undercover Punk exclusively under the handle Sheila G (as far as I’m aware- and that’s all I want). In regards to other points of philosophical disagreement between she and I-of which there are plenty!-there is NO NEED to foster interpersonal hostility over political divergences. We can discuss other, more fundamental issues that we agree more fully on, such as LOVING WOMEN. See Sheila’s words above: “not all women agree“! So true!! 
Except under circumstances amounting to a PATTERN of disrespect, hostility, contentiousness, or deception, I don’t think that the practice of banning women from participation in feminist discourse serves us, personally or collectively, in any way. I’m sure I could add a few more adjectives to my exception, but I think you get my drift in regards to the fact that there may be circumstances in which separatism from someone IS called for. It may be temporary (as it was here for Sheila G) or it may be permanently.
There’s also an important distinction between personal, blog-specific “bans” and calls to ban an individual from multiple blogs. I will not be complicit in continuously interacting with someone who calls names, refuses to agree to disagree, or who is otherwise contributing to discussions in a persistently negative manner. I may very well ban such individuals from my own blog. I do not, however, think we should ask our sisters to ban someone we have issue with. If she is a sister indeed, she is our Equal and she can make that judgment herself, without external pressure from the community.
Fact-specific and issue-specific disagreements are inevitable! But they shouldn’t mushroom into ultimatums. That’s what I’m really trying to saying here. Can we agree on that?
Or maybe agree to disagree with good reason? HA!
Women have much more important issues to discuss than fostering unpleasantries amongst ourselves.
FOLLOW UP NOTE: Seeing as how I had my head up my white ass, I didn’t realize how explosive the issues between ww and woc had become in the past 24 hours. This was written and published in response to Sheila G’s comment on my blog and NOT in light of the events that have only in the past 1/2 hour come to my attention. Please believe!
ha ha! i didn’t even know it was coming to this… out there… in the gay blogosphere… that is so funny, and typical. i love that you banned Sheila G and then made up… As you know I have gone berserk on ppl in my blog (usually just ex girlfriends) and had to delete posts… that seems so great while writing them and the next day seemed just plain old harsh, or jealous or whatever… anyways, don’t ban me SISTER!! just let me know who you’re banning, and why, so i can follow the fight!
Yeah, Sheila G and I got some history there.
I’m not banning anyone at the moment. EEK!
I am in NO WAY a chill person. I was not born that way. More often than not, time to reflect and calm down allows me to see that I’ve been more harsh than necessary. Especially since we’re writing to each other here on the internet, our words are preserved “forever.” Our feelings may mellow, but these words we type do not. So, for example, in the case of my anger towards Sheila, I modified my post but I still wanted to take responsibility for saying things that weren’t necessary. So I also posted a comment there reflecting my current feelings because after a few months, I realized that I didn’t care about holding a grudge as much as I wanted to talk to Sheila G about lesbians. YAY lesbians!!
Well the last few articles UP are very sensible. Oddly enough, I feel a kind of distance from the whole need to ban women for whatever reason. I figure in time, if someone is a decent feminist, they’ll figure it all out. As I said before, I’ve been around the block with feminist fights for decades. Most of the time they turn out to be about very disagreeable people, or women who are crazy (women that have ruined lesbian groups I’ve been a part of personally BTW). The nut cases take over groups, drag them down, and then go on to victimize other groups. Usually the members are unaware of the repetitive behavior, but I could see a lot, especially with groups I had volunteered to facilitate. The mental illness, the craziness, the drugs, the contant hook ups and pick ups and ex’s fighting, all of it began to bore me.
So the thing is, unlike real life a lot of time, blogs aren’t fact checked, and really can’t be if people are expressing personal opinions. Blogs usually aren’t written by people trained in journalism, there aren’t editorial policies or even grammar checks. So blogs are different.
It has long been my opinion that women suppress so much of themselves IRL, that they explode on the Internet. IRL, most women I know would not have the guts to simply deal with issues face to face. It gets into a big drama. We are watching this drama unfold yet again, and if you wait long enough the truth will come out.
