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    Women's websites are pink ghettoes for the opinions we're permitted to have

    Lou Heinrich
    The explosion of women’s opinion websites gives legitimacy to our opinions, and ad revenue for media companies. But we’re still just talking to each other
    Screengrabs of websites including MamaMia, RendezView, Daily Life, Huffington Post Women. October 1, 2015
    Screengrabs of websites including MamaMia, RendezView, Daily Life, Huffington Post Women. October 1, 2015 Photograph: MamaMia, RendezView, Daily Life, Huffington Post Women
    Who would possibly give more column space to Miranda Devine, after she denied gender was the cause of domestic violence? The editors of RendezView, that’s who.
    The website, run by News Corp, is the latest in a new generation of female-focused websites. Launched in March this year, the collection of ladylike columns joins Australian women’s news sites Daily Life (Fairfax), Mamamia, and Women’s Agenda (Private Media). Similarly, in the US, Slate established Double X (re-named The XX Factor) in 2009, Huffington Post has HuffPost Women, and Vice recently launched Broadly.
    These pink ghettoes are distinct, but attached, to mainstream media, and the content consists of daily news through a feminist lens, op-eds and personal stories that hum with emotion. “My son has the type of autism no one knows about”, writer Bonnie Zampino lamented in Mamamia last week, while Daily Life published Clementine Ford’s criticism of the fashion industry’s hypocritical body positive messages.
    The sites aren’t identical: Broadly’s ideal readers are porn-watching, spliff-smoking bad girls with an eye for justice; Mamamia emerged from the “mummy blogger” era and caters to a more conservative crowd; Women’s Agenda is for the “career-minded woman”; RendezView’s ultimate goal is to be divisive, it seems; and Daily Life deals in politics, fashion, stylish food and outrage. They are safe spaces for writers to #shoutyourabortion, discuss the expectation to have children, and recap The Bachelorette. Readers are expected to have ground knowledge of Feminism 101.
    The websites are designed to be the “female-friendly version of an existing site,” writes Kate Wilcox in her thesis on women’s media. And they are important as an alternative to the white, male-centric news sites.
    We know that authority and commentary in mainstream media is overwhelmingly provided by men. The benefit of RendezView and the rest is that women’s voices are heard and legitimised. Some of these sites also provide a platform to women of colour, who would struggle to be published in conservative press. Celeste Liddle (who also writes for the Guardian) is Daily Life’s authority on Indigenous issues and Ruby Hamad writes regularly about race, politics and prejudice.
    Considering we are half the population, female reader make for lucrative ad revenue for media companies – so this explosion of lady sites makes sense. But, golly, if News Corp wanted to attract female readers, couldn’t they be inclusive of women readers in regular news?
    Cordoning off feminine views reinforces the understanding that men are default, while women are other. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman is defined only in relation to man; while he is both positive and neutral, she is negative. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute,” she wrote in The Second Sex, “She is the Other.”
    Men are everywhere, while women are over there, in a playpen with pictures of yoga poses and celebs’ beards. Women can only speak to women – but men’s opinions are for everyone.
    This manifests in many ways, but is terribly obvious when we consider mainstream media. The wider publications connected to these websites (most notably Fairfax’s and News Corp’s news sites) depict and analyse a primarily male experience. A look at The Australian’s opinion page shows the pool of commenters to be flooded with white dudes. Having a vagina is not explicitly outlawed, but is clearly frowned upon. Similarly, in 2011, a study found only 22% of New York Times op-eds were written by women. The male perspective is the default, and women’s sites relegate the female perspective to a separate arena.
    The women’s website model allows the ghettoisation of female writers, and the segregation of female issues, replacing mainstream inclusivity. While women can speak freely in our designated, secondary space, we remain relatively silenced in mainstream media.

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    • 0 1
      You think women were hard done to in the past? Consider this, women weren't jumping up and down demanding equality when the Titanic went down, they weren't sitting in their lifeboat saying I want to be one of the men in the freezing ocean.
      Women have always been priviledged with the most valuble thing of all, life.
      When it was a choice between a woman living and a man, the woman lived, the man didn't even question the fact he would have to die so the woman could live, it was his duty to sink and die. Apply this to any extreme situation of the past and you will find the same result.
      Reply |
    • 1 2
      When we older feminists were marching and fighting for the right for women's voices we could not have known that a few short years later our work would be referred to as "pink ghettoes" "ladylike columns" where we sit in "play pens".
      Rather than make a valid and note worthy observation I think Lou Heinrich has served only to reveal that she is one of the latest of the GenY privileged writers, who call themselves feminists but have never had to work particularly hard to achieve any of the ground breaking things we did in the 60's and 70's.
