Skip to content

SEXIST BEATDOWN: You Will Always Remember That Very Special Time When You Were Like “Oh, Just Stick It In Already” Edition

SO! Guess who’s going to Harvard?

NO, NOT RIVERS CUOMO. He was there already! But on Monday, I will be there as well, at the delightful Rethinking Virginity conference, discussing with some other far more qualified ladies (seriously: look at all these ladies) my very favorite topic of all. Which is, of course, your hymen.

Your hymen! Is it a big deal? Lots of people seem to think so! They fetishize it, creepily, and also tell you to keep it around, for the other option is to fall into a life of Sin and Denigration! Now: I myself live a life of Sin and Denigration, so perhaps I am not one to talk. But the clean-living Amanda Hess of The Sexist and I have some thoughts to share, on things that we find far more important than your hymen! They include: Slut-shaming, first-time (or second-time, or third-time, or: Look, sometimes it takes us a WHILE TO FIGURE THINGS OUT, okay) being SO TERRIBLE, the fine line between consent and abstinence, and the many parallels between your personal sex life and the fine feature film “Dune” by David Lynch. Also, punning?

So join us, in this exceptionally late-posted (I refuse to apologize, because I spent much of the day not conscious? And other parts throwing up? I share these things only so you will not be tempted TO JUDGE ME; first it’s all “happy beer on the stoop Tweeting” time and then your body is like undermining your WHOLE SITUATION twenty minutes later) Sexist Beatdown!

virginity_soap-1191821310103

ILLUSTRATION: Dear God, do yourself a favor and never Google image-search “virgins” or “virginity.” I did, and now I wish I had some of this, FOR MY EYES.

(Continued)

Ladypalooza PRESENTS! Remember The Blow

There are lots of inevitably female pop performers to (shudder) deconstruct. I mean, there’s Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Beyoncé, and, uh. OK, so I guess there are five female pop performers. Why aren’t there any more?

If only there were some pop album that had songs about, say, how girls’ pussies are literal goldmines; being in a threesome involving a girl a girl and the universe; persuading a girl whom you hear through the ceiling being sexually undersatisfied downstairs for a real lesson in love (orgasming); being chewed up, digested, and crapped out—in sensual terms—by the beloved; how your love is like the Louvre; and other, strange, strangely complex love songs. And maybe those songs could have some fresh, eminently catchy production? Oh wait! That album does exist. It’s The Blow’s 2006 release, “Paper Television.”

(Continued)

Ladypalooza ON TOUR! Or, I Have Written My Own “Pinkerton,” Basically, I Am Sorry.

Why, hello, Reader! It has been a while!

“Yes it has been,” I imagine you to reply, “and also, you never post on your own blog any more WHAT THE FUCK WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING.”

A lot of things! I am editing pieces; I am replying to e-mails; I am taking part in some very exciting and sexy events. But primarily, I am finding myself to be OBSESSED WITH RIVERS CUOMO. Rivers Cuomo was very important to me, in many stages of my life, and for several reasons! I basically blame him for EVERY UNFORTUNATE INTERACTION I have EVER HAD with a penis! Now: If you know me, or my Twitter, at all, then you know that I have been working for quite some time on a long and detailed account of all this. Because my personal problems are fascinating to the world, and so I share them. And also, they have often much to do with The Sexism. But perhaps you would like... to read the piece itself????

Well, good for you, sir and/or madam! For it is available online! It is at The Awl, it is over 5,000 words long, and you are either going to be very happy about this, or you are going to be a dude I have slept with, in which case you will be like, “yikes, got out of that one JUST IN TIME.”

Before we begin, let us be clear: We speak not of the Rivers Cuomo that was, nor of the Rivers Cuomo that is, nor yet of the Rivers that shall be. We speak, now, of the Platonic ideal of a Rivers Cuomo: The Rivers Cuomo you have never met, nor ever can meet, nor can ever be sued by (subsequent to writing a blog post that uses his name quite a lot), but who lives, nevertheless, within your brain. Specifically, if you happen to have grown up in the 1990s, and are heterosexual, and also a girl.

Because you totally have one. I mean, come on.