Also, I think we often have misunderstandings due to women having varying degrees of technical expertise on the Internet. Some women are very good technically, others are not.
I know I get frustrated with trying to log in to various blogs and having a million different codes, and passwords, etc. This alone can be wearing. If I encounter too many log in barriers, I just give up. I don’t have the time to figure it all out, so I focus on a few skills and leave it at that.
We need to look at the medium as the message, and step back and say hey, what do we want to accomplish as Internet sisters? What is our collective power potential? Marshall McLuhan had some real insights into all of this, and you may want to get out your old J-school copy of “Understanding Media” to see how this applies to women and blogs.
I personally am tired of being called names on the Internet. I’m tired of being called woman hating, I’m tired of being called classist, I’m tired of being called names because I like good grammar, and attempt to improve my writing when possible. I’m tired of women calling other women racists, when we don’t have all the facts. I’m tired of collectives not telling how many women of color actually work at a place, and how this might affect interpersonal dynamics. And, my old whine, hey I’m tired of vulgarity and sarcasm for it’s own sake.
As sincere feminists, and I attempt to be one, I know that we are all trying hard to change the world. We are all trying to do very difficult things. And we should know by now that if we are talking about radical issues, chances are the heat will be turned up. It’s why Robin Morgan and others walked out of the male dominated new left, and created second wave feminism in the first place. They got tired of the radical male posturing, and wanted to get some real work done.
I have the perspective of being a feminist since I was a teenager, and I worked with women so that our lives would be better. I didn’t think women would get anywhere by not being clear about objectives, and what it is we wanted in the world. I know that being a lesbian feminist takes courage, and I have spent an awful lot of time risking a great deal of personal loss to advance the cause of feminism and of lesbians. And I can assure you I am rarely if ever thanked for this long term work, and most of my generation just kind of shrugs at all the name calling now.
But if we keep on fighting and fighting over nothing, we won’t get anywhere. We have to understand that there is a lot of craziness in lesbian community, and it is wearing. It can drag you down. People who have been activists a long time need to take care of themselves, and we need to respect that women are at different stages in their lives. We are not all on the same page all the time. Just because you don’t invite someone to a birthday party does not make you a defacto racist. Come on. There are a lot of radical women I would never invite to my home for a variety of reasons. But reason number one, is they are just mean, and have no self awareness of being mean, and then they wonder why life isn’t the party they feel they should be invited to.
There is a lot of childish nonsense out there. “You can’t come over to my blog—-” that sort of thing. So when I see a big fight, I just step back and think, here goes the name calling yet again. Here goes the avoidance of simple facts. There goes reason out the window yet again.
So we need to be aware of the goal, which is sisterhood. We need to be aware of the fact that political lesbians are hard to find these days, and that a lot of lesbians have settled for mental banality… believe me, in la la land this happens.
So let’s celebrate the lesbians who are doing the good work and trying. Let’s celebrate sophisticated responses. Let’s pay attention to things that matter, like understanding power, understanding privilege, race, social position etc. But let’s also honor women who work hard and who achieve because they are focusing on getting a job done. Let’s not use patriarchy as a constant excuse for not paying a credit card on time, or staying too long in a dead end job, for example. Let’s be clear about what the difference is between quitting a job or being fired from one. Let’s be clear that white ways of communicating can be radically different from black communication styles. We can be aware and try. That’s all we’ll really be able to do.
We won’t end racism, we won’t end sexism. We won’t derail the rich, and have the poor take over, because in a revolution, the next top dog becomes another oppressor.
One of my younger lesbian friends keeps asking me the secret of success in the world, and I told her it is showing up on time, following up and persisting. It is also about holding yourself to a higher standard than the norm, and being cautious about making promises.
Show up! Be on time! Don’t swear too much! Don’t always believe every word that women write, because if the language is attacking or the name calling gets too out there, I simply have less respect for the people. I look at the abusive language, and it tells me something about the character of the writer. As much as we want to blame everything on racism or sexism, the truth is, some women are just plain mean or crazy or walking wounded, and I don’t want to hang with them, because I want to focus on women who are caring and sharing.