      I am disappointed and embarrassed as a woman to read this kind of insulting commentary about women's web sites and would like to suggest that Lou Heinrich leave the "pink" reference to the Breast Cancer awareness people who are doing a fabulous job in reclaiming that stereotyped colour and working it to really make a difference in women's lives.
      The trite reference to a "ghetto" indicates she has not traveled anywhere near the ghettoes where struggle and adversity is a reality of life and I wonder how she could possibly write such a column and truly believe she is promoting anything other than a very immature and unbalanced perspective how women's websites are making a difference in the world.
      Women are blogging, video-logging, tweeting, writing across all forms of media and publishing memoirs. We are in the midst of the erosion of the boys clubs, not sitting in play pens or our "designated spaces".
      Let's not forget Miranda Devine is a woman who has a very high profile place and just because you don't agree with her, and I don't either, doesn't mean she is not one of many female journalists writing daily and weekly in Australian newspaper columns and on line.
      Reply |
      • 0 1
        From another "older feminist', what aspect of this article compelled you to immediately become a registered user and make a comment.
        I find it difficult to understand that you, as a feminist would find this article and the fairly innocuous mention of 'pink' and 'playpens' offensive enough to become a user, yesterday. Have you been away? There have been many, many other far more hard hitting articles, so where on earth have you been?
        Reply |
    • 0 1
      As Chomsky said in 2010:
      “What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimetre beyond that."
      Reply |
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    • 2 3
      Not only are they corralled off from the other news and reduced to 'women's issues', but they're often very superficial, contradictory articles that trot out the same tired middle class, first world problems. I find it tiresome that these writers drone on about male entitlement, objectification and rape culture and how it relates to violence against women, and then in the same breath support prostitution, porn and how empowering it is to be a stripper as a single mother trying to feed your kids or a uni student putting her health and safety at great risk simply to get an education There's a lot of cognitive dissonance and not much deep thought going on there.
      Reply |
    • 1 2
      What is the point of this article?
      Is it to decry the marginalization of womens opinions as a subset of "mainstream" media, dominated by male voices? If so, it does a half decent job, but i am not really sure that it is a point worth making as the article itself seems to admit that this "marginalisation" actually gives voices to people who would otherwise be neglected, which it seems to suggest is a net positive. As such, I'm not clear on the point being made.
      Alternately, is the point to braodly criticism mainstream media? The conclusion seems to suggest, women cannot speak freely in mainstream media, which is itself a much broader point around gender equality and I see several mainstream media outlets giving women air time, including the Rupert Murdoch owned the times. However, anecdotal comments aren't helpful :
      "A look at The Australian’s opinion page shows the pool of commenters to be flooded with white dudes."
      What is this telling me? A bucnh of white dudes have elected to commment? or the majority of the readers of this site are white dudes? I dont really know.
      Whichever the purpose of the article is (and it may be both), there is a very serious point to be made, unfortunately, it does neither well and instead provides at best a confused critique and at worst an poor illustration of a women's voice in mainstream media, which is most disappointing and a tad ironic.
      Reply |
    • 2 3
      the ghettoisation of female writers
      You should really think of more appropriate words. You're not an oppressed minority or a people facing genocide. It's a very loaded word, and you well know it.
      Reply |
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    • This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.
    • 7 8
      Surely the founding argument for these sites is that women need their own space to find their voice without being crowded out by threatening male voices. So you reap what you sow. Could it be that feminists are finding their own company as tedious as the rest of us?
      Reply |
    • 0 1
      Just out of interest - does the guardian app attempt to do the same thing? Present me the news and opinion it believes I am interested in? If so it's pretty much the same thing in a different wrapping. I haven't bothered installing it btw - for that reason.
      Reply |
    • 5 6
      Excellent article.
      Reply |
    • 2 3
      I haven't seen any evidence of anyone in the Australian media understanding anything whatsoever about "feminism" - let alone the fact that the term should be "feminisms" since there is more than one tradition.
      Reply |
    • 4 5
      “My son has the type of autism no one knows about” … criticism of the fashion industry’s hypocritical body positive messages … #shoutyourabortion, discuss the expectation to have children, and recap The Bachelorette.
      Would you really expect to see the topics above discussed on the front page of a paper of record? You will find their likes in the appopriate section of a mainstream paper, of course—those are the very definition of 'Lifestyle'.
      If you’re looking for more actual news from a female perspective, then you need more journalists, the likes of Lara Marlowe and Caren Bohan, reporting on the ground. That is something worth fighting for.