1. SEDUCTION

He was cute; he was vulnerable; he had glasses. Really cool glasses. His hair was unfortunate; his features were delicate; in his videos, he could never quite hold eye contact with the camera. He wore sweaters a lot, and he sang about wearing the sweaters; he was a sweater-wearing dude, that Rivers Cuomo. He sang at you on the radio. He loved you, more desperately than anyone ever had, or would.

Oh, AND IT GOES ON FROM THERE.

SEXIST BEATDOWN: You Are All Just A Bunch Of Stupid Cunts Who Should Shoot Yourselves In The WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY COMMENT GOT DELETED Edition

So, that Annaham post! So good, right? So important. And, let me tell you, I did not have to delete almost any comments at all for that post. Because the people who comment here? So great! And I love them!

But let me tell you why that story was important to me. For, you see, a while ago, I was reporting a story (it did not run! Probably because my take on it was not as good as Annaham’s, really) about a lady what got harassed via the Internet. And, over the course of reporting this story, I thought: Hey! Perhaps I should write about how this affects other ladies, who are more or less radically different than the lady in question! So I put up a little message as my GChat status, asking ladies if they’d ever been harassed re: their looks online.

And, can I tell you? Responses, responses, RESPONSES! So many responses! And then there were other incidents I knew about, because I have Google Reader! Because here are some things that can happen to you if you have a fairly high-trafficked blog, on the Internet, and also are a lady:

  • You can be called fat.
  • You can have someone opine that the reason you write about rape is that you want someone to rape you, because you are so fat.
  • You can be called a slut and/or fake feminist for looking okay in a sweater, and standing at an angle in which the viewer cannot help but notice that you like many women are in possession of real human lady breasts, and sharing a room once with President Bill Clinton.
  • You can have an online voting poll in which dudes decide whether they would prefer to bang you or your co-blogger.
  • You can be called a fake feminist and a hypocrite because clearly you are hot, and wear makeup, and therefore cannot possibly believe that you deserve rights.
  • You can be the subject of an online game, in the Tucker Max fan forums, in which the goal is to Photoshop your face into the most unflattering possible scenario.
  • You can be told that the only reason anyone pays attention to you is that you are hot.
  • You can be the same person, and be told that you are old, disgusting, ugly, and not worthy of attention.
  • You can have the only existing photo of you online stolen and posted on a BDSM website in a fake personal ad about how you want a man to come along and rough you up to fulfill your “rape fantasies.”
  • You can have your own hate blog!
  • You can have the only existing photo of you online stolen, and posted on a hate blog, along with the only existing photo of the lady you do Sexist Beatdown with. One of you will be deemed too ugly to rape; one of you will be deemed rapeable. Which is which? (SPOILER: I was the ugly one. I got off easy.)

And this doesn’t even begin to address your comment section. But you know who is in the mood to address your comment section, today? It is Amanda Hess of The Sexist and I! In a very special, New-Niceness-free edition of the Sexist Beatdown!

man-woman-computer-2ILLUSTRATION: “You see, Frank, I really do have to suck ALL the dicks. So I’ll need to reschedule that meeting.”

(Continued)

LADYPALOOZA PRESENTS! How Amanda Palmer Lost a Fan, or, My Own Private Backlash

[Oh, yes, indeed! You thought we would slow it down? YOU WERE WRONG. Because it is still LADYPALOOZA: Like an extra-girly-flavored Woodstock, but if Woodstock were on the Internet, and two weeks long (or possibly… LONGER???) and also not very much like Woodstock at all, really. My point is: Stop having joint-fueled sex in the mud and get over here, you hippies! Because there’s something we haven’t covered yet, and it is important. We have been focusing quite a bit on the people making the music — “musicians,” I hear they’re called — but there is another part of the equation, and it is just as important. That part is: Fans! How do they relate to their favorite musicians? Does it get COMPLICATED? Yes, it does! And thus, we lead off with an account of one such COMPLICATION, a post which I literally begged a lady to write for me, for it concerns an issue close to my withered, Haterade-pumping heart. That lady’s name is Annaham. And she has some, let us say, Experiences to share!]

Greetings, Tiger Beatdown readers! I am Annaham. You may know me from the rather scattered comments I’ve left hither and thither on this website, or from my work at FWD/Feminists With Disabilities.