I want to focus on the good and the sane, and call it my ever present middle class bias, but I really do believe that if you swear and call women names, you are no friend of mine.
So thanks UP for trying, and being reflective, and I have always enjoyed your blog for this reason…. it has emotional intelligence and complexity, and it seems to be very sane and grounded. Now let’s see if we can all go to the next step of liberation… a positive step, and let’s be sure to celebrate each other. Women need to celebrate rather than denegrate.
Sheila, you know I love my SWEAR WORDS!! I’ve tried to be more deliberate about using them, but I will never stop. Also, just to be clear, I am emotionally unstable. I take my medication like a Good Girl because I HATE DRAMA.
Just saw your post above UP– yeah lesbians!
Yey lesbians 
Like the sound of that!
Well you may, as you say, be emotionally unstable IRL, but a lot of things you say seem clear and make sense. There is a kind of underlying logic to it all. I really do encounter and incredible number of lesbians IRL who are on medication, and depression seems to be a major lesbian illness. I sense this edgeness throughout the lesbian and feminist blogs, so one wonders what this movement has come to. Or maybe so much of contemporary life really is about drugs.
I’m not on any anti-depressants, nor was I interested in the drug culture of my era. I was interested in women having more time to do what was of benefit to women. I expected us by now to get the basics of racism or sexism or non-heteronormative 101 by now. So I am disappointed at all the name calling, the on and on of it all. Women should be more clever than that? Or is it really about emotional and economic precariousness?
Thank you, Sheila! I TRY to make sense.
I tried to be OK without anti-depressants, but I wasn’t. That was a harsh realization. I don’t know what’s wrong with people–it’s definitely something! I think people avoid their emotions, I think they’re so scared that they just put up emotional barriers rather than dealing with situations in ways that make them feel better. This is understandable; the world is a cruel and violent place. I was commenting with BBB a few weeks ago about the passive-aggressive EPIDEMIC we have going on. People don’t say what they mean or what they feel, they engage in coercive and manipulative behavior to either get their way or to make other people feel badly. This culture of dominance and competition has done terrible things to us; unthinkable things. We don’t even know how to disagree anymore. We just HATE.
I’m really sad about what’s going on elsewhere. I don’t want to be involved. They just KEEP GOING. I know the women are mad at each other, but it hurts more and it causes more harm to keep going & going with no intention of reaching resolution. At all.
Undercover’s comment:
“I think people avoid their emotions, I think they’re so scared that they just put up emotional barriers rather than dealing with situations in ways that make them feel better. ”
This could be what is at the bottom of all the Internet explosions of late. This very real way that people can’t or don’t want to deal with emotions, and so they create false ones. I get very tired of this, because I believe that emotional courage is something you practice day in and day out.
You don’t know how many times I hear lesbians comment “Well I didn’t really like X” but then they don’t say they don’t like it.
UP, you also say:
“I was commenting with BBB a few weeks ago about the passive-aggressive EPIDEMIC we have going on. People don’t say what they mean or what they feel, they engage in coercive and manipulative behavior to either get their way or to make other people feel badly.”
This manipulative behavior comes out of the advertising/consumer industries that just saturate people night and day with manipulation. It’s a world of constant noise, constant advertising, and one that was alien to my early life experiences where I had a lot of time to think in silence.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I believe that somehow Internet feminism has a real bias against happiness. There seems to be the constant need to emphasize what doesn’t work, or to not really want to engage people. Yet, for me, feminism was a huge success, and the lesbian movement itself was more successful than I ever imagined back in 1976. I just can’t believe what’s happened on a national scale.
My partner and I were watching the Equality March this past Sunday. She had been instrumental in planning all the lesbian marriage activism for the march in 1993, so it was exciting to just listen to all the speeches on C-Span. You could really see this whole new alive generation out there in front of those mircrophones, and yet, I don’t think I heard the phrase “lesbian feminism” once, even out of the mouths of the many lesbians of all age groups who spoke.
So we have to think about how lesbian feminism fits into all this. And we have to think about how brutal and negative so much of what is happening now has become.
