Bix dot Blog

Blogs were unruly spaces. There were internecine fights. There were so many times when I saw my own little, narrow worldview challenged and sometimes exploded (that often felt very bad, even as it was very necessary). There were so, so many times when I made absolutely wretched and humiliating public mistakes. There were so many different claims to feminism, so many ways in which traditional hierarchies of race and place and class were replicated despite good intentions, in part out of ignorance, in part out of neglect, in part out of hubris. There was harassment, usually but not always from men, some of which follows me to this day, some of which I carry with me in lasting damage to my mental health, very little of which was ever resolved. There was also community in a way that simply hasn’t been replicated by Twitter or by feminist writing on more mainstream websites. That meant solidarity, and it meant pushback. It meant lightbulb moments and it meant conflict.

—Jill Filipovic, in “What Killed the Feminist Internet?”