You may also know me from a fairly recent controversy that erupted, in part, due to a post of mine. I am the person who wrote the infamous “Evelyn Evelyn: Ableism Ableism?” (please note the question mark there, because it seems that not many people did!) post at FWD, which got our site quite a bit of attention. That one post, once it had been be-Twittered and linked and sent around and, perhaps, rolled through one of those hand cranks used to make fresh pasta from scratch, got many, many views within a couple of days (so many, in fact, that we almost exceeded our bandwidth). This came about a week after it had been up on the site without incident, to boot.

We at FWD write on a wide variety of topics such as work, poverty, global issues, the medical industry, disability pride, advocacy, news media depictions of disability, daily life, and a ton of other things that aren’t pop culture–all of which, sadly, do not seem to get nearly as much attention as our posts about pop culture get. I have no idea what it is about popular culture that compels folks on the Internet to defend it as they might defend their country in battle. As a teenager, I used to be something of an Internet pop-culture warrior myself, but something in me eventually realized that there is much more to being a fan than fulfilling the “fan”-sounding syllable in “sycophant.” But I digress.

As a reader, you might think, from many of the responses that I and my co-blogger Lauredhel (who wrote a great followup post on Evelyn Evelyn a few days later) got, that we’d been contributing to a site called AmandaPalmerSucks.com instead of disabledfeminists.com. Some selections from the mod queue from those two posts:

“What’s the matter with you?”

“cant handle it? then just fucking die!”

“fuck u die slow nigga!”

“ONOEZ SOMEONE WANTED TO SMACK SOMEONE SUCH VIOLENCE!!! Typical retarded comment on an idiotic, stupid, moronic, weak, and lame blog. Fucking oversensitive twits.”

(Continued)

LADYPALOOZA PRESENTS! The World At Large: How Privilege works in Rock Music

[Hey, dudes and ladies! Guess what we’re still up to? Yes, it is still time for LADYPALOOZA, the badly-titled Ladies and Music and Whatnot THEME POST PARTY on the Tiger Beatdown. We tried to stop it! (FULL DISCLOSURE: We did not try to stop it.) But it was JUST TOO GOOD. For example, you may remember that one of our posts, the first one, by a lady named Silvana, got quite the reaction. Often from prog-rock fans, for whatever reason! Because we have learned that you can write about overthrowing The Patriarchy and de-privilegizing the dudes and also racism and how probably more people are really fucking racist than they realize, and also we’re really into QUEER people having rights TOO, and we maintain that you shouldn’t make fun of fat people because it’s dehumanizing and gross, and you shouldn’t use “retarded” as an all-purpose insult because folks with disabilities also matter, and trans issues are really fucking important and central and your “tranny” jokes are just NOT SO WITTY AS YOU MIGHT SUPPOSE, we can do all of that and people will basically pay us no mind — it’s the Internet, women be shopping and/or conspiring to overthrow the entire culture as it is currently structured, whaddayagonnado — but, whatever you do, DON’T GO AFTER A MAN’S RUSH RECORDS. Because that business IS IMPORTANT. Well, it turns out that when a post gets over 100 comments, we like to do a follow-up! And, you guys, guess who’s back?]

Sometimes, you post something that you know is going to cause a shit storm. But most of the time, when you write something that ends up causing a shit storm, it just hits you like a ton of bricks and makes you think “Dude. I really must have been on to something there, because why else is everyone freaking the fuck out.”

I was not just surprised, but kind of floored at the response to my first guest post here on Tiger Beatdown. One hundred and fifty-nine comments, people. As of right now. I’m not just bragging. I want to know–what is it that my post is tapping into that has heretofore been un-tapped-into, why haven’t we been talking about it before, and what the hell are we going to do to dislodge this righteous anger and put it in a pot where it comes out SOMETHING AWESOME? Because I am ready to rock, I think.

My post was linked by Yglesias. And by Amanda Marcotte. And by Amanda again. You’ve got to read those two posts by Amanda, because they’re great. Also read this post by Spencer Ackerman. While you’re at it, you might as well read this post by Spencer, because it’s a good kick-off for what I want to talk about today.

I have a reputation as a hothead, and it’s pretty well-deserved, if I’m honest. But I have a steady job with an income at a place I love that lets me, for instance, blog at FDL and cover my beat my way. If I was a woman and was half as intemperate, I would not be given second and third chances. I just wouldn’t be hired. I wouldn’t be considered passionate. I’d be considered difficult and hard to work with. I say this thinking of a currently unemployed friend who’s a vastly superior thinker, writer and reporter. Guess what her gender is?