      What you don’t need is more nazel-gazing, middle class, (mostly) white people writing ‘what about me?’ articles, or insubstantial fluff about being ‘sweat-shamed’ or what have you. Unless your goal is lower what we consider news to include this kind of self-obsessed nonsense.
      Reply |
    • 5 6
      Who would possibly give more column space to Miranda Devine, after she denied gender was the cause of domestic violence?
      God forbid that anyone be allowed to tell the truth, let alone lay out the overwhelming evidence as Devine did. How dare she!
      Reply |
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      • 0 1
        What that DV can be improved by 'ending the welfare incentive for unsuitable women to keep having children by feckless men' and that DV is only a problem with indigenous people and those in poverty.
        Pretty insulting to those living in poverty, not to mention the snide racist element. And you claim this as 'truth', I am actually embarrassed for you.
        Reply |
      • 0 1
        What is true is that is that Domestic violence correlates strongly with with marginalization, unemployment , substance abuse, mental illness and welfare dependence. These are the facts and just because they don't fit the PC narrative that DV is not related to socio-economic status and is caused by "the patriarchy"and non feminist attitudes does change their truth.
        You can't solve a problem if you don't understand it and the feminist theory of domestic violence is just plain wrong. It is a scandal that the facts are plain for anyone to see but that feminists who claim to care about domestic violence are ignoring them and are using dv to pursue their own agendas. This is the unforgivable truth that Miranda Devine and others who actually do care about DV have pointed out.
        Reply |
    • 1 2
      This article quotes Simone and then does exactly what she described. Writing about women as the outcasts is exactly the same as writing about men as the absolute.
      Times are changing and the talking that is the fundamental crumbling of traditional media, where the journalist is the supreme opinion, uncontested by questions, well, that's changing.
      We all have a voice now, not just Rupert Murdoch's, so stop worrying about his opinion and do interesting stuff.
      Reply |
    • 1 2
      well, if you head over to a female life-style website dont raise a diff opinion! men may control access but we've got our own problems thereafter.
      tolerance and manners are both in poor supply...
      Reply |
    • 1 2
      RendezView? *barf*
      Reply |
    • 10 11
      You could alternate these articles week by week
      Week 1 - "Ignored, shouted down or marginalised - why are there no spaces for women on the Web?"
      Week 2 - "Women on the Web - ignored and marginalised in a pink ghetto"
      Reply |
    • 0 1
      An interesting insight into a strange new universe - we know already that the 'social' medium is the message for young, pop feminism. But could the above online commentariat be the primary explanation for the Guardian New Wave ie. the cyber femmes don't actually exist in isolation in mainstream liberal newspapers but have constructed their message collectively (like the Corbynites) and so reached waiting warriors like Ms Proudman?
      Reply |
    • 2 3
      after she denied gender was the cause of domestic violence?
      If I said most scientific geniuses are men and that is because men are on average more intelligent than women you'd tell me I was missing so many historical social factors as to make my argument irrelevant. And I would agree. Yet somehow it is okay to say most perpetrators of violence are men because men historically are more violent or sexist than women and that seems to be an acceptable argument. Again, missing, or deliberately ignoring, lots of other factors.
      Reply |
    • 0 1
      Don't have much to contribute other than I enjoy reading mamamia & daily life but I see Heinrich's point.
      Reply |
    • 6 7
      There isn't a "men's perspective" and a "women's perspective". Do you think you're more likely to agree with an op-ed by Thatcher or by Corbyn? If Thatcher, then you're probably.... drum roll... female. Oh no, sorry, I meant right-wing. Seriously, can't so-called feminists see that this constant insistence that they are defined by their gender is counter-productive to the cause of equality?
      Reply |
      • 5 6
        This so-called feminist is a wee bit suspicious that our constant insistence in asking for equal representation and an equal voice keeps getting equated to counter-productivity in terms of gender equality as a means of trying to shut us up.
        Reply |
      • 4 5
        Perspective is not the same as opinion.
        Reply |
      • 0 1
        On one end the scale 'so called feminists' are told to be grateful for what they've been given; at the other end we are told to be careful what we wish for.
        The facts are that nothing was given, it was taken and we are not 'grateful' to get what we automatically deserve.
        The most ridiculous aspect is, repeatedly reminding people of the facts, no one person, regardless of their gender, or race is superior in any way to another, we are the same species.
        Reply |
    • 3 4
      The modern left have been trying to restrict freedom and freedom of speech for 40 years. Eventually they will restrict themselves out of existence.
      Reply |
      • 2 3
        When the post-68 left were outsiders, they were very keen on free speech. Now they're in power, it's time to restrict it, so that the unsayable becomes the unthinkable.
        Reply |
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