07 April 10
My history with feminist media
I bought my first subscription to Ms. Magazine when I was 22. It was $35 and that was almost my entire monthly budget for food. I had three jobs, was going to school full-time, and was maintaining my 3.0 average. My life is lazy now in comparison. But I truly felt like Ms. Magazine was The Magazine that would help me learn all of the things I’d never bothered to learn. Which is truly how I felt. The slightly more suspicious me 16 years later realizes that I wasn’t really given an organized opportunity to miss the things that I felt like I’d not bothered to learn, but that’s beside the point.
I kept that subscription for 3 years even though it felt like a financial hardship it felt important to support the magazine that was documenting and making it possible to find all the information I felt that I needed. When I moved to Chicago and money became tight and I felt bitter, I canceled it for a few years. I renewed in 2000 and felt good about it.
In June of 1996 I lived in Alamogordo, New Mexico for a summer. I shouldn’t have been there. It was a huge mistake to move there, to move to be there with the person who was living there. I was depressed and miserable and so aware that I was in the wrong place that I couldn’t believe I was actually there. And then I wandered into a Border’s or Barnes and Noble (really, is there a difference between them?) and amidst the Cosmopolitan and Redbook magazines was a magazine that was printed on black and white newsprint with a color cover named Bust magazine. I was blown A-way! I read the magazine cover to cover for weeks on end. It saved my sanity. It made me feel less crazy that I was the “crazy chick” in a community of very conservative military folks. What felt like a homework assignment with Ms. came naturally with Bust. And it not only kept my sanity, but it helped me start to piece together knowledge from my women’s studies classes with the information I was gathering from reading Ms. and with the popular culture that was leaking in through all of the edges.
Then in 2001 or 2002, my friend Veronica suggested I pick up this magazine named Bitch. I’d grown bored with Bust, began to feel like it hadn’t aged with me, or that I’d grown old while it remained fresh and full of life and ready to teach younger women how to embrace the term feminist while still remaining their happy lifestyle full of feminist fun and music. And Bitch was like what I missed about college, the intellect and discussion and opportunity to learn, without the pedantic papers and preachy professors. I liked Bitch, but it still seemed so distant. But shortly thereafter I found out about Ms. Musings (also most likely from Veronica) and I became a huge fan. A huge giggly OMG!!1!! Ms. fan. It was great. All the information that didn’t make it into print made it onto the website. I read the site religiously, often hitting refresh several times a day, faster than Christine C. could update.
And then, much too early, Ms. pulled the plug on the blog. I protested by canceling my subscription. And I began to switch over to just reading Feministe.us and I read Feministing a little while later and I read Shakespeare’s Sister and relied on Veronica to keep me up to date. I continue to subscribe to and donate to Bitch magazine and i keep meaning to get a subscription to Bust and Ms. again, just because I can and should. And I adore what their mission is and I support them, but I’m not as much of a giggly fan as I used to be.
And I wondered if it was because I was getting older and maybe just wasn’t prone to being inspired and awed as easily as I was. And I’m sure that is all a part of it. But tonight I had dinner with a woman who has had a career creating feminist cartoons. And at 70+ she is looking to embrace technology to help her keep growing her business and supporting herself. And I love her message and her witty sensibility and her sense of fun and joie de vivre. And at her age, instead of resting on her laurels and lecturing people younger than her about how we don’t know how good we have it, she’s looking to learn and grow and expand.
And that is amazing. That is what floored me. And I think that is what has kept me from becoming a fan girl about these feminist publications that exist now. They’re all smart, they’re all doing great things, they’re all fighting the good fight, but they’re all a little full of themselves and of their message. And I think this may be a simplistic statement. But I think a woman, like the woman I met tonight, is what the current feminist wave—the Y Feminists—is missing. Not the knowledge, but the rootedness, the humility, the awareness that no matter what we know, we all have more to learn. We don’t know it all, and whether it is what came before us or what is coming up on us, we have more to learn and more to give and more to grow.
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