Spencer’s writing about journalism, but I think what he’s saying is so widely applicable that I’m really sorry it didn’t get more attention at the time. I’ve known a lot of men, and I’ve known a lot of feminist men. A lot of those feminist men are willing to acknowledge “hey, I’m privileged.” You’d have to be a real sociopath to think that despite the widespread privileging of men’s bodies, men’s art, men’s opinions, and men’s power throughout cultures and human history, you, personally, had managed never to be the beneficiary of it. No, those admissions of privilege are so banal that they don’t even really get my attention any more. What Spencer’s doing here is acknowledging the specific way that privilege works, and how it has worked for him, using real qualities that he actually has.

The phenomenon he identifies is at the heart of the way privilege works in rock music specifically, and in art in general, which is this: As a woman, you don’t get a break for the negative flipsides of your good qualities.

(Continued)

Dear Internet:

You and me, we need a break today. I just deleted a 5,000-word blog post about the “Tina Fey Backlash” that was apparently caused by me writing a few blog posts all of which emphasized how I think Tina Fey is super funny and I love like 80% of her work. Because, who cares? There was a backlash! My name got mentioned in regard to it a few times! This is much like the time that I started the Taylor Swift Backlash like four months ahead of schedule, and got yelled at about it, in that it is essentially trivial and no-one will care about it in two weeks and my sense of it as a phenomenon is primarily informed by the fact that, in direct violation of my own Rules for Internet, I keep reading things what got my name in ’em. I know less about the volcano that just apparently exploded Iceland than I do about everyone’s various feelings on the Tina Fey Backlash, and, my God: A country is covered in DEADLY VOLCANIC ASH, apparently, the sort of thing that KILLED THE DINOSAURS, a country has BEEN EXPLODED BY VOLCANO, and I am sitting here like, “but seriously! I like that TV show! I don’t hate that TV show at all! It makes me sad that you think I hate that TV show, because I like that TV show! TV show!” Ugh. At this point, I want to start a backlash against MYSELF.

But. This weekend, Internet! My experience of this weekend was very uneven! It was so great sometimes, when I was not on the Internet! And then, other times, when I was on the Internet, I got what has to be the 57,000th e-mail about how someone hates me because I wrote that blog post about Andrea Dworkin a year ago. Like: I don’t know what this compulsion people have is all about, this thing where they are like, “so, I’m a stranger who didn’t like something you wrote. Want to hear about it?” Uh, no. No, thank you. This was maybe the most fun e-mail I’ve ever gotten about the Andrea Dworkin thing, however, in that it made much the same points that every other e-mail along these lines has made — Real feminists don’t fight with other feminists! Real feminists fight with MEN! — but was, apparently, written by a man. I don’t know anything else about him — surprisingly, I did not click through to his blog — but the “I’m a dude” message was kind of overt. (UPDATE: Oh, okay, fuck me, I clicked through. Sample line: “Being oppressed means people impact your life who you didn’t invite into it.” Huh.) So I guess I COULD be fighting with a man, right now, if I felt like it! Thanks to this e-mail, I can accomplish “fighting with another feminist” and “fighting with a man” SIMULTANEOUSLY!

But also, I don’t want to. I don’t want to fight with other feminists or with men or with anybody, right now; I am all fighted out, for the moment. The Internet, though: It just keeps coming! Like, here is another thing I read because it had my name in it: A hate blog, written specifically for and about Amanda Marcotte. Apparently, publishing a guest post  that is linked to by Amanda Marcotte gets you written up by all the prominent Amanda Marcotte Hate Blog journals and trade publications.

I’d never heard of Tiger Beatdown, but it’s apparently a fairly significant site in the feminist blogosphere.

Oh, how nice of you to say!

The proprietor of TB is Sady Doyle, who is obsessed with her comment section.

They’ll put that one on my tombstone. Right next to “cared more about TV shows than people dying in natural disasters or of awful diseases; is dead now, so let’s all go watch TV.”

She admits to editing and deleting comments with which she disagrees, and she recently wrote three posts totaling 6,000 words on a single commenter who pissed her off. Clearly, Sady is the picture of maturity and stability.