My life has rarely been about misery, it has been about incredible opportunity and adventure. Sure, my life has been a challenge, or I had to be very persistent, and it took me longer and with less resources to do things, but ultimately, I feel a certain contentment at the activism I did, and how I can be of service to others even in small daily situtions.
This small world of happiness rarely gets reported, and Internet feminism seems far from sisterhood so many times. And since my early years as a young new college grad newly minted feminist were completely focused in an international non-white country, I see charges that feminism is white rather stupid. Feminism is worldwide, and has been for over 100 years. We’d quote a feminist poem that was written by a Japanese woman back in 1912, for example.
My world is about the miracle of meeting really great women every day. Of having such fun working with very smart women, or planning fun things, or encouraging my friends.
But yet, there is such competition out there, such cut throat fighting, such draining commentary.
I could see with my work in young lesbian groups that what the greatest challenge was was to raise the bar of positive energy so high, that they couldn’t help but feel loved. This alone seemed to take the sting out of the craziness or sarcasm, or all that club scene stuff.
So life is about accomplishment, and 2009 is a vast improvement from 1993, and yet women are still not happy
My greatest joy comes when I am with women. We cant give up the fight- that’s why I’m a feminist- but I have to practice optimism in order to Live. I have to be positive about where we’ve come from, where women are headed, and about being here now as myself.
“I know the women are mad at each other, but it hurts more and it causes more harm to keep going & going with no intention of reaching resolution. At all.”
Exactly.
i cant believe that UP banned sheilaG?? i wasnt around then, so i am not privy to that, and i dont know what happened or want to know. it kind of makes me LOL, as so far i have felt that sheilaG was a voice of reason, and a much needed one. i can tell that you (sheilaG) have been around the block a few times and that you are wiser for it. i think its important to have women of all ages at the table, because the energy and perspectives are so different. one of my most cherished internet friendships has been with a woman i met at newsvine, who has been around and involved in the US feminist movement since before i was born. i value her perspective and her experience very much, and she has told me that she sees herself in me. a group of twenty-and thirty-something internet addicted first-world privileged femininsts is great and all, but i think we are also pretty full of shit and green in many ways. i value other voices as well.
and sheilaG, i dont usually name-call but i do swear. sometimes, i swear a LOT. i hope that we can still be friends.
I totally agree with you, FCM. It’s been mostly older, more experienced women like Sheila who have kept me sane and grounded over the past week. I value them and their hard-earned wisdom so much.
Does everyone understand why I don’t have a blog-roll, now? Good. I almost added one a few weeks ago. I think I might’ve dodged a bullet there.
Yes- and I’ve followed suit. It’s just so stupid and petty.
I agree with veganprimate- I think we’re all sufficiently intelligent and perceptive enough to make up our own minds about whom we read, whom we let comment and where we go online. I also think we need to be more forgiving…especially when most women enter these discussions in good faith and with similar goals in mind.
I’m with you on the whole banning thing. Yeah, we might need to ban certain people from our own blogs, but this whole banning-people-b/c-someone-else-doesn’t-like-them-and-if-you-don’t-you-are-obviously-against-the-other-person bullshit is stupid. I make up my own mind about whom I read, whom I let comment, where I go online, etc. Sometimes I end up in the long run agreeing with someone else’s assessment of a person. Sometimes I don’t.
You just don’t want to bother with blog rolls, because this seems to cause such a big to do out there. One blog decides to really be mean or attacking, and this causes the owner of another blog to delink, and then on and on it goes. This is what I mean by having technology sometimes fascilitating things we’ve never dealt with before. Caution is useful on the Internet.
FCM, don’t worry. Use whatever language you feel comfortable with, however, I do point this over use of the vulgar mainly because it is sexual terms that imply the rape of women by men.
And thank you for the compliments, I appreciate them. All we can try to do is our best, and even that isn’t good enough in feminist land these days. But here we all are still trying
Well..I’m glad to see you still here and writing/reading away UCP – you are one of my favourite blog sites *hugs*