CLEARLY.

It’s not like there aren’t real problems in the world. Here’s some real problem, for you: I was in the subway, with the dude I’m dating, and some kids started hollering racial insults at him. Teenagers. They sounded young. And my boyfriend was cool about it; he just started walking away, not making eye contact, doing what I suppose one does in this situation, but I was the asshole who froze and almost looked back. So clearly, they were trying to get attention — they were calling AT him, trying to get him to look around — and my attention was what they needed to escalate the situation. So we kept walking, though, and it was all cool, and then I heard one of them say, “push ’em onto the tracks,” and sure enough, in about 0.5 seconds, one of the kids, a really huge one, got between me and the wall and the track — it was one of the passages that is really narrow, in Union Square, where the stairs come down — and sort of purposefully bumped me toward the tracks. I did stumble. I said “sorry,” because you say “sorry” to the guy who might also be the guy who was just talking with his friends about killing you and your boyfriend in public, because despite popular rumor I do have a tiny little fraction of common sense in my head and I know not to Start A Confrontation if it might result in you getting somebody killed, and the kid just looked down at me and said, “you BETTER be sorry.” I can’t even analyze the racial dynamics of the situation with any degree of accuracy, because the kids were also people of color, and I am a white person, and I just don’t fully understand any of this because I am so fucking privileged, because I am not the person who gets hollered at and called “Jackie Chan” by teenagers looking to feel tough, but, I mean: These kids, they probably weren’t actually murderers, right? They probably just wanted to scare us? Because I’m white and he’s not, or just because of him because how fucking self-absorbed is it to think that I had anything to do with it, or just because they wanted to scare the hell out of some people to prove that they occupied that space and could influence it, or whatever, what I know is, I got pushed toward some subway tracks this weekend. Somehow this seems way more serious than people on the Internet doing casual drive-by insultings of strangers, and somehow it seems like the same thing, and I don’t know any more, really, what it’s all about. I watched him board a train and I watched him leave town for the next six weeks and I went to a party and I thought I could drink more than I could and I fell down and I broke somebody’s glass and then I got in a cab and cried, because: This weekend, for fuck’s sake.

And, I don’t know, Internet. I love you. But I am really busy starting the Sady Doyle Backlash, right now. Does anyone have a Tumblr about it? Someone should have a Tumblr. Look: I started one already. Let me know if you want to contribute, I’ll add you on.

SEXIST BEATDOWN: Tell You My Name, F-U-C-K Edition

Ladies! Have you ever entertained the desire… to rock the fuck out???

Well, too bad. The dudes, they do not support you in this ambition! Some of them! (“But some of us DOOOOOOOO” — The Comment Section.) And, in this very special LADYPALOOZA edition (yes, it’s the worst title for a Theme Post Party ever. And I’m going to be typing it, it looks like, for AT LEAST TWO WEEKS NOW. I will have plenty of opportunities to regret this decision, is what I’m saying) of Sexist Beatdown, we discuss why that might be the case!

Yes, the legendary duo of Amanda Hess of the Sexist and I — the Indigo Girls of blogging! — will posit several reasons why The Dudes look to exclude or ignore The Ladies in the field of musical accomplishment. Our hypotheses involve (a) wedgies, (b) sexism, and (c) the fact that a lot of indie rock dudes are just basically the same guys that go to Ren Faire., but in different outfits. (So, again: Wedgies.) Also, we reveal the song that first delineated the Tiger Beatdown Method Conflict Management. SPOILER: It’s this one.

ILLUSTRATION: Oh, like you are surprised.

(Continued)

LADYPALOOZA PRESENTS: Why Can’t I Be Making Love Cause I’m In It? Or, The Phair/Cuomo Conundrum.

[And we’re back! With LADYPALOOZA: The Tiger Beatdown Lilith Fair Experience, But If Lilith Fair Didn’t Suck, And Also Were a Blog. This is the place where a bunch of ladies — and, perchance, some dudes! — come to discuss their Complicated Relationships With Music. These relationships: They are complicated! We have discussed the fact that certain of the dudes wish to discourage ladies from making music at all, or basically just ignore them when they do! But sometimes, my friends, these ladies are not so ignored. Sometimes they get ATTENTION! And how is that attention! How does it, say, differ from that paid to dudes — dudes who are doing the very same sort of thing? Is there any chance that it literally fucking perfectly re-iterates Ye Olde Double Standarde, that beast of legend and song? Well! Lady musicblogger K. is here, to school us on just such a topic!]

When I was fifteen, Very Intense Things were happening in my life. I had my first boyfriend, my first semi-intentional kiss, and, relatedly, my first moments of “Shit, do I really want to be in this relationship? I don’t think I do! Now what do I do about it?”

I was, basically, living out my My So-Called Life years. I was also listening to a lot of music – excessive amounts of music. Like, so much music that I kind of had weird breakouts around my ears and cheeks because I would fall asleep wearing my greasy headphones. That year, the year of bad breakouts and relationship turmoil, was the year that I first heard Liz Phair’s debut album, Exile in Guyville, 18 songs rumored to exist as a track-by-track response to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. It blew my teenaged mind.

Now, when most people talk about Liz Phair, what they really love to talk about is sex. Breaking News! Did you know that women sometimes have sexual intercourse? And that in addition to having this “sex”, they might sometimes use art as a framework for exploring themselves as sexual beings? They might even make that art publicly available! Like, to total strangers! I mean, have you heard that one Liz Phair song, “Fuck and Run?”

(Continued)

META-POST: Yes, I Like the Guest Posters Better Than You. Sorry!

So, here’s the thing: Yesterday, we put up a guest post. A seriously fucking amazing guest post! Which sparked a seriously fucking amazing discussion! And yet, in that seriously fucking amazing discussion, there were sadly, some people who chose to act a fool — like, here’s a hint: When we’re talking about sexism, maybe don’t pitch in with the “but NOT ALL DUDES ARE LIKE THAAAAAAAAAT” defense — and get themselves deleted.

These people were very angry! They disliked the CENSORSHIP! And one of them went so far as to say that she would Never! Read! Tiger Beatdown! AGAIN!

Well, since she is never reading the blog again (NEVERRRRRR), she probably will not read this little meta-post of mine. But some of you might! And I think it is time to explain some things to you.

People who guest post and contribute to Tiger Beatdown ARE DOING TIGER BEATDOWN A FAVOR. They are making it better. They are making my blog less narcissistic and All About Me, allowing me to represent a wider variety of human experience. They are providing more perspectives, and donating their expertise on topics that fit into the general “media, pop culture, and marginalization” focus of the blog. Typically, I ask them to guest post because they know about topics that I don’t. So, they are enriching both the variety of the coverage and the variety of perspectives and voices available on this site. They are helping me to model what I consider to be the only feminism worth feministing: One based on human community, where all sorts of people — NOT just young, white, abled, cis, creative-class ladies, such as myself — get together and talk about the shit that matters, conveying the idea that humanity is commonly shared, and not to be denied to anyone for any reason. Tiger Beatdown can’t just TALK about that feminism (using, uh, Liz Lemon as an example of how not to do it? I AM A SERIOUS THEORIST, OKAY;  I TALK ABOUT SERIOUS TOPICS); we have to DO it. The shape and content of the blog itself has to reflect it.

So, there’s one point. And the other one is: People who guest post and contribute to Tiger Beatdown are doing ME, PERSONALLY a favor. This lady, right here. Me. They are allowing me to work on the Giant Mystery Project, and to pitch other publications, and to write for those other publications, and to meet my deadlines, and to do a lot of things that I simply can’t do otherwise. If I am posting lengthy essays (and they’re ALL lengthy essays) to Tiger Beatdown every day, AND single-handedly screening and answering all of the e-mails sent to Tiger Beatdown (there are a lot of them! And I seriously CAN’T answer them all, at this point, but I do answer a fairly large portion and feel guilty about the ones I don’t answer, and then the people I actually care about, who are not writing to Tiger Beatdown but to Sady, are like, “where is my e-mail from you Sady? Also, you didn’t come to my party/show/whatever. And also, I hate you.” There was seriously a time when my mother came into town to visit me, and I didn’t know she was coming, or that she was here, for twenty-four hours, because I saw all the Tiger Beatdown e-mails, and my mom’s e-mails, and I was like, “Mom’s e-mails can wait!”) AND single-handedly going through each and every one of the comments that this site gets, which at this point routinely number from thirty to over one hundred per day, AND marking/deleting the spam AND deleting the overtly hostile ones before they get published AND moderating the ones that do get published, well: I literally cannot do anything else. Nothing. I can’t clean the house, make dinner, sleep, go out with you this weekend, have other jobs.  Ido Tiger Beatdown, and that is what I do, and I do nothing else, and everything and everyone else in my life suffers. For example: I used to live with someone who HATED it when I smoked cigarettes in the house. And this person was like, “for fuck’s sake, just smoke outside.” And I was like, “DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH BLOG-ADMINISTRATING TIME I WOULD LOSE IF I PUT ON MY COAT AND WALKED DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS?? Not to mention the FLAGRANT TIME-WASTE of SMOKING WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING ELSE AT THE SAME TIME, Jesus.” (You: “Quit smoking, Sady!” Me: “Right. Because you want me to be MORE irritable. That’s a good idea!”) This isn’t complaining: It’s my fault for trying to do everything myself, and for not realizing how MUCH of everything there could be.

So, yeah: I bring on guest posters, and contributors, and I love them. So, so much. Which is why it is a continual source of frustration to me that, on nearly every guest post we do, nearly every time someone guest-posts on TBD for the first time, the comments get nasty and disrespectful. It happened to Garland. It happened, I do believe, to C.L. It happened to B. Michael (and oh, did it EVER happen to B. Michael — and I got e-mails, actual e-mails, about how I had sold out by publishing a man). And it happened, despite the OBVIOUS FABULOUSNESS OF HER POST, despite the fact that she has BEEN IN THE FEMINIST BLOGGING BUSINESS, AND WORKING ON A POPULAR FEMINIST BLOG, for FAR LONGER THAN I HAVE, to Silvana.

Let me explain something to you: I personally choose every guest poster or contributor on this site. I personally edit their pieces. Sometimes, I edit their pieces really hard: Telling them each and every one of the ways that someone could, potentially, dismantle or derail their argument, and how to make it better, telling them completely honestly what flaws I can perceive in their posts, and asking them to flesh out their arguments if I personally find them unconvincing. B. Michael’s latest piece had about a thousand words cut, and the headline changed, and it was held in the queue until I’d personally looked into and read the people and blogs he was talking about, and one of his arguments (about the whole “no homo” thing of engaging in homoerotic behavior for awesome straight-dude kicks) was more or less eliminated, because, I told him, he was coming hard at a specific writer, and two specific blogs, and if someone from either of those blogs came hard at us (and someone did) we needed to be able to defend every point in the post based on specific textual examples, and to be able to defend ourselves from charges of unfair ad hominem (and we could). I don’t do this to make their lives harder; I don’t do it because I’m a control freak; I do it because I care about the people who write for me, and want them to do well and to have a pleasant blogging experience, and if someone comes after them, I want to be able to defend them. But, in case you are missing the point, the point is this: By the time something shows up on Tiger Beatdown, I have personally required it to be something of which I like and approve. I have put substantial work into it my very own self.

So, considering that these people are doing my blog a favor, and doing me a HUGE favor, and considering the fact that I consider publishing something on Tiger Beatdown to be, in effect, a statement along the lines of “I, Sady Doyle, personally like and approve this blog post,” it drives me UP THE FUCKING WALL when people start pulling shit in the comment section. And they always do.

I am hard on people when they disrespect me in my own posts. You may have noticed! But I am WAY, WAY HARDER ON PEOPLE when they disrespect my guest posters. There are bans; there are deletions; there are people getting smacked the fuck down. The comment section is moderated more closely, and with more of an eye for disrespect, than it is on my own posts. This is because I know I’m in charge here, and if people have a bad time because they blogged with Tiger Beatdown, it’s my fault. And it’s also because I think a favor deserves a favor. And it’s also because I value loyalty and compassion more than just about anything, and one of the ways I tell you that I like and appreciate you is to GET INTO IT with people who are mean to you. Seriously: If I start fighting your fights, you can tell that I want to be your friend. And if you can’t handle this, if you can’t deal with the fact that you’re not allowed to disrespect people who are not Sady on Sady’s blog, well? Maybe you should just Never! Read! Tiger Beatdown! EVER AGAIN! Because none of that is going to change.